Alpha Workshops supplies AIDS advocacy by design

Volume 1, Number 33 | The Weekly Newspaper of Chelsea | May 4 - 10, 2007

Chelsea Now photo by Joshua Bright
Designers with a mission: Ruth Gottesman, manager of The Alpha Workshops, with its executive director and founder Kenneth Wampler. The Chelsea-based decorative arts studio trains and exclusively employs people with HIV and AIDS.

By Stephanie Murg

Next time you’re in Gracie Mansion, look down. That dazzling checkerboard marble floor in the entryway of one of Manhattan’s oldest wood structures? It’s not the work of craftsmen from George Washington’s time. It’s not even marble. The mansion’s faux marbre floor is the product of The Alpha Workshops, the Chelsea-based decorative arts studio that trains and exclusively employs people with HIV and AIDS.

The 12-year-old atelier’s vast repertoire goes far beyond the ability to convincingly recreate interiors from the 1790s. In addition to an array of decorative paint finishes and gilding, Alpha produces lamps, furniture, and giftware. Their popular made-to-order wallpapers, in designs such as “Curvy Swervy,” “Fiddlestix,” and the top-selling “Kimono,” are made entirely by hand. “Basically, give us a surface and we’ll cover it,” says Kenneth Wampler, Alpha’s founder and executive director. “Sometimes it’s a little challenging to find a plain surface on the market that we can then in some way embellish.”

Embellishment is a specialty at Alpha. The busy West 29th Street studio, which features kilns, looms, and sewing machines, buzzes with color and patterns. Amidst sheets of handblocked wallpaper and surfaces finished in techniques such as verre églomisé and stucco de veneziano, stands a custom-cast Eden Roc lamp, which resembles a lampshade perched atop a gravity-defying pile of silver morsels, and a small box decorated with a wacky stuffed bird. Minimalist it is not.

Alpha’s whimsical maximalism and breadth of offerings, which have garnered editorial coverage in magazines from Interior Design and Metropolis to In Style and Newsweek, are rooted in the organization’s unique origins. “We’re bound by an illness, not an aesthetic,” says Wampler. “One of our board members once described us as ‘fresh.’ And I think he said that because we didn’t come together around a similar aesthetic — that just didn’t exist.”

What did exist was HIV and AIDS, and a lack of opportunities for those with the disease to focus their talents. Founding Alpha in 1995 was a way for Wampler, once a decorative painter, to return to the arts after nine years of working for the AIDS Resource Center, now known as Bailey House. Inspired by the Omega Workshops, the 20th century decorative arts workshops founded by English painter and critic Roger Fry, Wampler sought a way to bridge his two careers.

It was a time when a new set of questions were emerging for those with HIV and AIDS: What am I going to do with my time? What am I going to do with my identity? What’s next, other than AIDS? Am I going to be totally defined by this illness? Wampler’s answer was Alpha Workshops. “I wanted to be back working with artists and being around visually creative people again,” he says. “So I started Alpha as a place where people could come and learn or retool their skills in the decorative arts.”

Alpha began with wallpaper—donated paper painted with donated paint—and was steered by an enthusiastic board of directors. The progress was steady, but it took some time for the organization to prove itself and to communicate that at Alpha, AIDS was neither a secret nor a focus. “The design community took a while to take hold — to accept us as a source for decorative art rather than a place to send donations,” says Wampler. “It took us a little longer to bring them in as [an entity] that was going to work with us as a client.”

Today, having grown from two employees to 30, sales of products and services represent 65% of Alpha’s funding. Their goal for 2007 is $670,000 in sales revenue, and according to Wampler, they’re on track to exceed that goal. Along the way, Alpha has designed for such corporations as Benjamin Moore, eBay, and Origins. Famed interior designer (and frequent client) Samuel Botero recently touted their work in the pages of Architectural Digest, and several Alpha designs have made it into the private collections of the Cooper-Hewitt and National Design Museums.

Education and training of those with HIV and AIDS is a cornerstone of Alpha’s mission and philosophy. No experience is necessary. Groups of five to eight students begin with a ten-week training session, during which they study such topics as color theory, gilding, and wallpaper design and production. About half of all trainees go on to complete a more intensive advanced training course, contributing to real world projects under the guidance of Alpha staff artists. Throughout the training, Alpha provides its students with health insurance and a weekly stipend, with the goal of increasing that to a living wage within a year or so. Last year, the organization was licensed by the Department of Education’s Bureau of Proprietary Schools.

“Right before I came to The Alpha Workshops I was between jobs, between apartments, and suffering from depression,” says Richard Zimmer, who has worked at Alpha for almost four years. “I was staying with friends while collecting unemployment benefits.” Zimmer, who formerly worked as a weaver, was initially apprehensive about entering Alpha’s training program, as he hadn’t been in a classroom since his teenage years. “While I found the program rather challenging, I did well, and that did a lot for me in terms of restoring my confidence and self esteem.”

According to Ruth Gottesman, a manager at Alpha, there is no such thing as a typical trainee, but a flair for the creative certainly helps. “We do find that people who do well here have a creative background, [though] not necessarily this creative background — people from dance or set design or things like that,” says Gottesman. “But those who have come from strictly office backgrounds have surprised themselves with how well they’ve done. I think it’s a matter of throwing themselves into it.” One such person is Harvey, who has been with Alpha for two years. Formerly a manager in the telecommunications industry, he was pleasantly surprised by the individualized attention and nurturing that Alpha provides. “From the beginning ten-week intensive introduction program through today, Alpha has provided an learning atmosphere rarely found outside private tutoring,” he says.

This year, Alpha will again be exhibiting at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (Booth 318), which takes place from May 19 to 22 at the Javits Center. On view for the first time will be several recent additions to Alpha’s product line. Most exciting is their new line of Parsons tables, finished in negoro nuri, a technique pioneered by 14th-century Japanese monks. “It’s a process where you layer one color of paint over another layer and then rub through one to get the other,” says Wampler. The result of the two-step process is not unlike the two-pronged mission of Alpha itself: noble, multifaceted, and lustrous in its depth. Despite its many accolades and commercial success, Alpha is more than a place to learn and work. “What I enjoy most about working here are the people that are the Alpha Workshops,” says Zimmer. “For me, it’s like having a loving family of fellow artists.”