A S Two Twenty: Providence's Uncensored Room

Downtown Providence holds one of the most unusual arts institutions in New England, a place that started with eight hundred dollars, one borrowed room, and a manifesto, and grew into a hundred-thousand-square-foot anchor of the city's cultural life. It is called A S Two Twenty, and its story says something important about what art spaces can be when they refuse to play by the usual rules.

The name comes from a room number. In nineteen eighty-five, a Providence artist named Umberto Crenca and two colleagues, Susan Clausen and Scott Seabolt, rented space above the Providence Performing Arts Center at two hundred twenty Weybosset Street. The three had spent years watching the Rhode Island arts scene reward the same institutions, the same circles around the Rhode Island School of Design, the same galleries connected to city government patronage. If you were outside that network, access was nearly impossible.

Crenca had a particular grievance. A harsh review of his work in the Providence Journal in nineteen eighty-two had gathered a circle of artists in protest, and from that frustration, they wrote a manifesto. Their core demand was simple and radical: art should be unjuried and uncensored, open to all, with no committee deciding what was worthy of the wall. AS stood for artists space, or alternative space, depending on who you asked.

With eight hundred dollars, they opened. No application process. No jury. Anyone could show. Anyone could perform. The room at two hundred twenty became a gathering point for artists, musicians, poets, and troublemakers that the mainstream scene had no room for.

Four decades later, A S Two Twenty owns three mixed-use buildings in the heart of downtown, totaling roughly a hundred thousand square feet. It runs four dozen live-work artist studios, six rotating gallery spaces, a main performance stage, a black box theater, a print shop, a darkroom, a digital fabrication lab, and a youth recording studio. It operates its own bar and restaurant. It has become, in the words of scholar Micah Salkind, one of the forces that laid the groundwork for the cultural development that reshaped Providence in the nineteen nineties and the early years of this century.

In two thousand sixteen, Crenca was recognized at the White House as a Champion of Change. But the real testament is simpler: the one-room experiment above a performing arts center became an institution that the city cannot imagine being without.