Inside a Durham Storage Unit, A Decade of Wonder

Shadowbox Studio, a hobnob space for film, art, and community, was born in the line to the men’s bathroom at the Rialto Theater. 

It was 1997, after a movie had played, and Alex Maness, a recent transplant to Raleigh from Greensboro, wondered aloud what else was playing there. From a few feet behind him, Jim Haverkamp replied, “I don’t know, I just moved here.” 

The two strangers proceeded to get drinks at the Stingray Room and discovered they lived only four blocks away from each other. From that first meet-up, they became fast friends and collaborators in their respective filmmaking careers. In 1998, when Haverkamp moved to Durham, Maness followed. 

“You could live here for cheap, you could be an artist and make weird art, and you really didn’t have to kill yourself to make your rent,” Maness, who also works as a photographer and a projection designer, explains at Shadowbox Studio on Dominion Street. Haverkamp is a freelance video editor and teaches at Duke University. 

“You could pursue interesting projects,” Maness continues, “and you could have interesting, cool, fun ventures, and you could still have a good quality of life.”

Around the turn of the millennium, rent was still largely affordable and there were many unused properties around town. The Space was one such locale, a used-car garage turned hangout space on Washington Street for Durham’s musicians, writers, and visual artists to congregate.

 “We wanted a place to make noise in,” explains Chris Vitiello, also known as the Poetry Fox, Durham’s poet laureate. “And to make messes in.” Vitiello describes the freedom of The Space as a “magnetism” that drew Haverkamp and Maness in—a place that could be anything because you could do anything in it. 

Haverkamp and Maness arrived as a wave of the original artist collective was leaving, and the duo was in a perfect spot to take the reins. In the warehouse above Corpse Reviver where the Durham Distillery now sits, they began to build out what they refer to as “Shadowbox 1.0.”

From absurdist plays to film shoots—to one specific endeavor where dozens of Christmas trees were rounded up after the holidays and strung upside down from the ceiling—Shadowbox 1.0 was a haven for experimental art.

But it wasn’t all easy: there was no heating or cooling, and if Maness and Haverkamp wanted it to become a legitimized performance space, at the very least they had to revamp the plumbing and install a toilet that “you wouldn’t be ashamed of letting your mother use,” Maness elaborates, “make it safe, put a proper door on it, too.”

As things evolved, during the mid-to-late aughts, Durham real estate began to take off. The owner of the warehouse space wanted to develop it, and it was time for Shadowbox to find a new home. 

“We had all our junk,” Maness says, “all my photography equipment, we had acquired dozens of stage lights, all this crazy rigging … and it went into Jim’s basement.”

“Much of it is still there,” Haverkamp chimes in. “What’s a basement for?”

Shadowbox Studio, in its current form as a rentable production studio, launched off of Club Boulevard back in 2015 in a complex affectionately referred to as the Ample Arts District, due to its location in an unassuming block of Ample storage units. 

“It’s our 10th anniversary in this space,” Haverkamp says, reclining on one of the midcentury sofas in the front room of Shadowbox. “But we were doing this for years before that.”

Looking at Shadowbox in its present fashion, you would never think that it could have been anything else. The foyer is bedecked in sunflower-yellow, patterned wallpaper, a brightness magnified after walking through the monotonous storage units outside. 

Then there’s the real spectacle: pass through the entranceway and you’ll find yourself in an open industrial space with eclectic carpets spread on the floor, the walls painted a fresh white so that whoever rents the space can visually remodel as they see fit. 

In this case, the next people to utilize the space would be Haverkamp and Maness, for Shadowbox’s 10th birthday extravaganza, the Art House Cinema Pop-Up. It was a fitting choice, with Haverkamp and Maness being filmmakers themselves, but it was also deeply personal.

For Maness, hosting a multiday event was a way to further legitimize Shadowbox’s place in the community. 

“It’s a fun experiment,” he says. “What if we did actually have a designated performance space?” He left a word hanging off the edge of the question: “Again.” 

