Louisville's Attraction for the Artistic Lifestyle

Mitchell and Matthew Bradley are not musicians, but they live like rock stars. Since they returned to Louisville after receiving art degrees from Murray State University in the late '90s, the 6-foot-4-inch twins have shown a knack for being at the most happening parties and befriending the most talented people in Louisville's art and indie rock scenes.

From 2001 until 2003, the brothers combined their passions for art and music as co-curators of Museum, an underground art gallery located in a warehouse off Washington Street, which featured avant-garde art exhibits as well as rock shows by Will Oldham, Parlour, and other local indie bands.
To this day the Bradley twins' downtown apartment is a regular stop for touring Louisville-bred musicians like Torbitt and Wilder Schwartz of the New York-band Chin Chin and Tara Jane O'Neil, the ex-Rodan bassist who now resides in Portland, Ore.

"Matthew and I are both artists, so we tend to make friends with creative people," said Mitchell, who is known for rarely rising before the afternoon. "We've been lucky enough to forge long-term friendships with some of them. We like interesting people."

Mitchell Bradley said that he and Matthew could not maintain the life they live anywhere else but Louisville. The twins share a 1000 sq. foot apartment on Market Street above Derby City Espresso. "I was drawn to this apartment, but I thought it wasn't going to be in my price range," Mitchell said. "We have pretty much the whole second floor of the building. There are not many places where you can afford this much space without having to work all the time. I've always been drawn to the urban environment and city life. It's great to watch things develop around me. I watched the construction of the Fleur de Lis on Main, now I'm of course watching the destruction of the produce market and the blood bank across the street. It seems like when something's done there is always something else to draw your attention."

Matthew added, "I can't image living anywhere else but downtown, unless I moved somewhere else entirely." In fact, downtown Louisville is increasingly becoming a popular destination for those living bohemian lifestyles—those who focus more on artistic endeavors than they do on what many would consider a conventional lifestyle.

Since Museum closed more than five years ago, the twins have continued to pursue their creative interests while supporting themselves financially with jobs in the service industry. Mitchell waits tables at the Vietnamese restaurant Basa and does landscaping work for the owners of a life form sculpture by Meg Webster, an artist who creates from natural materials like earth and plants. He also emcees a hipster karaoke night every Wednesday at Seidenfaden's Café, where things rarely get started before midnight even on weekdays.

Matthew has two part-time jobs, both at 21c, a downtown hotel and art museum. He works at Proof, the hotel's restaurant, and is also an assistant handler for the museum part of the operation. "I mostly help hang art and put together installations," Matthew explained. "Between my two jobs I work more than 40 hours, but I love 21c because it's such an exciting place. It's one of the things that I love about downtown—the others are everyday trash pickup and the fact that I can ride my bike to work."

The twins have several friends who live downtown or in the surrounding neighborhoods. They include David and Kelly Mount, owners of Fusion Home, and Paige Von Wheeler, who is involved with Glassworks and Architectural Glass Art, Inc.
Brenda Wirth, another acquaintance of the Bradley twins and a member of the Zephyr Art Gallery on East Market, said downtown is attracting bohemians because it's a place where they can afford to live sufficiently and still take time out from working to make art.

Wirth and her husband, musician Greg Acker of Ut Gret, share an 1890s Italianate brick house in the Smoketown neighborhood. "It's big enough for two artists to live comfortably with all of our junk, or should I say art collections," she quipped. Wirth's neighbors include Billy Hertz, owner of the Billy Hertz Gallery, who recently purchased a building on Preston Street near Shelby Park, and the painter Ann Stewart Anderson who lives on St. Catherine with her husband Ron Mikulak, a Courier-Journal food writer.

Wirth, who teaches art at Highland Presbyterian Preschool, is a Louisville native who has spent most of her adult life in other cities: Denver, Boston, Kansas City, and New Haven, among others. It was a stint in Mississippi that convinced the traveler to move back home in the early 1990s. "I got bored," she said. "There was nothing to do in Mississippi. It was either go to New Orleans or come back here to visit. By coming back here, I found out it was a pretty vibrant art community. I felt like the gallery scenes in the other cities were a little hard to break into, Denver and Kansas City especially. I was gone from Louisville for about 15 years, long enough to be an outsider. But it felt like Louisville was a small enough place that everyone knew each other."

Wirth met her husband soon after her return, when both of them served on the board of Artswatch, a defunct alternative arts gallery on Frankfort Avenue. After leaving Artswatch, Wirth joined Zephyr, which is a cooperative of artists on East Market Street. Her latest show, Kaleidioscape, is a collection of digitally manipulated photos that was hanging at Zephyr until July 4th.

"I'm a painter, I'm not a photographer," Wirth said. "I have for the past 10 years painted from photos, mostly nature scenes. I wouldn't exhibit them unless I could manipulate them—they end up looking like all kinds of things. I only started considering the photos as photographs that I can show about three years ago. My friend Michelle Amos (a fiber artist and former Zephyr member) suggested that my photographs were good enough to exhibit themselves. I'm always getting ideas from hanging other artists' work or just talking to them. That's one of the benefits of being a community of artists; inspiration is constantly coming from all of these different directions."