PROVIDENCE – Umberto “Bert” Crenca is an artist whose vibrant canvas is literally the people who work, live, create and perform in the urban ecosystem of greater Providence.

Crenca envisions “a just world where all people can realize their full creative potential" – a vision that he has put into action through AS220, where art is about creation, performance, inclusion and conversation as much as it is about display on a wall.

As the founder and artistic director of AS220, Crenca has placed a special emphasis on helping young people in the community take control of telling their own narrative.

From a struggling nonprofit that, as Crenca described it, was “living and presenting in an illegal building, with only one paid staff person making minimum wage – and that was me,” AS220 has grown into an arts and cultural institution, with gallery space, performance space, a restaurant serving healthy, affordable, locally-grown food, a youth program, and an affordable, high-quality lab in digital media tools for a new generation of makers.

AS220 now owns three buildings and may soon take on a fourth. In three weeks, on March 24, AS220 is convening a gathering to engage the community in a conversation about building AS220’s future. The free event, to be held at 5:30 p.m. at the Trinity Repertory Theatre, is an effort to re-engage and re-animate the AS220 community.

ConvergenceRI recently sat down to talk with Crenca, to explore AS220’s vision for the future and how it converges with other developments in Rhode Island’s emerging ecosystem. As with any conversation with Crenca, it was interactive, a free-wheeling discussion, filled with sudden turns, ideas, tangents, humor, frankness, and possibilities. Crenca was as much interested in learning about ConvergenceRI as he was in talking about AS220.

At the end of the interview, Crenca led ConvergenceRI on a tour of the AS220 Youth programs ensconced on the second floor at the Empire Street building, checking in with all the different young artists in action. Crenca insisted that the reporter and photographer stop by the wall mural and take time to read it: “Hateration gets no toleration,” expressing AS220 Youth’s commitment to respecting and embracing all people.

Can you imagine this as a mural above on an arch as people enter the newly redeveloped land in The Link? ConvergenceRI asked him.

“That would be fucking great!” Crenca said, clapping his hands together in delight. “That’s what it’s all about!”

ConvergenceRI: How do you define community? What is an engaged community? How do you motivate a community to take action?
CRENCA: Some years ago, AS220 wrote a paper called “The Compost Theory.” It was produced by the AS220 “stink tank.” We brought people together to think about the issues you asked about, about convergence.

Someone asked us to write a piece about what we’d been talking about. The compost theory was: think more about fruitful environments. Not about trying to predict results, but what was the public sector’s role, what was the private sector’s role, what was the nonprofit role in creating an environment that will allow for any number of possibilities.

ConvergenceRI: How do you see the task ahead in building community?
CRENCA: I think that community, it’s one of those terms that used a lot and rarely defined. Are you asking what do you mean by community in a contemporary society?
I think that for all that the Internet has provided us with, community is fundamentally about the way that you and I interact. I think it’s a fundamental need.

I think it’s great, all these communications tools that exist now, and I think there are tremendous opportunities within that realm, but it’s not something that replaces the fundamental need for people to interact, in person, the need to have to look into the eyes of another person and judge the nuance of the interaction, the nuance of the communications.

ConvergenceRI: So, having the conversation is as important as the outcome at AS220’s “Building Community” meeting on March 24?
CRENCA: Let’s talk about motivations a bit first, before questions about outcomes. There are a number of concerns and opportunities that AS220 is facing, concerns about the 2014-2015 budget projections. We’re at [the end of a funding cycle with the Ford Foundation. The cycle will end, and there’s not necessarily a promise of continued funding. They’ve been with us for five, six years. So has Kresge.

They’re both ending at the same time, and it’s putting a hole in our budget [projection] that has never existed before.

I don’t want to put too much emphasis on this. AS220 is not at risk as an organization. We’re a healthy organization. But it’s the first time we’ve confronted this kind of [projected] budget gap ever, in our history. AS220 has run a balanced budget for 29 years.

So there is that challenge we’re facing in 2014-2015. There’s also a process we’ve been working on, 20/20, what does AS220 want to be in the year 2020. I think that there’s great promise in that vision.

It’s likely to mean another building. It could be a new building construction, or a signature piece of architecture – or another renovation. That would be our fourth building. But I don’t want to give too much away before the March 24 gathering.

Let me say, in general terms, we know how we got there, we know very much about where we are, and [the conversation is] about where we want to go.

ConvergenceRI: How will the community be engaged?
CRENCA: When you talk about the way that we define community, there are certain words that are essential: equity, access, concepts of reaching across class, across everything, when you talk about race, ethnicity, age, bringing together the youth culture and the older culture, all of this, it’s the way I define community. In looking at what AS220 does, its’ the manifestation of the way we define community.

