An excerpt on Fort Thunder’s history from AS220

In the early 1990’s, a group of artists, looking for cheap, flexible space in which to live and work, began living in an industrial mill building in the Olneyville section of Providence. Dubbing it “Fort Thunder,” the artists there lived all over the building, and worked there, too. There was a shared kitchen, a shared silkscreen studio and a large flexible performance area for anything from film nights to costumed wrestling, rock concerts to puppet shows. Around the corner from the performance space, there was “Cafe Intelligentsia” (a comic/zine library with an antique espresso machine), and in the very back there was a rehearsal space—filled with exotic noisemakers and encouraged by the lack of neighbors to complain about the noise in this remote industrial area of the city.

The artists who made up the Fort Thunder community supported one another not only by sharing resources (apartments, studios, food) but by showing up for each other’s performances and applauding or criticizing, buying or bartering for posters, comics, zines and recordings, and by collaborating on larger projects. Fort Thunder provided fertile soil in which these musicians, graphic designers and installation artists could grow. Indeed, the metaphor of a “compost heap” easily suggested itself to visitors greeted by rooms filled with bicycle parts, toys stuck to the walls and ceiling, and a communal kitchen often stocked with free food from local dumpsters.

To the surprise of only those who hadn’t been paying attention, Fort Thunder was catapulted to international acclaim when Forcefield, a four-person collective working there, was invited to create an installation for the 2002 Whitney Biennial. The installation was favorably reviewed by the New York Times, and Forcefield made the cover of the November 2002 Artforum and also contributed a “Top Ten” list to their summer 2002 issue.

Another Fort Thunder group, the Drum/bass duo Lightning Bolt has enjoyed fame among the underground music scene for several years. The band has toured in Asia and Europe, as well as the US, and has their own DVD called “The Power of Salad.” In April of 2004 the group entered into a new realm of notoriety when it recorded a “Peel Session” with John Peel of the BBC. Not only did Fort Thunder foster the individual success of groups like Lightning Bolt and Force Field, but—before it was leveled in 2002 to make way for a shopping center—the space itself soon earned its own critical acclaim.

What began as a place for a group of local artists to live and work soon became a music venue for bands from all over the world. Musicians came both to perform and to sit in the audience of the various shows that took place at Fort Thunder. In November of 2003, The Comics Journal devoted an entire issue to the artistic work of Fort Thunder residents and noted that the Fort was “important not just for the sum total of its considerable artists but for its collective impact and its value as a symbol of unfettered artistic expression.” Even the physical space at Fort Thunder achieved national attention in summer of 2001 when the architectural publication Nest Magazine featured photographs and descriptions of the building.