Paul Artspace: A Global Artists’ Residency, Hidden in the Woods

Paul Artspace is technically located in a heavily wooded area of unincorporated St. Louis County, though, for mail purposes, it’s found in Florissant. While several buildings populate the artist retreat’s six-plus acres, the linchpin is a single-story ranch home, with a massive, finished basement doubling the amount of usable room. There, for the past several years, artists from around the world have gathered to create here, in a space that really needs to be experienced in person to be fully appreciated.

The property is owned by two of Paul Artspace’s five board members: Mike Behle and Laura Grady. Officially, it’s described like so: “Paul Artspace is a residency program based in St. Louis, Missouri that offers living and studio space for local, national, and international artists, writers, and curators. Through providing time and space, Paul Artspace promotes thoughtful discourse and artistic exchanges within the greater cultural community.”

The arts venue, named after Behle’s uncle Paul, the last resident of the property, is one that Behle knows well.

“My family bought the house in 1980,” he says. “ I lived there from 1980 to ‘94. It was a good place to grow up. I moved away in 1994 to go to college. And I moved back to St. Louis in 2002, but never back into the house. It stayed with my family and when my dad retired in 2000, he sold it to his brother Paul, who stayed there until he passed on in 2011.”

Behle, a visual artist who teaches at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and his wife, Grady, had dreamed of “an artist colony or residency for years. But the resources were not there, or never presented themselves. In 2009, we looked around for possible properties for a collective. We live in South City, near Bevo, and were looking in the city. But when Paul got sick in 2011,” they knew that “this building was the one.”

From the project’s inception until this very week, Paul Artspace was funded by those who lived and worked on-site, be they from Europe, across the U.S., or even from here in St. Louis. Typically, that meant paying a $400 a month stipend. But that approach never really sat well with Behle and Grady, who longed to make the space affordable to anyone who passed muster in the application process.

“Our model is shifting,” Behle says. “It had been, from when we opened, $400 for the place for a month. We’re doing away with that, so it’ll be free, aside from the application fee. We’re putting more parameters on what people can do here (in lieu of rent) and one of those things is leaving behind an object. It could also mean creating something for our digital library, something written, or images, or audio files. There’s also the need for some engagement with the community. By doing those things and by removing the fee, it’s a way to ask for something back from the resident, while continuing to build the narrative of this place and a history of it.

“In large part, we’re able to do this place because it was in the family, and my wife and I were able to get it without a mortgage,” he adds. “That’s huge. The rest of the money will come through writing grants and getting private donations; we’re a 501c3 non-profit and are able to raise money from private donors that way. It’s funny—once we got the 501c3, we gained legitimacy in other people’s minds. ‘I can give and also get IRS approval.’ We worked with Volunteer Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts and they were amazing in helping us. By removing that fee, we’re much more in-line with functioning as a charitable arts organization, supporting other creatives and also our communities.”

Behle does half-joke that “I never saw myself as an arts administrator. I’d always identified as an artist with a studio practice and as someone teaching studio practice. Lo and behold, I’m an arts administrator.”

Though he may be that, the artist in him is on clear display as he travels around the wild-yet-tidy grounds of Paul Artspace on a misty, late-winter afternoon. Each area completed offers new possibilities, while all the edges that remain a bit untended are sites of future expansion.

As noted above, the center of the whole project lies in that 1970 ranch home, which features three bedrooms on the main floor and three artist studios in the basement; peeking out of a hillside, the studio with large, walk-out sliding doors is the one that most of the 30 residents have gravitated towards, thanks to its ample, natural light. Upstairs, too, is a kitchen and large living room, all looking very much like the same rooms that Behle knew in childhood, marvelously visually locked-in-time.

Outside, natural walking paths lead to a series of smaller buildings, each in various states of rehabilitation. One, a sort of extra garage, is moving forward as a studio for bigger, beefier equipment; this building’s benefitted from the elimination of several trees and the construction of an earthen wall along the property’s small creek. Another standalone building on the back of the property looks as if it’s the county’s smallest church or schoolhouse; Behle imagines writers finding that structure the best for solitary work. Nearby is the property’s most-dated element: an outhouse. (There are no future plans for that one, as such.)

Along the walking paths, previous artists have left their mark. Mid-sized, Blair Witch-like domes sit here and there. Animal statuary is found in one, big batch. Large and small pieces dot the landscape, never overwhelming, but always inviting you to look up into the trees, or down into a ravine, or even straight-ahead. In time, more and more pieces will appear.

As someone who grew up here under very different circumstances, Behle says that he’s even consistently “rediscovering this place, through new lenses, as we get other folks to come out here, seeing how they interact with the space, how it informs them.”

Rightly, Behle notes that the car culture of North County is really pretty close; highways are nearby and the old Jamestown Mall’s just a few minutes away. And, yet, the going down the side roads that take you deeper into this woodsy subdivision, you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re plenty far away from St. Louis, culturally and geographically.

“I know it’s removed,” he says of that remote vibe. “It’s not so connected in that way to the St. Louis arts community. At the same time, a residency should give you a chance to pull back. For me, in graduate school, this seemed an interesting idea. That’s when I became aware of artist communities. Learning of the Vermont Studio Center solidified it for me. In a large way, that’s the model we’ve worked with, building it not just for visual artists, but for writers and curators, too.”

While not everyone’s going to be lucky enough to spend a night (or a month’s worth of nights) at the facility, or even to get a relaxed, meandering, personal tour of the grounds, Paul Artspace does offer the occasional open-to-the-public event, particularly for spoken-word programs. Those wishing to find a secret, serene corner of the St. Louis Experience would do well to visit on those days, taking in an environment that offers both creative energy and a space for quiet reflection.

Behle, Grady and their fellow board members have blessed the region with something special in Paul Artspace, a true gift to the artistic community of St. Louis. 

For more information: paulartspace.org.