Take a walk with Casey Arthur.
Descend the stairs at 100 College Ave. and meet the artist and founder of Muck Duck Studio, who is standing in a feathered hat.
Then step into a 7,000 square-foot space where soon, Arthur said, couches will host first dates in which paintbrushes and chamomile tea break the ice.
“A lot of young people want to date and don’t know where to meet people,” Arthur said. “Having art and creativity as a shared language gives everyone an in to the conversation.”
Muck Duck’s newest venue is not a matchmaking service or even a community center, but an event space in the Neighborhood of the Arts. The location is set to open this spring after nearly six months of planning, construction and a public hearing in front of the city’s Planning Commission.
Muck Duck’s original artist studio remains in the Blossom Business Center, where Arthur and a team opened it in 2021. That location will continue to host resident artists, while the new NOTA location can throw concerts, mixers, open mics and more.
The events are in service of Muck Duck’s essential mission: creative care.
Or, in Arthur’s words, “curating experiences for vulnerable groups in a contained setting.” Like, for example, an industrial space a block away from the Memorial Art Gallery and the West Herr Auditorium Theatre. Perhaps even out in the community via the new Muck Truck, a pink mobile art studio retrofitted from an old food truck.
“Once we were in here, everything melted, and I knew that the issues I would face while building this place were privileged problems compared to the things that I hope to solve in the city over the longevity of this,” Arthur said. “Fixing the floor? What kind of couches do we want? That’s privileged problems. We have things we have to deal with immediately, like what we’re going to do with our homeless population by the beginning of next winter.”
On a sunny day in early March, as Arthur gave CITY a tour of the new digs, she clocked the space at about 80% complete — including hanging paper lanterns for coziness. The remaining 20% includes details like final decor, a schedule of programming and the little matter of settling on a name for the venue.
It’s a feminine space, Arthur said, but she’s going to meditate on it.
What’s certain is that Arthur and her collaborators see Muck Duck’s NOTA location as an important third place in a highly walkable area. She had plenty of help realizing the new space, including an anonymous $20,000 donation and other substantial contributions from community members who support the mission.
Arthur calls Muck Duck’s story “a trajectory of opportunity and hard work.” She’s eager to pass it on, thanks to a partnership with RochesterWorks that will pay city school students to set up and break down Muck Duck’s events.
“We have kids that are falling through the cracks at RCSD,” she continued, mentioning the proximity of the School of the Arts on Prince Street. “They need somewhere to go. I’m going to host a couple youth-led empowerment open-mic events where kids can come in and express their poetry.”
The tour continues. Past large gallery walls is a left turn into a yoga area. A towering rack of mats and foam blocks by the dozens nests in a corner. Beyond that lies the crown jewel of the event space: a stage.
It’s still early in the life of this still-unnamed venue, so the only performer is a headless mannequin in needle pose. But Arthur envisions diverse social events like “pitch your friend” — think “The Dating Game” meets bachelor(ette) auctions, with slideshows of the contestants’ most dateable qualities backdropping the stage.
These are all reasons to get people in the door, Arthur said. Then the real work of Muck Duck’s creative care can begin.
That work is what excites self-taught painter Christina Counts.
“What fills your cup is what I’m trying to figure out with my life,” she said. “It really is about something bigger than yourself.”
Counts met Arthur through an art residency at The Yards Collective. Years later, feeling burnout from her corporate job after working as a tattoo artist, Counts got back in touch. It was just the right time.
“The whole message of what she was trying to deliver, it inspired me,” Counts said of Arthur. “I’m like, ‘I think I have some skills to offer. I like what you’re doing.’”
Arthur gave Counts free reign to paint the bathrooms in the venue, and the artist bathed the walls with gold leaf and made them her own. Counts said those pulled into Muck Duck’s orbit experience a kind of “collective effervescence,” a feeling of intense energy shared among a group who gather for a purpose.
How does one monetize such an experience? That’s one of the many questions Arthur has considered in the context of running a nontraditional business.
Much of it comes from partnerships with other local businesses and organizations. She knows that Muck Duck serves folks in need — artists, vulnerable people with addiction issues, those struggling with mental illness. The rest will evolve as it needs to.
“We get a lighthouse effect, where they’re all invited into a new way of doing life, which you’ll see in our business practices here,” she said. “There’s no trapping you in a subscription. I’m not doing that. A lot of my motivation comes from rewriting our business norms.”
There’s also no alcohol, so no money to be made at the bar. But there’s an art supply library. A men’s group that meets regularly to unpack, among other issues, toxic masculinity. A dance floor.
Muck Duck’s wide breadth of programming distills down into a simple mission.
“A lot of what art does in people’s lives, you can’t touch or grab or hold or measure. It’s a feeling,” Arthur said. “When people come in contact with what we do, they say, ‘I don’t really know what it is, but it just feels different.’”
After pointing out the walls that will soon be filled with her own watercolor works, Arthur walks back near the venue’s entrance. She picks up a handpan, taps rhythmically in a circle and sends the notes of the D minor scale up to the high ceiling.
It’s a more creative way to say goodbye.
