Middle school students expressed a desire three years ago for alternatives to the drugs and trouble of their North Sacramento neighborhood, and the Sol Collective was born.
Set in the burgeoning arts district of Del Paso Boulevard, the collective gave those neighborhood kids and local artists a venue to create and show their work, growing to involve more than 300 young people from the area and a regular slot in the city's Second Saturday art walks.
That growth was put on hold Wednesday, when much of the building was gutted by a two-alarm blaze that Sacramento fire officials labeled suspicious.
The fire, which authorities said started about 1 a.m. in a storage structure behind the building, gutted an office and classroom space and destroyed the work of several artists and musicians. Arson investigators do not know if the fire was intentionally set, but "it could have been an accident," said Sacramento Fire Department Capt. Jim Doucette.
Estella Sanchez, director of the nonprofit agency that runs the collective, was teaching a drug prevention course at Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School three years ago when she first heard stories from students about what their neighborhood had to offer.
"I was so appalled that these kids weren't into anything," she said.
Pockets of North Sacramento were experiencing an art boom, but Sanchez said "it felt like the youth were being pushed out." So she decided to convert an empty space at 2010 Del Paso Blvd. into a wide-ranging venue to expose both neighborhood kids and adults to the arts.
Soon, the drug dealers who hung out in front of the building were gone, replaced by teenagers hoping to hone their skills as DJs or painters.
Older artists volunteered to teach classes and mentor DJs in training. When it wasn't being used by artists, social justice organizations held meetings and fundraisers in the gallery's open space.
"It was an epicenter for community art, not a competitive thing," said Jesse Sanchez, who runs Youth In Focus, a program at the collective designed to empower young people to make changes in their schools and communities.
To keep Sol Collective going, artists began selling their work out of a small shop in the front of the building. While other art galleries continued forming along Del Paso Boulevard, Sol Collective considered itself more of a grass-roots venue for younger artists and neighborhood residents trying to break into the art world.
"We were another side of what was going on," Estella Sanchez said. "It was a place where the community could get involved and be a part of that growth."
Neighborhood artists saw it as a place where they could break into the local art scene, bypassing what they said were hurdles at more established galleries in midtown and North Sacramento.
"That place was accessible and there was no pretension," said a neighborhood resident and musician who identified himself as Skinner. "It just seemed very hard to do something progressive and amazing in Sacramento because there are political hands that oppress any kind of street art movement."
Sanchez said she would like to keep the organization going but doesn't know if it can rebound financially from the fire. Yet as bad as she feels about losing the space, Sanchez said she feels worse about the damage done to the artwork that was stored there.
"You can't really replace people's art," she said.
Sanchez said the collective accepts donations through its Web site at www.solcollective.com.
Call The Bee's Ryan Lillis, (916) 321-1085.
