For two years, you could hear it before you could see it.
Music spilling out from the corner of Granby Street and Olney Road, loud enough to reach you half a block away on Brambleton Avenue. Lines wrapped around the building and spilled across the street, still moving at 1:30 in the morning. On the busiest nights, overflow crowds drifted to the Granby Social Club a couple doors down, waiting for a gap in the line.
That was Work|Release.
The venue opened in April 2015, in the early beginning stages of what is now called Norfolk’s NEON District,on the ground floor of the old Texaco building at 759 Granby St. For two years, Work|Release was a singular creative space in Hampton Roads, according to those who made their way through. It blended contemporary art exhibitions, live music, DJs, food and an open-door policy that meant on any given night you might find symphony patrons next to skateboarders or 70-year-olds dancing next to college kids.
It closed in April 2017. No farewell event. No press release. No obituary.
“I think we all knew at the time how special it was,” said Careyann Weinberg, who served as director of Work|Release for its entire run. “But not how fleeting it might be.”
The Texaco building had sat empty for years when Arthur “Brother” Rutter and his wife Meredith bought it. The old owners wanted to turn it into condos before the housing market crashed in 2008. The Rutters ended up with a stripped-down shell.
“There wasn’t a wall, a pipe, or a wire in the thing,” Rutter said. “There were dead pigeons in it, there were holes in it. There was no way that building would ever do what a real estate investor would call pro forma — there’s no way to do it profitably.”
By the time the couple reached the third floor on their walkthrough, they were laughing.
“We’re going to do this thing,” Rutter recalls thinking.
The Rutters ran the Rutter Family Art Foundation and they saw the building as an opportunity to do something the city’s museums were “unable or unwilling” to do, as Rutter puts it: bring contemporary art to the widest possible audience on their own terms.
The timing was right. Norfolk was just starting to call the area an official arts district. The idea grew from a pitch by arts organizers Hannah Serrano and Jesse Scaccia to city leaders. Rutter and a few early investors, like the Perry family who started Glass Wheel Studios nearby, saw what could happen and joined in early.
“Without the Rutters and the Perrys jumping in really early to create these two nodes that had true financial support, I think it would have been much more challenging to get it off the ground,” said Charlotte Potter, a curator and museum director who was part of the NEON District’s founding years and curated a show at Work|Release.
Rutter enlisted the people from Norfolk’s arts scene to build what they thought the community needed.
He tapped Weinberg, who was already living and working in the arts district and running a studio space across the street with her then-partner Charles Rasputin, to pull the creative community together. In the summer of 2014, Weinberg organized what they called the Texaco Talk It Out, gathering 50 to 100 people to brainstorm what the building, and the district as a whole, should become.
“We basically did like a big charrette with everyone,” Weinberg said. “For the most part, Work|Release was born out of everything that came from that big meeting.”
Those talks showed that a regular art space wouldn’t be enough. The community wanted something more lively, open and exciting.
“We realized that art alone probably wasn’t going to cut it, because art spaces are sometimes not that engaging,” Rutter said. “Let’s mix art, music, community events, drinks and fun. Let’s make it almost like a nightclub, but not a nightclub. This was a thinking club, an intelligent club, an art club.”
The name came from those same sessions. Rasputin pitched “Work|Release” as something of a joke, Weinberg says. Still, it stuck because it held so many meanings at once: the release of an artist’s work, the release from the workday, a riff on the criminal justice term that itself carried a kind of reclamation.
“Everything else sounded corny,” Weinberg said. “‘Work release’ kept coming up, and it really encompassed everything that it was.”
Designer Josh Newton created the branding, including the corner-wrapped signage that still clings to the Texaco building nine years after the venue closed. Rutter says they left it there on purpose as a permanent physical piece of the venue's legacy on Granby Street.
Work|Release opened at the beginning of April 2015 with AGLOW, a neon sculpture exhibition featuring 12 artists from across the country and around the world. The opening night drew a crowd that had never quite seen anything like it in Hampton Roads.
Within weeks, it was the place to be.
A typical week might include a Thursday collaboration between the symphony and local indie duo Sunny and Gabe, followed by a figure drawing session the next afternoon that morphed into live music by evening, followed by a punk band, followed by a DJ set that pushed toward a full club night by midnight. Weinberg and her team brainstormed events weeks and sometimes months in advance, always reaching for the unexpected combination.
