A 10,000 square-foot bar, event space and art gallery is coming to South End later this year
Want to support the arts in Charlotte? You could buy local art, check out a gallery — or buy a beer from Alchemy at C3Lab when it opens later this year.
Creative hub C3Lab is teaming up with artist- and maker-space Union Shop Studio to open Alchemy — a bar, event space and art gallery — with one goal in mind: Making studio space in South End sustainable and affordable for makers in Charlotte.
“Anything with art is a challenge, especially financially,” said Glen Nocik, who opened C3Lab in 2015 with his wife, Maria. “Most artists can’t afford too much or anything at all for space. So going in we knew we had to create a model that could sustain itself.”
Alchemy will open in half of the 20,000 square-foot building next door to the current C3Lab location at 2525 Distribution St. (C3Lab has plans for the other half of the building, but that phase won’t happen until 2018.) Nocik hopes to have the space open in September 2017.
The 10,000 square-foot space will include:
– A fully-functional bar with beer, wine and liquor, which will have normal bar hours — “Another place in South End you can go out to,” said Jeffrey Barninger, who opened Union Shop on Wilkinson Boulevard in 2014.
The bar area will also serve food from Friendship Trays, the nearby meals-on-wheels program serving Mecklenburg County.
– A “maker market,” a small retail area where local artists and makers can sell their stuff.
– A coffee bar.
– A 2,000+ square-foot gallery space, with its own entrance so it can be closed off for private events.
– An event space that could be as large as 4,000 square-feet, which will also have its own entrance and can be closed off for events like weddings. Nocik and Barninger also plan to have regular concerts in this space.
“With all the closing of all the music clubs … we want to have the ability to have those kind of shows in there,” Barninger said.
– A large, multi-level outdoor space in the back that will eventually connect both of the C3Lab buildings.
“It’s going to be huge,” Nocik said about the outside area. “It’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be multifunctional.”
– The new event and gallery spaces will also open up room for more artist studios in the original C3Lab location, where the current gallery and event space sits.
Barninger and Nocik first met last March and realized they were doing similar things in different places. Union Shop was created to be a space for artists and makers to work in the same space and share that creative energy. C3Lab was meant to be a “creative hub,” where artists could have affordable space and a sense of community.
“We were running these weird parallel lives,” Barninger said. So they decided to join teams.
Union Shop will merge with C3Lab and close its former location when the lease is up in June. Together, they hope to keep studio space affordable even as rents rise dramatically in the South End area.
You see it happen all over the place: Artists and creative-types move to an area, it becomes hip, more people move there and eventually the people who built the neighborhood get priced out and they go somewhere else. C3Lab doesn’t want to see that continue to happen in South End.
“That is a stressful way to live your life, to constantly have to be recreating the community you just built,” Barninger said. “So I think both of us have the philosophy that creating sustainable, affordable space is extremely important.”
Their plan: Combine something that makes money — a bar — with something that isn’t a huge moneymaker — artist space and a gallery. That’s Alchemy.
“This is what makes the artist space sustainable,” Barninger said. “Even if you can’t buy art or support art in a major way, you can come here and have a beer, and in a way you’re giving back to the arts and helping sustain that in Charlotte.”
Photos: Corey Inscoe
This story was originally published March 21, 2017 at 1:01 AM with the headline "A 10,000 square-foot bar, event space and art gallery is coming to South End later this year."