The right place: Drop-in art studio crafting a community of creatives (2025)

The long table slowly fills with work-in-progress. Pencil drawings, collages, digital sketches, watercolours.

On Wednesday nights, The Third Place becomes a drop-in studio, where artists of all mediums and abilities are invited to work on their projects in the company of others.

“You just sit and have tea and chat as you’re making your work,” Third Place co-founder Alana MacDougall says.

“It makes the time go by faster and it’s nice accountability.”

Located at 66 King St., the vast Exchange District warehouse is a chameleonic venue hosting yoga classes, ceramics workshops, book club meetings and private events.

Third Place is something the MacDougall sisters have been dreaming about for decades.

“It’s been brewing for a while,” Sydney MacDougall says.

“We came up with a really cliché name and a terrible logo for it when we were in high school,” Alana says of their teenage business plan for Art Box Club or A.B.C.

While the name didn’t stick, the goal remained the same: create a public space where the three sisters could pursue their diverse interests and host communal gatherings.

Last month, Alana, 33, Sydney, 31, and Jane, 28, celebrated the one-year anniversary of Third Place — a descriptive nod to the sociology concept referring to places outside home and work where people gather to connect and build community.

Community is something the sisters were craving when they returned home after years spent living abroad. Born and raised in Winnipeg, the trio went their separate ways in adulthood.

Alana moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts at the Pratt Institute. Sydney travelled to Thailand and then Toronto for post-secondary. And Jane moved south to study and compete on the Louisiana State University swim team.

“One by one we slowly returned,” Sydney says.

The sisters moved back to Winnipeg prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The isolation of the health crisis exacerbated some of the challenges of coming home after a long absence — the city was less familiar, old friendships had shifted.

“Everything was closed and, even more so than usual, we were missing that community,” Sydney says.

Youngest sister Jane started hosting art nights for friends in her one-bedroom apartment and Alana was drawing and sculpting out of a home studio. It seemed like the right time to make their high school dream a reality.

They stumbled on a dusty 5,000 square-foot room for rent in a former Exchange District rubber factory and opened Third Place — after much dusting and painting — in March 2024.

The fourth-floor venue is accessible via stairs or a creaky but reliable (according to Sydney) elevator. Inside, the white minimalist space is surrounded by a bank of tall windows and finished artwork hangs between the warehouse’s hefty pillars.

“It’s turned into so many different things based on the people that have come through the space.”–Sydney MacDougall

There’s a generous seating area with plush couches and a long multi-purpose table. At the back of the room is an airy yoga studio with curtained walls, where Jane teaches classes on Tuesdays, and a ceramics area with a slab roller and shelves of drying pots, where Alana, who’s an instructor with the University of Manitoba’s School of Art, works on her own projects and teaches workshops.

While Alana has professionalized her affinity for art, creativity and education is common ground for all three sisters. Jane teaches early years students and Sydney, who handles most of the business admin, teaches middle years.

“We really like sharing and collaborating and I think a lot of the things that appeal to us about being in the classroom also feels tied to what we’re doing here,” Alana says.

Third Place is a self-funded passion project the sisters have built between their full-time day jobs. Word about the space and its mix of free and paid programming has grown slowly and organically over the past year, spurred on by social media and visitors exploring the Exchange during First Friday events.

The evening and weekend event schedule is a fluid thing that morphs based on the sisters’ capacity and community suggestions.

“It’s turned into so many different things based on the people that have come through the space,” Sydney says.

The free weekly Bring Your Own Art events have been a hit. On a blustery Wednesday night in mid-March, about 20 people trickle into the room with paper, notebooks and pencil cases in tow. The collection of strangers, friends and acquaintances starts quiet and gets chattier as the table fills up.

Yaba Kotchani was attending Third Place for the first time with her husband and friends. The group usually gets together for a weekly paint night but decided to switch it up.

“It was a way to get outside of the house and see other people’s creations and just have a little bit of diversity of inspiration. It’s nice to be in a space dedicated to art,” says Kotchani, who typically works with paint but was playing around with neon-coloured crayons.

For Kotchani, making art is a form of personal expression that’s enhanced by the company of others.

“I think we sometimes forget that we are kind of going through similar experiences, and when we come to places like this, we kind of leave what’s happening at home and outside in the background and we just kind of focus on creating and sharing with other people,” she says.

Bring Your Own Art runs from 6:30 to 9 p.m. every Wednesday at The Third Place.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com