One Dallas artist sees the demise of Flora Lofts as nothing new

Andrew Kochie says the demise of Flora Lofts as a low-cost residential destination for Dallas artists is familiar. Kochie lived through his own sad story with the conversion of the Continental Gin building in Deep Ellum from a venue for local artists to retail and office space.

There is more than a little in common between the two projects. In June 2018, workers broke ground on the tower designed to include Flora Lofts. Two months later,artists in the Continental Gin building, a haven for decades, were given six months to vacate.

Kochie describes himself as a “geometric abstraction artist” who moved to Dallas in 2013, when he became part of the Continental Gin building only to be later “kicked out.”

Now 43, Kochie met and married his husband in Dallas, where he was initially offered, at the Continental Gin building, 61,000 square feet spread across three stories. “We had 41 artists who were there,” he says. “We would all create a body of work for biannual open studios — spring and fall. We would get up to 4,000 people for one open studio event, where they could experience local, home-grown art.”

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Rent was about a dollar a square foot.

He draws the comparison to Flora Lofts because both situations, he says, bear an “ongoing theme” of what continues to bedevil local artists.

Flora Lofts, he says, drew excitement over “having something downtown, where you could develop a bigger vision. And then, all of a sudden, all of the threads rip loose, and the net gets cast down to nothing. It’s like, ‘So, they pulled the rug out from under us again.’”

As it is, “We don’t have a big venue for our local and regional artists,” he says, “where we can deliver to the public. That was supposed to be a big part of the Dallas Cultural Plan to do that, and it doesn’t have to be downtown. It could be off in the neighborhoods somewhere. But you have to have the space to do that.”

The problem is, in Kochie’s words, “the lack of governance over a vision. If you have a solid vision and a mission to go after something, and you have the financial plan that’s already been presented to everyone, and you can’t execute it? That’s lack of leadership. We need some good leaders to start standing up and saying, ‘This is unacceptable.’ That’s something we don’t have but something we desperately need.”

Just as signage for Flora Lofts still lingers in the Arts District, the Continental Gin Building has its artsy traces, too: a mural painted on its water tower by the blue-chip artist Shepard Fairey. But beyond the window-dressings, artists say the pattern is the same.