For the first time since it closed its doors as an art college, there’s activity in the Star Store again.
Looking up from the street, there are now bright stars in every one of its giant windows, stretching four stories high and nearly a block in each direction.
The ground floor windows are filled with art. The corner gallery has an overflowing curation of New Bedford relics and detritus, like a child’s dream of a hidden room within a department store, where a wrong turn takes you to a bizarre, time-warped dimension.
UMass Dartmouth’s College of Visual and Performing Arts abruptly closed its Star Store campus two-and-a-half years ago, when a behind-the-scenes political dispute eliminated funding that paid the university’s rent in the privately-owned building.
The result was disastrous for everyone involved. The university scrambled to set up another arts campus in a strip mall; the landlord saw his annual tax bill increase tenfold; and the politician who cut the university’s rent money, in the hopes that the school would buy the building, saw the campus’ future go up in smoke.
After years of investigation and finger-pointing while the campus sat dark and empty, the Star Store’s doors swung open again to the public this December. Visitors trickled in for a pair of holiday markets, including former art students and faculty, eager to see what’s become of their old school.
A promising solution for the downtown arts space has emerged, and the property’s new owner is hoping to make that known this holiday season.
“The goal was to have something, a presence in the building, and to let the public back in for the first time in a while,” said Matt McArthur, of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston. “And then I couldn’t help myself. I had to put all those stars in the windows upstairs as well, just because it was begging for it.”
The nonprofit purchased the Star Store for $1 this spring, which it announced at a celebratory press conference in early June.
McArthur, the council’s director of real estate and fundraising, has since outlined goals to raise $10 million to renovate and reopen the building as a mix of private and group art studios, with social and exhibition spaces as well.
Since the real estate deal closed, McArthur has led nine community meetings in New Bedford for artists to advocate for the kind of space they want downtown. Requests ran the gamut from the types of equipment to be installed, to the layout of new studios, to possible programming and hopes of what kind of community might grow out of all this.
“What we’ve heard a lot in the community process is, ‘We want a creative living room downtown,’” McArthur said.
At the December events, titled “Lighting the Star Store,” McArthur said he saw that vision begin to take place spontaneously.
“People came in, they screen printed a shirt, they checked out the maker’s market,” McArthur said, “and then they hung out an extra half hour or 45 minutes.”
McArthur said the fastest timeline for the Star Store’s renovation would have the building reopening in early 2027. Until then, he is focused on fundraising and a mix of maintenance concerns. To name some of his biggest headaches, he needs to update the elevators and replace the roof.
Jill McEvoy, a former UMass Dartmouth graduate student in the arts, helped screen print t-shirts celebrating the “lighting” of the Star Store, which she handed out to visitors for free on a recent December evening. For her and her friends, the holiday markets were nights of happiness and laughter, after finishing their graduate studies in a makeshift facility, miles from the downtown campus that inspired them to move to New Bedford.
“It almost feels like we never left,” McEvoy said.
