By DCist contributor Rachel Kurzius

Despite plans to terminate the lease at a board meeting on Tuesday, the now-shuttered Rosslyn building that housed Artisphere is still in Arlington County’s hands.

Monday Properties, which owns the building and leased it rent-free to the county, “requested more time to implement the termination,” said Michelle Isabelle-Stark, the director of the Arlington Cultural Affairs Division.

Monday Properties declined to explain why it wanted to reschedule the termination.

When Artisphere closed its doors at the end of June, Arlington County still had six years left on its lease. The FY2016 budget for the county includes $1.3 million of one-time funding to “address lease termination provisions” for the performance and exhibition space.

“Accurate termination figures are not known at this time,” said Isabelle-Stark. “The only motivation for the County to terminate the lease early is if the arrangement is cost neutral or better for the County.”

The closure of Artisphere represents a change in arts-funding strategy for Arlington, but Isabelle-Stark emphasized that it shouldn’t be seen as an abandonment of cultural investment.

“We want to take the content developed at Artisphere into the community,” she said, citing the Art on the ART Bus mobile gallery as one example.

“Arlington has always been really good about doing public art,” said local artist Linda Hesh, who was commissioned by Artisphere to do two pieces and who may work with the county later this year on a temporary art project.

But that doesn’t mean Hesh isn’t upset by Artisphere’s closure. “A lot of people think it’s more politically correct to take a positive viewpoint but the reality is that we lost a lot of spaces, not just for local artists, but for everyone. Now all we have are these national, institutional art spaces. Artisphere had shows you’d never see at the National Gallery.”

The question is whether Arlington residents saw these shows. The Rosslyn Business Improvement District says that a quarter million people walked through the Artisphere doors, but a 2014 report found that 75 percent of the audience came from outside the county.

“I never heard of it or about it until our offices moved across the street.” said Rosemary Ferrera, who works in Rosslyn and lived there for a year. “It seems like a cool thing, though.”

“I preferred it more when the Newseum was here,” added Billy Haddad, who has worked in Rosslyn for more than fifteen years.

While this year’s adopted budget cut $946,659 by closing Artisphere, the County Board put more than half of those savings back into the county’s cultural affairs division. The majority of that money went towards preserving seven of the 12 full-time Artisphere staff positions. The closure still nets taxpayer savings of $450,000.

Photo by Rachel Kurzius.

Some artists who performed and exhibited at Artisphere worry that art in the street just isn’t the same.

“Artisphere was more autonomous. When art gets closer to the government, it loses a little of the freedom in the part of curators and organizers,” said D.C.-based visual artist Carolina Mayorga. “A lot of people support art, but under conditions that limit artist freedom. Art is about making people aware of issues, not just putting pretty things in the street.”

Mayorga performed as “Our Lady of the Vanishing Arts” during a closing ceremony for Artisphere. “I called it ‘Ash Saturday,’” she told DCist. “Instead of making the cross sign, I made the dollar sign.”

It cost $1.2 million annually in utilities alone to keep the building running, out of a $3.2 million yearly budget.

“It’s a quirky space,” Isabelle-Stark told DCist. The building includes two different theaters (plus a third next door), three exhibition galleries, a 4,000-square-foot ballroom, and a two-story projection wall. “It’s going to have to have a for-profit take it over. We’re hoping that tech companies will take a serious look at it.”

One technology company, the Rosslyn-based MoDev, considered moving into the building.

“I really got to know the space as a tech venue,” MoDev founder Pete Erickson said. “We organized a dozen events there, and it started to feel like home. You could really see how people loved it.”

Erickson said MoDev wanted to sublet the space from the county, utilizing the same favorable terms that Arlington enjoyed—namely the free rent.

“There’s enough demand where that place could have been busy with tech events almost every day of the year,” Erickson said.

Ultimately, MoDev never submitted a proposal to the County Board.

“It was just very unclear given the uncertainty of the lease and whether or not it would be vacated,” Erickson said. “It was like chasing a moving target and I didn’t have the time to invest without knowing what the playing field was really like. We found alternatives, but unfortunately they’re not in Arlington County.”

Historically, the building has been an odd one to fill. Once the Newseum left for the District in 2000, the building remained vacant for a full decade before Artisphere opened in October 2010, following a $6.7 million renovation.

“We are in the very early stages of our marketing efforts to release the premises,” Monday Properties told DCist in a statement. “We are looking at a diverse set of space users and opportunities to fill the space.”