“It might be a Stranger Things-themed party, and I mean it just was everyone,” Weinberg said. “Young kids, older folks, the art crowd, people partying, poor, rich. Literally everyone in here, and they would be hanging out together.”
Off-duty police officers hired for security later told Rutter they competed to work the venue.
“They said, ‘We all fight to work this place because we all look at what goes on here and know that this is what a community can be in Norfolk,’” Rutter recalls.
The music lineup brought in acts that seemed unlikely for a 2,000-square-foot spot in downtown Norfolk. Grammy-nominated artist Masego played there early in his career. D.R.A.M., the Portsmouth rapper who later became famous, was a regular. International DJ Tiësto filmed a video there. Indie band of Montreal packed the place with 500 to 600 people. Kishi Bashi also did a set.
Bart Barnes, who DJs under the name Fake Uzumi and is now based in New York, got his first real opportunity at Work|Release after Rasputin heard him play an impromptu set at Alchemy, his and Weinberg’s studio space across the street at the time.
“I knew immediately that it would be a staple because of how eclectic it was,” Barnes said. “I didn’t know that it would be so short-lived.”
For Barnes, then 24 and newly committed to DJing, Work|Release became a laboratory. The crowd’s openness to unexpected music, its willingness to follow a DJ somewhere unfamiliar, pushed him to take risks he wouldn’t have dared at a conventional club.
“People came knowing that you’re not going to hear the same music that you’re used to hearing,” he said. “Because the audience was so open and receptive, even if you aren’t familiar with that music, you started to like it and grow with it.”
Gabe Niles, one half of local duo Sunny and Gabe, describes Work|Release as a launching pad for an entire generation of Hampton Roads creatives.
“We(‘ve) seen a couple people go through there and have nationwide success,” Niles said. “It was a beacon of creativity. In one of Norfolk’s greatest surges of creativity, it was the beacon.”
The arts exhibitions were not decoration or secondary to the live entertainment — they were the point.
Rutter and Weinberg ensured that every security guard, every bartender, every cook knew the work on the walls as well as any docent. When someone got too close to a sculpture, the response wasn’t a warning, but an invitation.
“But we had to get really creative and fun in doing that because it was a lot when you have pieces of neon artwork that are worth a quarter of a million dollars, and somebody’s twerking up against it,” Weinberg said.“Instead of being like, ‘Get away,’ you’d be like, ‘Hey, let me tell you about this piece of artwork. This is why it’s really special. You help me protect it.’ … We were flipping the script so that everyone became a part of it.”
The exhibitions rotated through guest curators, each bringing a different sensibility to the space. Potter curated “Native,” a show celebrating Hampton Roads artists that included everything from a painting made of frosting that slowly disintegrated over the course of the show’s run to boats suspended from the ceiling to a magnetic poetry installation built from artists’ own statements.
“The high low,” Potter said of her curatorial approach. “You want to have the highbrow stuff that signifies to people this is a serious exhibit, but then you also want to have some really approachable work.”
Scaccia curated a gun violence exhibition that brought police officers and Black Lives Matter groups together for brunch, mediating conversations through the art that might have been otherwise impossible. The show drew national attention.
Perhaps the most celebrated run was the graffiti exhibition, which Weinberg calls her favorite. Rutter dropped a shipping container in the back lot. A half pipe appeared between two containers. Graffiti artists flocked from Atlanta, New York, Baltimore and Richmond. Projectors shot images onto the building across the street, letting passersby do digital graffiti that disappeared with a wipe of an iPad.
“That stuff was not happening around here back then,” Weinberg said. “People from Virginia Beach were coming to Norfolk. People from Chesapeake were coming to Norfolk. Those things aren’t always happening now.”
Potter, who watched from both inside the community and the adjacent museum world, describes the combination of nightclub energy and museum-quality art as genuinely avant-garde, even by national standards.
“Art and life sort of melded together,” she said. “It was beautiful, and it was really powerful. It got a lot more people interested in art and invested in art because it was approachable.”
Work|Release was costly to keep going, and Rutter knew it was always going to be hard to solve that problem.
At its peak, the venue employed 17 people. It commissioned artists from around the world. It brought in major musical acts. It operated on a nearly nightly schedule while Weinberg lived in an apartment directly above the space, never fully off the clock.
