Today we’d like to introduce you to RJ Armstrong.
Hi RJ, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
In 1998 I founded the Riot Bread Art Collective, a group of artists, musicians, dancers, poets, punks and philosophers with the intent of bringing all of our intense energy to the world, the Riot, but making it sustainable, repeatable because anyone can bring the Riot but ya gotta make the Bread. We organized shows of visual art, live music, performance and zine publication for a few years. But we were all young, full of energy! and took off for other places across the country, and the world. I left Texas and carried Riot Bread with me, showing art and publishing zines under the Riot Bread name in California, Florida, and again in Texas, landing in Austin 2010.
For my art, I use an encaustic base to build my work and in 2019 I was living in a six hundred square foot house just south of the river with the two youngest of my five kiddos plus their mother, and I was getting hot wax and pigment on everything I touched! so I went looking for an art studio. This is how I found the Factory, a 1948 quonset hut, painted pink, and I carved a space for my art out of nose-high carpentry and welding equipment, getting cut by rusted metal and stung by wasps a dozen times each, at least, the first few years.
But then, CoVid happened. By 2022 everyone else had moved out and the landowner asked if I wanted the full lease. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the money but there was no way I could turn it down. I came up low-income and didn’t get over the poverty line until my thirties. Where I come from, I was evicted from an apartment in Dallas alongside everyone else living there with no reason given and we didn’t find out until later it was to bulldoze our entire block of affordable housing to make way for new condo development, same as what’s happening now to Riverside and Pleasant Valley! And in Florida, I lived in a working class Central and South American neighborhood, so broke I once went nine months without electricity, painting by candlelight, but then the West Elm showed up, and the Target showed up, and by time I left for Austin my hodd became the Wynwood Arts District.
So, yeah, when the opportunity to take on this space opened up, I had to take it. I mean, all you gotta do is step outside and look downtown to see the condos and offices and retail rolling down the street to know this place has a time limit. And I ain’t mad at development, it’s human nature, but my business partner, Kara, and I, we know right NOW is the only time we’ll ever get to run a space that supports all that we love; art, music, performance, any creative out there just trying to bring their dream to life. Today, Riot Bread Enterprises is the business organization that runs our cultural arts space, the Factory on 5th. Bring the Riot but make the Bread, ya know?
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It could be said this place is a labor of love, but I really can’t stand that expression. Sure, it’s a labor of love, but also pain, and sweat, and blood, like literally, you should have seen the argument my head got into with a rusted steel pipe last week! But what I mean is, yeah, it is a sacrifice. A labor of love and sacrifice. And that’s okay, it’s a sacrifice by choice. I’d already gone broke for the place more than once by time I brought on my long time friend Kara as a business partner. She matched what I’d put into the place, the last bit of which bought us the climate control, last May. And that helped so much! Every summer I’d carried the place on my back, financially speaking, because if it was 105 degrees outside it was 105 degrees inside, but last summer we broke even all the way through.
After that, we had a conversation about the business. We figured if we wanted to get our personal investment back for sure, we should make it a straight venue rental spot, that, or go after a liquor license. But the thing is, everything Kara and I love, it’s all the creative work that doesn’t make any money! At least not much anyway, it’s the emerging artists, the performers of marginalized communities, it’s the creatives just too damn strange to ever make it in the mainstream, like us, right? that’s the work we love and so, ok, we made that decision, that’s what this space deserves. Is it the best financial decision? Nope. Is it the right decision? Every day yo.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Factory on 5th?
The Factory is a cultural arts center. We host events and production of all disciplines. For example, our last month went down like this: theatre, followed by dance, there was a fashion photo shoot and a music video shoot mixed in, two live music deals, one was punk, the other hip hop, and a clothing brand launch party. The whole time we’re running our own figure art session on Tuesdays and open art studio, open mic days Sunday. Oh, and we’ve been hosting a group on Wednesdays that runs archery in here, bows and arrows, can’t make that shit up!
We’ve taken to saying that the business plan of a creative arts organization looks a lot like a Jackson Pollock painting. If you wanna have any hope of breaking even as an arts business, and maybe even getting paid one day, your business plan has gotta look a lot like a Pollock painting. Lots of little lines all over the place, a ton of different colors all intertwined, a real hot mess, but if you can roll like Pollock, if you can pull all those little lines of color into one cohesive whole, you’ve got a work of art, an art’s business. Make it a masterpiece and you might even get a paycheck!
End of the day, and middle of the night to be honest, we are artists ourselves, using the space as our own art studio. We recently figured out the right business sense balance between the needs and benefits of events alongside the needs and benefits of artists like ourselves working out of the space on the daily in a way that can benefit both events and artists. Or we think so at least! so we super recently, like now basically, began offering art studio space to outside artists. Our creative events require more flexibility out of artists seeking studio space than the standard six month or nine month studio lease typically provides, but we believe our events and daily foot traffic offer a ton of opportunity in exchange for that flexibility.
Speaking for myself as an artist, and sales of my own art are managed the same as anyone else with the Factory, I can def say the opportunity is there for artists to take advantage of, but also artists who can’t manage the flexibility, I get it. I’m totally fine with my art getting moshed into during a metal show or whatever, but I get that don’t play for every artist out there! Sure, my art gets moshed into, or obscured by a theatre set, or whatever, and that’s fine because my art has a unique audience, getting seen and, right, getting purchased. I can’t be the only artist out there willing to make that trade, right?
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
This place, what we call the Factory, this place fucking owns itself. Sure, we are artists using the space to create, and KAra and I are the commercial leaseholders, and there is a landowner, he lives just across the street down a ways, family been here forever, but we say that the Factory owns itself because it does not matter what goes down here, it could be a spooky halloween ballet performance, or a punk metal rap show, or an Austin Studio Tour exhibit, or a private party like a prom theme 50th birthday or a unicorn disco theme 30th birthday, or a fashion show, whatever, it does not matter, everyone always uses the same vocabulary to describe the space, no matter what they are up to or where they come from. They all use words like magic, color, time, and light, the same vocabulary, the same words, again and again, to describe their experience of the space. After hearing this same description of the space over and over again by so many different groups of people we finally figured, fuck, this space just owns itself and, for now, as long as this lasts, we are just the lucky curators of the space, the Factory.
Pricing:
- Figure Drawing Short Pose: Life Drawing @ Factory on 5th… $10
- Factory Creative Arts Network & Workshop: Open Studio + Open Mind… $10
- Creative Events… $200/hr or $1,500/day
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.factoryon5th.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/factoryon5th/
- Other: https://maps.app.goo.gl/XCWwGp78AfVkLN8v7
