By the time I show up at MADE boutique on a Saturday afternoon, Cindy Dach has already had a hectic morning. A television crew had been here earlier in the day, and the previous night's event, an art opening featuring boxes made by local artists, was so successful that eager customers insisted on leaving with their purchases right then and there.
"We were going to keep them on display for a month, but people wanted to take them and I wasn't here to argue," Dach says.
MADE is the latest success in a line of Dach's endeavors here in the Valley. Since she and her husband, Greg Esser, moved here five years ago from Denver, they have been an integral part of the revitalization of the downtown Phoenix arts scene.
Dach's day job is marketing coordinator for Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, another center for local culture. She has worked hard to get national authors to stop by for readings, including Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), Dr. Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
While these larger events are well-attended, Dach felt frustrated when similar events held by first-time authors only drew a handful of people.
"Audiences come out for authors whose books have been made into movies or are well-known, but when (the authors) are just starting out, they don't come out. This is not a Changing Hands situation; it's across the country."
One night, while listening to live music at a bar, Dach came up with a bold idea: If unknown authors don't fare well at bookstore events, why not change venues?
Dach created the First Fiction program with the idea "to take literature to where the people are." A handful of first-time authors tour major cities and read in bars, getting the exposure they need while interacting with a young, hip audience.
The inaugural First Fiction event took place in November of 2003 at Monti's La Casa Vieja restaurant in Tempe, when more than 100 people showed up to listen to authors read on the patio. Word-of-mouth spread, and now the tour runs twice a year (spring and fall) to cities around the country.
"My dream or vision, one day as I get free time, is to do more of these cool or fun opportunities. Bookstores are great places, but they can't necessarily be happening places," Dach says.
In her hours away from Changing Hands, Dach and Esser spend much of their time on or near Roosevelt Street in downtown Phoenix, where they run three art spaces (eye lounge, 515 Gallery and Sixth Street Studios) and MADE. When the couple, who were voted "Best Power Couple" in the New Times' 2002 "Best of Phoenix" issue for their impact on the Valley arts scene, moved to Phoenix, "we hated it," Dach says, "mainly because it was so hard to identify community. We whined and whined and whined, and then we thought, 'OK, we can either leave or get involved.'"
Five years ago, the building that houses MADE and eye lounge was a crack house. Dach and Esser renovated the building, rented out the space that is now MADE and turned the eye lounge space into an artist collective. In an artist collective, members are voted in and pay rent to use the space. They're not represented by anyone, so they don't split a commission with the owner of the gallery. Instead, they pay rent to use the space.
515 Gallery opened in 2002 just down the street from eye lounge, and the couple bought Sixth Street Studios ("the worst house on the block," Dach says) in 2002. They fixed up the property, which is now on the market. MADE opened earlier this year after the last tenant of the space moved out in March.
"We kept noticing down here that you get really expensive art, and artists only get to show once a year, maybe once every two years," Dach says. "We thought it would be neat to do kind of a boutique where everything's on consignment."
The store, which features unique accessories and gifts from local artists and hip national companies, "feels like it's filling a niche in the community," Dach says. "It's really exciting to work with artists in a very different way than I'm used to."
MADE will hold quarterly themed exhibitions; the recent box show will be followed by an ornament show in November that will benefit Hurricane Katrina relief. Currently, MADE is open three days a week; Dach hopes to go to six days a week if business continues to improve.
MADE, eye lounge and 515 Gallery are heavily visited stops on the First Fridays circuit. The downtown Phoenix event, which began in the 1990s, now draws thousands of people to the heart of the city to walk around and check out the art in galleries and art spaces.
"To me, it got popular within the last three years, and the reason I really believe it got popular was not only the quality arts community at the time, but the fact that you could walk from gallery to gallery," Dach says. "It's not that we created this, but we helped facilitate it along with a lot of other people."
The First Fridays in August was a watershed moment for the event. City inspectors, county inspectors and police officers, spurred by numerous reports of underage drinking, open containers of alcohol on the street and an out-of-control parking situation, descended on the event en masse. Gallery owners and operators felt resentful about the fact that inspectors were accompanied by armed police officers.
Dach says that the incident and the following outcry from the people involved with First Fridays shows "how much this matters," although she thinks that crowd control would be less of a problem if the galleries were open every Friday night.
From all the Friday night activity, you might not guess that Dach comes from a Sabbath-observant background. She grew up in a modern Orthodox family in New York, which for them meant that the kids could wear jeans on Sunday and after school, and her mother only covered her hair in the synagogue. Still, "my Jewish background is really intense," she says.
She attended yeshiva through 11th grade, when she left New York for Israel and a religious all-girls school. However, she never felt quite at home in the Orthodox atmosphere.
"Ever since I was a little kid I had questions," she recalls. "To me, in orthodoxy of any religion I find a lot of hypocrisy. I sometimes find in orthodoxy in any religion that people find it more important to be orthodox than to be a good person."
While in Israel, she began spending time with nonreligious Jews, and while she enjoyed the freedom of not observing the Sabbath, it took getting used to.
"The first time I turned a light on on a Saturday, I was shocked I didn't get struck by lightning," she says.
She then moved back to New York and spent time learning about the non-Jewish world. "I'm a person who likes to learn by experimentation. So I just started experiencing everything, which included getting to know non-Jews, which is something I didn't know about as a kid. I wasn't allowed to have friends outside my community. I found myself attracted to good people whether they were Jewish or not Jewish."
A Memorial Day trip one year to Colorado led Dach to the next phase of her life. She entered the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., where she attended graduate school and took courses in writing from instructors like Allan Ginsburg and William Burroughs. She moved to Denver after Boulder, where she met Esser.
As for the role Judaism plays in her life today, Dach says, "It's my identity. It's very much who I am." She doesn't attend a synagogue or celebrate holidays in a traditional way: "The idea of getting into a car and driving to a seder sits more strangely with me than not going to a seder at all."
For major Jewish and Christian holidays (Esser is not Jewish), the couple usually stays home and does an art project together. "Our holidays become this time to be together and embrace goodness," she says.
"I feel most Jewish when I'm around Jewish women. When I go home to my family and go to weddings and bar mitzvahs, it's just a part of me. I know all the dances. It's such a part of who I am. But I don't feel it's something I need to wear on my T-shirt."
Besides being an arts advocate, Dach is an artist herself. Her art grew out of her writing; while she enjoyed creating both fiction and nonfiction, she longed for the hands-on experience of creating art.
When she and Esser founded eye lounge, the member artists encouraged her to join. "Eye lounge was this great community, where I gave myself permission to experiment," she says.
Her work is mostly text-based and includes a lot of photography. One of her pieces won the Governor's Excellence in the Arts award in 2004. Her most recent show, "Matter," held in January 2005 at eye lounge, juxtaposed enormous images of Dach at different times in her life with text describing who she thought she would be when she was each age.
"My art is very personal," she says, "but I strive to make my text universal. I'm happy doing it, and I still get to write. I love it."
