Star Store’s next act

by Steven Froias

Before 2022 gets into full swing, we should first acknowledge a milestone for the City of New Bedford which occurred in the fall of last year.

Not least because heading into 2022 and beyond, it will be a key barometer of the city’s central position in the region’s creative economy. For many decades, Star Store defined downtown shopping and wove itself into the fabric of this community. Yet, just over 20 years ago, the physical structure at 715 Purchase Street assumed a new role – one of more profound consequence to the city and region. In 2001, the vacant former Star Store was transformed into the urban satellite campus of the UMass Dartmouth College of Visual and Performing Arts, thereafter beloved anew as CVPA Star Store. As CVPA Star Store enters its third decade, its impact on the cultural landscape is being evaluated once again with an eye toward where it’s been – and where it’s going. Nothing less than CVPA Star Store 2.0 is being envisioned to build upon the solid legacy and achievements of the last twenty years even as the next twenty beckon. The goal, says CVPA Dean Lawrence Jenkens, is to maintain the downtown campus as a vital hub of artistic achievement for the region. Star Store 2.0 will retain the core elements of what has made it successful, while embracing new fields of design study into the future.

Star Store 2.0 will retain the core elements of what has made it successful, while embracing new fields of design study into the future.

That means textiles will mix with virtual reality, and fine arts will brush up against gaming. Looking ahead, Jenkens and UMass Dartmouth see a CVPA Star Store that drives design in all its forms in the region, just as the first twenty years of the school helped drive arts and culture in New Bedford and for the South Coast region.

Growing up together

Around the time CVPA Star Store was established, New Bedford was at the beginning of the creative renaissance that captures the city’s imagination to this day. Within a span of several years, The New Bedford National Historic Whaling Park, the New Bedford Art Museum, and AHA! New Bedford all sprung to life in downtown New Bedford. “We all grew up together,” says AHA!

CVPA proposes that the Star Store Campus be transformed into a state-of-the-art facility for design and technology in the arts

Director Lee Heald. She calls CVPA Star Store an important partner in that journey, and places the downtown campus into a much broader historical context.

“CVPA Star Store fits into the legacy institutions of design and learning have had in New Bedford,” she says. She references the former New Bedford Textile School as an apt example. It opened its doors at 1213 Purchase Street around the turn of the 20th century. By century’s end, the building was repurposed after the textile school closed. A studio arts building housed in that space was put to use by Southeastern Massachusetts University (SMU), the forerunner of today’s University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, in 1988 after it absorbed the Swain School of Design. Swain itself enjoyed over a century of artistic life in the city.

Even more, Heald believes CVPA Star Store caught the arc of urban redevelopment at just the right time when it opened in 2001, as arts and culture and placemaking came to the fore and helped reinvigorate urban economies.

The next 20 years

Even as UMass Dartmouth CVPA Star Store celebrated its twentieth anniversary in September 2021, Dean Lawrence Jenkens was eagter to share the details of what the next twenty years in downtown New Bedford can look like. The vision for tomorrow is referred to as Star Store 2.0 by UMass Dartmouth administrators, faculty, staff, and students.

Working in partnership with local and state government and the private sector, CVPA proposes that the Star Store Campus be transformed into a state-ofthe-art facility for design and technology in the arts, essentially a Design Hub that will brand UMass as a destination school for the visual and performing arts, and New Bedford and the South Coast as a center for contemporary design across several in-demand industries.

Dean Jenkens says that a reimagining of the Star Store campus is about addition, not subtraction. Naturally, the popular galleries which have welcomed so many visitors from near and far will remain a feature of the building. It will still house the heavy equipment which the building was designed for when it was first redeveloped. It will also continue to house facilities for CVPA’s ceramics and jewelry programs, including kilns, ovens, and metal fabrication equipment.

A second phase of redevelopment into Star Store 2.0 will, though, allow the campus to accommodate so much more. Like showcasing new and existing interdisciplinary programs such as the collaboration between CVPA and the College of Engineering to create a Game Design program (in collaboration with MassDiGi).

And allowing the room for a design concentration which would include graphic design, animation, game art, illustration, interior architecture, and fashion design. Additionally, the Star Store campus will provide a home for the Music and Technology initiative, spotlighting CVPA’s commitment to the intersection of the arts and technology while making these pursuits available to the public.

Star Store 2.0 also outlines plans for a Design Incubator, providing young entrepreneurs affordable opportunities to build design businesses through access to office space, a smart conference room, and most importantly, access to the students and facilities of CVPA’s design programs.

Lee Heald sums up CVPA and the plan by noting that it has helped create a different portrait of New Bedford for over twenty years now, built on a traditional model of the economy of New Bedford as reflected in its textile manufacturing heritage, but which is also something capable of leaning into the future and embracing a variety of people to effect systematic change.