“You never stop working,” Weinberg said. “My son’s in his 20s now, but he was here too. He got to see and experience everything. We’d be hanging out the window watching what was going on when he was a teenager.”
The money side was always tough for them. The venue couldn’t make a profit, and even the Rutters’ willingness to lose money had its limits.
“I remember Brother and Meredith saying many times, ‘I’m willing to lose my sleeve. I can’t lose my shirt,’” Potter said.
The model also required something that never fully materialized: an ecosystem of other businesses in the NEON District developing at the same pace, so that no single venue had to carry the entire weight of luring people downtown.
“One business can’t bring everybody else along,” Rutter said. “There just wasn’t time for that kind of critical mass to occur.”
Potter offers a different perspective.
“It was fast and furious and hard. It was like dynamite, like a firework show,” she said. “A firework show doesn’t last for long because it’s an unsustainable model. The only way it could have sustained longer would have been counterintuitive to the very experiment itself.”
Work|Release closed at the beginning of April 2017, almost exactly two years after it opened.
The closing was not announced publicly. There was no final blowout. The doors closed last night and that was it.
“People didn’t know that it was going to end,” Weinberg said. “It was kind of like a ‘Hey guys, it’s done. It’s wrapped up.’ I think we went out with a bang.”
She is careful about what she will say about how the end unfolded internally.
“I don’t know that the Rutters’ vision and our vision were always exactly in line. Not to say that either were necessarily right or wrong,” she said. “It got to a point where I just felt like it was time for me to step away and see what the next rendition of the Texaco building would become.”
For the DJs and musicians who had built their early careers around the room, the closing landed quietly and then dawned slowly.
“We thought they were closing for like a little bit of time, getting paperwork or whatever figured out,” Barnes said. “That last night, it kind of felt like it was an end, but we weren’t sure, so we just partied and had a great time.”
Rutter says the closure was always intended as a pause, not a stop. Commune restaurant later moved into the space to keep the building activated. Some art shows continued. The apartments above the venue became free housing for visiting artists supported by the Rutter Family Art Foundation, a way of staying invested in the district’s cultural life without running a full venue operation.
Then COVID hit, and the district’s recovery stalled. The building that housed Work|Release has since become a rentable event space.
The NEON District celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2025 with NEON at Ten, a 244-page hardcover book featuring more than 200 works of art and personal essays from key contributors. Restaurants, galleries and creative businesses now occupy spaces that were vacant warehouses when Weinberg and Rasputin were organizing charrettes.
But the streetscape project that has Granby Street torn up for utility work has slowed foot traffic and businesses have pointed to the years-long disruption as reasons for closing up shop. The commercial gallery ecosystem that Work|Release needed never fully materialized. The NEON District looks like an arts district. Whether it still feels like one depends on who you ask.
“It just might not be as centrally focused where it once was,” Niles said. “It’s a little bit more spread out.”
On the current state of local nightlife and municipal support from the city of Norfolk, Niles is more blunt.
“Honestly, they don’t do anything well,” Niles said. “Nothing well is being done, and that’s as politely as I could put it.”
Potter, now director of the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland, watches from a distance with a mix of pride and wistfulness.
“I think the rise and fall of the NEON District was so quick,” she said, then catches herself. “Not fall. It’s gotten more like it’s been discovered. The secret’s out of the bag. There’s no dirt-cheap rents.”
Weinberg, who most recently worked as Director of Economic Vitality at the Downtown Norfolk Council, thinks about it often.
“If I could go back and own and/or run a venue like Work|Release, that would be my dream job now,” she said. “I wish I could do it knowing what I know now, having 10 plus years more experience under my belt.”
Rutter still passes the Texaco building — his law office is around the corner.
“Something that was going on there, something that was happening between the art and downtown culture and music promoted this kind of community engagement that was special,” he said. “I just haven’t seen it since. I miss that space, man.”
The people who built Work|Release describe it the way people talk about things they can’t quite explain; with a kind of helpless precision.
Rutter wishes he could bottle the recipe. Potter calls it a beautiful flash of light. Niles calls it a beacon. Barnes says it was preparing him, without his knowing it, for everything that came after.
Weinberg, sitting outside the building, nine years and a career later, gets the farthest into it before her voice catches.
“Work|Release was real community,” she said. “Real from the soul community, creative community. Like, we have never...”
She stops.
“I’ve never felt in this area.”
She stops again and laughs at herself a little.
“Dang.”