We have an equal pay policy. It’s transparency around our numbers and all that. Transparency is essential, going back to your original question. Transparency is essential. To be a real community, you have to have trust.

How do you develop and create trust? As an institution like AS220, transparency is the key to trust.

Politicians throw that word transparency around all the time. In every platform, in every lecture, they say: I promise to be more transparent. I have yet to hear one of those politicians define what they mean by transparency. And how they are going to execute it.

Lately, in meetings that I have had with some of the mayoral candidates, I’ve made the point, if you’re going to use the word transparency, define it, and commit to it. If you say you’re going to do something, say how this how you’re going execute transparency within your organization. Don’t just throw the term around.

ConvergenceRI: Have you heard about the work of the R.I. Alliance for Healthy Homes and Mark Kravatz? They are seeking to build an engaged community by leveraging resources and data.
CRENCA: Some of the key values that drive our work are that we value the creative potential of every individual. AS220 envisions a just world where all people can reach their full creative potential. We believe you have a stronger and healthier community as a result.

ConvergenceRI: How do you accomplish that?
CRENCA: We do that by providing affordable access to space to perform or exhibit. [We create] a safe place to perform, to take risk, and grow, with an emphasis on the intrinsic value of the artist what they bring independent of what they produce as a commodity. We’re not playing into the value of a capitalist system, we’re playing into the value of a humanistic system.
We provide education, affordable education, access to sophisticated tools. In our restaurant, healthy and affordable locally produced food at a reasonable price, at a value. We provide affordable live/work studio spaces. Members of that living community in AS220 have to do five hours of volunteer work for the AS220 community as part of their lease.

So, that’s how we define community. All you have to do is look at the vision, mission, polices and practices of the organization.

One additional thing that is elemental about this. One of the things we do is work with kids at the R.I. Training School, bringing art to them, 10 to 12 classes, every week. And, we try to connect our work here when they get out. It’s a little roundabout, but you’ll see how it connects to community.

Our theory of change, if you will, in regard to our intentions with working that particular population… I’ll speak for myself, but it’s really a part of the organization.

What I perceive out there, with those young people, is that they have accepted a narrative that’s been dictated to them by a political, social and economic conditions. So, when I said to a kid in the R.I. Training School, “Aren’t you afraid of going to the A.C.I.?” And the kid says: “Why would I be afraid of going to the ACI? My brother’s there, my uncle’s there, half the boys in the neighborhood are there…”

That’s one of the saddest moments I’ve ever experienced. In essence, they’ve accepted a narrative in regard to their life and their story that’s been imposed on them by social and political conditions.

ConvergenceRI: Are you changing the narrative?
CRENCA: We’re giving them control of the narrative.

ConvergenceRI: How are you doing that?
CRENCA: We provide them with the tools. What is art, if not communication. So, whether it’s visual or written, we give them an opportunity to use those tools. And to suggest to them that their experience, and their story is relevant and important – and that people need to hear it. Not isolated behind a fence or a wall, and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Or pretend that we have no responsibilities for it. .

In fact, their perspective, based on their experiences, is critical to understanding the challenges of community and the health of the community.

When we talk about community here, we are talking about another element that is intrinsic – the idea that all voices not only have the right to be present in the conversation, but that it’s critical.

The strength of Providence’s cultural diversity is not recognized – or valued – by the business community.

ConvergenceRI: How do you see the potential interaction of AS220 with the plans to redevelop the land know as The LINK?
CRENCA: The I-195 redevelopment is a little bit overrated. We have as many acres of surface parking in downtown as they do in that area. There are lots of opportunities to develop. I don’t think we’re nearly courageous enough.

Right now, the situation for private development is awful. To be able to develop a project or build a building in downtown Providence or anywhere in the state right now, based on this bureaucratic structure, is unaffordable and very bureaucratically bogged down.

The processes are very inefficient, the way that tax breaks are handled for any of the incentives that would allows these projects to be affordable.

It’s all at a personal level. There’s no real good strong policy that supports development. There’s no efficiency to it. So, the public sector is failing miserably in that arena.

Another example is our education system. No courage. What if we had a design curriculum? We talk about a technology curriculum, like a digital curriculum. We got all this excitement about 3-D printers; 3-D printers have been around for two decades. It’s just a new piece of technology.

What you do with it, who has access to it, to this technology, is far more critical than the technology is.

If we had, from K-12, a progressive design curriculum for every public school student in the state of Rhode Island, we would create a design curriculum for every kid from the first grade on that begins to understand design from the perspective of communication, the built environment, transportation.

We would create an entire population of problem-solvers – who would also be very supportive of the fine arts, because they go hand in hand.

ConvergenceRI: How do we do that?
CRENCA: We have to have leadership in education from the board level, from the director of education that has the courage to make radical recommendations and radical shifts in our curriculum.

