Elevated art form

Sometimes all it takes to spark a great idea is a little creativity—a quality not lacking in LSU art graduate student Raina Wirta. She’s the co-founder of Elevator Projects, a growing art movement that’s created pop-up art events in unique spaces in Baton Rouge.

Wirta has been pursuing a career in art since 2004, when she began working toward her undergraduate degree in sculpture. She moved to Baton Rouge from Minneapolis in 2010 to attend graduate school at LSU.

Mostly made up of LSU art graduate students, Elevator Projects has as its goal to bring art out of the studio and into the community. The group finds unoccupied space, like the Capital Area Corporate Recycling Council’s warehouse near downtown or the empty drugstore on the corner of Third and Florida streets, and radically transforms them for a night.

“I immensely enjoy creating those connections between art and people,” Wirta says. “I believe that art should be accessible to everyone, and Elevator Projects aims to do just that.”

Their first event, early in 2012 at the CACRC warehouse, featured performances, sculptures, site-specific works—including a doughy yellow blob that dripped from the ceiling into a pile on the floor—and a food truck slinging Cuban sandwiches outside.

During the summer, they turned the aforementioned downtown drugstore into an interactive arcade venue with DIY games and a giant Lite-Brite. The team also held a garage sale-style event of local art on Radio Bar’s patio in October.

The Elevator Projects team recently participated in the Baton Rouge Gallery’s fifth annual Surreal Salon Soiree, hosting a multimedia, interactive exhibit on the lawn in front of the gallery.

Jason Andreason, executive director of the gallery, was excited to have them on board for the soiree.

“Anytime you have a passionate group of people doing interesting and exciting things, people will begin to notice. They’ve done some really fun and engaging things over the last year or so, and it gets everyone on their toes. I think it can only help push the entire arts community to be better,” he says.

Wirta is currently in her thesis year of graduate school at LSU. After graduation, she plans to continue working with Elevator Projects, and having participated on her own in live art events like BR Walls’ Come Paint With Me in December, she seems to have found her place in Baton Rouge. “The community has been receptive to our ideas and our creativity,” she says. “I have met an unbelievable amount of people who support what we are doing, and that gives me more motivation to continue creating and generating new ideas.”