Back in the aughts, Shadowbox 1.0 wasn’t alone in its effort to create a third space for artistic Durhamites. Manbites Dog Theater, Common Ground Theatre, and Mr. Shoe grew with them.

But with rising rent prices and owners’ desires to sell and remodel over the past few years, they all closed.

“Within a year, all these spaces went away,” Maness recalls, “and so what felt like really fertile, awesome ground for theater and performance was shit …. Where are you going to see your weird band? Where are your friends that have a kooky modern dance troupe going to perform?” 

A decade later, the Art House Cinema Pop-Up was just the thing to find a middle ground between Shadowbox’s bohemian past and present status as a rentable studio space. Suspiria screened one night, newly released, and The Apprentice another, with a version of Nosferatu scored by Radiohead and a modern dance film series in between. 

For Haverkamp, this was as much about the past as about the future. Cinema was his first love. 

“A friend of our family managed a movie theater, and I was ten when the first Star Wars came out,” he says, “I’d go to work with her and she’d let me watch three showings of Star Wars every weekend for a year.” It was the kind of small theater that doesn’t exist anymore, he elaborates—more a cinema than a theater. 

Stepping into Shadowbox for its “NC Films” evening of the pop-up was a replication of that setting. The lights were low, and out front Haverkamp sold candy and made fresh popcorn from an old-fashioned Lincoln popcorn machine he typically keeps in the side closet. Shadowbox’s wide, airy space was thinned by a thick black curtain closing off a few rows of a screen from the rest of the studio.

Jennifer Scully-Thurston’s Playing House, an experimental dance short, was followed by Stephanie Diane Ford’s Afrofuturist fantasy thriller The Black Baptism. Last was a screening of Melanie Ho and John Rash’s documentary Our Movement Starts Here, on the sparking of the environmental justice movement in Warren County in 1982.

The evening concluded with a Q&A with Rev. Bill Kearney and Wayne Moseley, who were featured in the documentary, as well as Scully-Thurston. It was an intimate, engaging evening, and it could bear repeating; Haverkamp hinted at this being an annual series. 

The pop-up concluded on November 4, but the rest of November is packed with odd events, from a poetry-film fusion series titled “I See in Words” hosted by Vitiello to a triptych musical evening on the 22nd featuring ambient, experimental, and jazz orchestration. 

Beyond that, for followers of independent cinema and scrappy arts projects, it’s important to stay tuned: as Maness says, despite never having a long-term plan for any iteration of Shadowbox, both his and Haverkamp’s minds are turned to the future. 

“We could keep doing this forever, or we could tweak it a little bit and allow it to evolve,” Maness says. “Suffice it to say, we are thinking about letting it evolve.”

“At the same time, though, we’re acutely aware of what happens when a space gets established and it goes away,” Haverkamp says, picking up where Maness left off. “We’d never want to do that. The way we run this, it barely pays for itself, and that’s fine …. But maybe we’d take on another space, another model.” 

For Durham and surrounding arts communities, that is a relief. Experimental spaces are popping up all over the Triangle, from PHOTO FARM to Queen Street Magic Boat and Perfect Lovers, but Maness, Haverkamp, Vitiello, and other Durham artists have watched locales come and go. They’re entrenched in the modern history of Durham: Vitiello first equipped himself in his now well-known fox costume one evening at Shadowbox 1.0 and even coined the term “Shadowbox,’ and restaurateur Andy McGowan was known to jog over when he needed a break from starting up Geer Street Garden to pluck away at a piano. 

But they’re also providing an affordable space in Shadowbox 2.0 for the young artists of today to congregate and pursue their work. It has an ageless, mutable spirit that cannot be closed or shut down, not permanently.

Shadowbox Studio’s birthday is a chance for locals to celebrate—and discover—a unique space that serves as a bridge between the most bizarre parts of Durham then and now.

 “Just this kind of attitude [Haverkamp and Maness] bring to a variety of communities that have nothing to do with each other,” Vitiello says of his friends and collaborators. “God knows how much they’ve actually made happen. I don’t think they’re even aware of it.”

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