[We need to] stop playing into a 100-year-old methodology that has no basis in reality anymore. We’re not training people to count widgets in the factory anymore. We need creative thinkers, we need problem solvers.

ConvergenceRI: Has the departure of John Maeda from RISD been a loss in efforts to integrate art and design into the technology curriculum?
CRENCA: He didn’t give a shit locally. He didn’t play locally at all. It wasn’t any loss here at all. He lent some significance on the national level around turning STEM to STEAM. He did serve the country, at some level, in that conversation. But he had very , very, very little interaction with the local community here.

ConvergenceRI: If you could collaborate, converge, collide with the developments for The LINK, what would you do?
CRENCA: The whole concept for that property and that land should be mixed use, mixed income development. It should be a living, vibrant community.

If you go back to the 1880s for that parcel of land, there were small factories, residentials, people could cross the street and go to work. It was vibrant, dense.

ConvergenceRI: Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities…
CRENCA: Absolutely, that woman was a visionary. Absolutely. Absolutely. Scale is important.

I’ve been brought to Colorado Springs. It’s challenging, because they have these big wide avenues through the city, it’s very blocky.

Where’s the human scale? Now, they are developing certain sections of Colorado Springs, on a human scale.

It gets into the whole idea of what downtowns, historically, were meant to be.

They’re places of interaction and communication, of trade, of cultures, where all the the communities could convene to have this experience in the commons.

The exploded version of the commons is the downtown, right?

Now, people are rediscovering that – whether it be in the suburbs outside of Colorado Springs, or the suburbs outside of Providence. People are saying that [life in the suburbs] isn’t everything it’s trumped up to be.

People want to be back engaged. That’s why most of the condos downtown are actually sold, contrary to what people think.

ConvergenceRI: How does AS220 become a force for that change. How do you scale up? How do you get the politicians and the business leaders to have the courage, to become believers?
CRENCA: A lot of it is show and tell. Neil Steinberg [president and CEO of the Rhode Island Foundation], forgive me, Neil, he has been quoted as saying: “I don’t know how Bert or AS220 does it, but I’m going to keep supporting them, because somehow or another, they get it done.

I think he’s beginning to understand, more and more, how we get it done. I think Neil has to claim that statement.

There’s not entitlement here. We’re not entitled to anything.

If you believe in a vision, in you believe in the work that you’re doing…

When I’m courting an individual, when I’m trying to get support, I tell them: this isn’t a high pressure sell. I’m going to present you, just like at a restaurant, and they give you a menu, and then you decide if you want to order or not.

If you’re a person of influence in this community, so now you know more about AS220, and I’ve already won by the fact that you’re providing me with the opportunity to educate you about what we’re doing. There’s going to be a return on that.

You get obstacles. I think patience, and a willingness – I know this is a cliché – a persistence, and a willingness not to take no for an answer.

When we were buying this building, we had one paid staff person making minimum wage that was me, and we publicly said, we are going to buy and renovate a building in downtown Providence.

There were a billion meetings we had to have to convince people. It was one of the best con-vincing [Crenca draws the first syllable out, with a smile] I’ve ever done in my life. Right?

The conditions were right, the city was desperate. Buddy [Cianci] came into power, he was able to trigger things in a way, that if you were on the right side of him, were very efficient.

But every time we went into a meeting, the banks and the finance people gave us 50 million reasons why this wasn’t possible and they couldn’t fund a project like this.

We politely said, we’ll be back, thank you, we’ll come back with answers.

And we put our heads together, and came back with answers. That’s the opposite of entitlement.

Someone mentioned the letters CRA, the Community Reinvestment Act. I found out that the money the banks were loaned from the Federal Reserve, their rate was affected by their CRA rating. There’s the button.

I suggested that maybe this was a CRA project, and you can put this in your CRA portfolio, and, ohhh, we got a very different response.

Part of it is a certain amount of patience, a certain decoding.

There are certainly people on the left of left who think AS220 may have compromised in some of the partnerships we have, as an institution, and there are people on the right, far right, who think that anyone associated with AS220 is a bunch of tattooed, unwashed people who are running around naked. And some of all that is true.

ConvergenceRI: What is your message for the future that you will be delivering on March 24?
CRENCA: We are re-animating the community. I think we have become passive – in many of ways of community and civic participation. The Building AS220 campaign is a good opportunity [to change that].

We have tremendous cultural assets in this community. I can go through a huge list. I think the idea that Rhode Island has this sweet scale – that there are so many things possible, and people are accessible – is true. I don’t think that’s bullshit. I think that’s true.

But I think as a community, from the public sector across the board, we have to be far more courageous in executing policy and vision, working with what could be, in a very holistic way, a very inclusive way, a phenomenal enterprise as a state.