Textile Arts Center of Madison’s new space at 1702 S. Park St. is in the old Thorstad Chevrolet building, where a car dealership operated for 40 years until the early 2010s. Heather Kohlmeier, TAC’s co-founder and artistic director, points out the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows, open concept rooms and tall ceilings. “It was a natural fit to turn this into a multi-use space,” she says.
Although a former car dealership might not seem like the natural location for a nonprofit that serves local textile and fiber artists, Kohlmeier and co-founder Elizabeth Tucker see it as a perfect fit.
The Textile Arts Center, or TAC, was initially situated in a warehouse on Pennsylvania Avenue behind the former Oscar Mayer plant on Madison’s north side when it opened in October 2023. Enthusiasm from the community was so great that Tucker and Kohlmeier began to look for a new location just a few months later. “It was faster than we thought, but we never thought that we would be there for that long,” says Tucker…