The Torpedo Factory

Creativity inspires creativity, and Alexandria, Virginia’s Torpedo Factory churns out inspiration as much as it does creative expressions of the human spirit.  This artists’ cooperative– three floors of studios, galleries, and installations housed in a repurposed torpedo production facility– inspires unique ideas, new perspectives, and encourages artists of all mediums who pass through its doors.  Who could have predicted a Post-World War One facility dedicated to producing instruments of destruction would someday become a cultural hub?

An elderly man stands on the front steps evoking an invisible choir with dampened fingers stroking the rims of water-filled glasses.  The factory’s doors open into a two-story atrium lined with working studios.  On the right, a painter assembles simple earth-tone squares to form complex, abstract landscapes sprawling under blue skies.  Human-sized dogs, deer, and a camel painted in circus colors and metallic gold seem to wander the hallways and open spaces.  A staircase lined with spinning mobiles and sculptures winds around a long-quieted smoke stack to more studios and catwalks on the second and third floors.

The Torpedo Factory provides tools and opportunities to produce beautiful and engaging works of art, yet the building’s most important functions are not in providing the means to compose music, place paint on canvas, mold whimsical figures from paper mache, or assemble dizzying mobiles but to foster an atmosphere of collaboration in an open forum.  The people who work within and visit the Torpedo Factory trade inspiration and ideas, which awaken, poke, nudge, and reawaken the creative drive lying in every person.

We know we can make our art in home offices, garages, basements, and at kitchen tables, yet everyone benefits when we emerge from our solitudes from time-to-time and rejoin the greater community of creators, all of whom possess the same desires, drives, and challenges.  Places like The Torpedo Factory remind us sharing inspires.  Perhaps, more importantly, the factory reminds us sharing encourages. Gathering with positive, like-minded creators can be a powerful antidote for rejection, writer’s block, performance plateaus, and all manner of slumps inherent in the creative arts.  Visiting such places and interacting with such people, drawing from these wells of inspiration, can help to keep our creativity alive and strong.