Umberto "Bert" Crenca is an American artist, arts administrator, arts advisor and educator. He is known for being a founder and long-time artistic director of the non-profit arts organization, AS220, in Providence, Rhode Island. He has been credited with helping to "lay the groundwork for much of the cultural development that shaped the Providence imaginary in the 1990s and early decades of the 21st century" by scholar Micah Salkind, and in 2010 was identified as one of Rhode Island's Most Influential People by Rhode Island Monthly.
Early life
Crenca was born in Rhode Island in 1950. In the 1980s, Crenca worked in the print shop of Fleet Bank. He graduated from the Rhode Island College in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts.
AS220
Following an unfavorable review of Crenca's work inThe Providence Journal in 1982, a group of artists gathered to condemn harsh art critiques. Together, they created a manifesto and sought to create a new art space. This resulted in Crenca founding AS220, a non-profit art space, in 1985. AS220 grew from a small performance and studio space in 1985 to the proprietor of live/work studios, exhibition spaces, multiple performance areas, teaching spaces, a restaurant and bar. Crenca describes his work at AS220 as being "extremely blurred" with his work as an artist, and describes AS220 as a "work of art." Crenca retired as Artistic Director of AS220 in 2015, and served as an adjunct advisor and spokesperson for the organization through 2019.
In his capacity as Artistic Director of AS220 and arts administrator, Crenca acted on local boards and committees as a representative of the Rhode Island arts community, including the Arts and Entertainment District Task Force in 1992, the mayoral transition committees of Providence mayors David Cicilline and Jorge Elorza, and the Providence School Board 2005-2008. Crenca has spoken at numerous events as regarding place-making and community arts programs, including the keynote address Museums Aotearoa Conference in New Zealand in 2012, the TEDxProvidence conference in 2013, and The Cass Project's lecture series at the University at Buffalo in 2018. Much of his work has centered around arts education and programming for youth, including the establishment of the Broad Street Studio, which evolved over time into what is now the AS220 Youth Program, and his work as an art instructor at the Rhode Island Training School and at AS220's education program for arts administrators, .
Visual art, music and performance
Crenca is a visual artist, musician and performer. His style was described as "propelled by a prolific, relentless, try-everything-at-once drive" and "improvisational, free-association, automatic-writing, hallucinatory" by Greg Cook of the Providence Phoenix. In the 1990s, Crenca co-lead a fluxus-based music and performance troupe, Meatballs/Fluxus. His other musical and performance collaborations include Monkee Head, Panic Band, and the Gillen Street Project.
