On the Ground: Open Sessions

 

During the last week of each month Storefront will open the gallery for On the Ground: Open Sessions, inviting a different guest to curate and host the evening. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding the transformation of New York’s ground floor are shared and discussed. 

 

See below for details on each of the open sessions. 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

Open Session #1: Hosted by David L. Johnson 

 

Wednesday March 29, 2023, 7 – 9 pm

[RSVP]

 

Note: This program has limited capacity and RSVP is required. Attendees are highly encouraged to wear masks.

 

Top: From the Street, I Can See the Moon by David L. Johnson, 2014 

Bottom: C’est Vrai (One Hour) by Robert Frank, 1990

 

About Open Session 1

For the first in our Open Session series, artist David L. Johnson is convening an evening of conversation and collective learning around his own video work and C’est Vrai! (One Hour), a single-take film photographer Robert Frank made in 1990 on the streets of SoHo and the Lower East Side. Johnson will convene writers Nicholas Dawidoff, Geelia Ronkina, and special guests to converse around street performance, pedestrian perspectives, and how we choose to document New York as it continues to change. 

 

About the Artists

David L. Johnson (b. 1993, New York, NY) is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Johnson uses photography, video, found and stolen objects, and installation to engage the margins between public and private space. Focusing on loitering and property law, his recent work has been interested in the complex relationship urban development engenders between the built environment and its living and non-living subjects. Johnson received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015 and an MFA from The University of Pennsylvania in 2020. He is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program and a part-time lecturer at The New School. Recent exhibitions include: Life Between Buildings, MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Everything is Common, Artists Space, New York, NY; Revocable Consents, Theta, New York, NY; A Place to Live, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA; Wants & Needs, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY. Johnson’s work is in the public collection of The Studio Museum in Harlem.

 

Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of six books including the just-published The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, And The American City. It’s a New Yorker book of the year and is a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Award for excellence in journalism. His biographical memoir of his grandfather, The Fly Swatter: Portrait of an Exceptional Character, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy, won the Kenneth Johnson Book Award for outstanding literary writing about mental illness. He has been a Henry Luce Scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a Berlin Prize fellow of the American Academy, an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, and an Art For Justice Fellow. His articles appear in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine including several pieces on the life and work of Robert Frank. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Wesleyan (University) Center for Prison Education and a member of the Honorary Council of the Board of Directors of the MacDowell artist’s residency program.

 

Geelia Ronkina is a writer.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Credits
On the Ground is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by PJ Rountree 

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

What Black Is This, You Say?


Photo by: Michael Oliver

 

What Black Is This, You Say? 

A Public Artwork by Amanda Williams

May 2021 – June 2023

 

#whatblackisthis    #awstudioart     @storefrontnyc 

 

What Black Is This, You Say? is a public artwork created by artist and architect Amanda Williams for Storefront’s facade. This multi year project translates to the physical realm, a body of work initiated by the artist on Instagram. 

 

The project began as an informal response to #BlackoutTuesday, a social media protest campaign that invited the public to post black squares to their feeds. This “blackout” of communication on June 2nd, 2020 was intended to be a show of solidarity with Black lives and the calls for justice in response to the murder of George Floyd and many others before him. 

 

“I’ll be honest. I wasn’t feeling the blackout. I hate stuff like that, but I caved. Wanted to be in solidarity. But color is everything to me. You can’t just say “black”…which one?” –Amanda Williams

 

Drawing upon her past work exploring color theory, Williams sought to bring attention to the plurality, complexity, and nuance of Black experience(s). Over the following five months, in order to challenge the black square as a monolithic representation, she posted 120+ shades or textures on Instagram – each with a corresponding caption. Together, they provided a rich palette of overlapping and divergent narratives and histories that inform Black identity. 

 

At Storefront, Williams presents a public artwork that more deeply explores these shades. During the first year, twelve of these were painted on each one of the moving panels of the gallery’s facade, serving as hinges between the public realm and the gallery interior. In its second iteration for the season 2022-2022, five new shades are introduced. What Black Is This, You Say? constitutes a transformation of Storefront’s facade, which all exhibitions during its run navigate and build upon in various ways.


Alongside this, Storefront will release a publication with writings, reflections, and interviews, related to the work. Together, these discussions and contributions from cultural thinkers such as Roxane Gay, J Wortham and Corrine Bailey Rae, among others, interrogate and contextualize commonly held narratives around Black culture, joy, spirituality, suffering, agency, labor, and more.

 

About the Artist

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as a way to draw attention to the complexities of how race shapes the ways in which we assign value to space in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most major US cities. Williams’ installations, paintings, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar, and in the process, raise questions about the state of urban space and ownership in America.

 

Amanda has exhibited widely, including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago, and a public project with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is a 2018 USA Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grantee, an Efroymson Family Arts Fellow, a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow and a member of the multidisciplinary Museum Design team for the Obama Presidential Center. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. Williams lives and works in Chicago.

 

In the spring and summer of 2021, Williams presented three bodies of work at New York City organizations. In addition to this public artwork at Storefront, they included two projects organized by The Museum of Modern Art: Embodied Sensations, a participatory artwork that considers the transformation of public space during the global pandemic, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, MoMA’s first ever exhibition to explore the ongoing impact of anti-black racism on the shaping of architecture and the built environment. 

 

Amanda Williams was selected as a 2022 MacArthur Fellow.

 

Groundworks

Groundworks invites one artist to present a public artwork on Storefront’s iconic facade, that will be on display for the duration of a year. Launching with What Black Is This You Say? by Amanda Williams in 2021, this series of annual commissions engage the gallery’s exterior wall with the sidewalk passerby. This initiative locates Storefront’s facade as a site of critical discourse to weave together notions of place and identity, using the built environment to foster understanding around complex ideas of public life. Each artists’ commission celebrates community, and the history and politics inextricably connected to the building of cultural identity within a specific time and context. 

 

Credits

What Black Is This,  You Say? A Public Artwork by Amanda Williams

Graphic design by poly-mode. Organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2021.

 

aw|studio:

Amanda Williams / Artist

Bianca Marks / Communications and Strategy

 

Polymode:

Silas Munro / Partner

Brian Johnson /  Partner

Randa Hadi / Designer

Michelle Lamb /  Designer

 

Storefront Team:

José Esparza Chong Cuy / Executive Director and Chief Curator

Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa / Curator of Programs and Public Affairs

Camille Bacon / Project Coordinator

Eduardo Meneses / Environments and Production Manager

Jessica Kwok / Assistant Curator

Andrea Molina Cuadro / Gallery and Exhibitions Fellow

Maya Whites / Gallery and Community Engagement Fellow

Jennifer Cohen / Finance Manager

 

Support

What Black Is This, You Say?  has been made possible through the support of the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the New York State Council of the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

On the Ground: Broadcasts

Storefront for Art and Architecture x Montez Press Radio, 2023. Courtesy of Montez Press
Radio.

 

Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release On the Ground: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. Set in their recording studio and performance space in Chinatown, these broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together. The first one, titled Threshold, will air on Sunday, March 26.

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a year-long research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader.

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

On the Ground: Ilana Harris-Babou

Storefronts, 2023. Courtesy of Ilana Harris-Babou.

 

On the Ground: Ilana Harris-Babou
97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY

 

Exhibition Opening:
Saturday, September 23rd

 

From September 23rd to December 23rd, we will present the work of artist Ilana Harris-Babou, an exhibition that reflects on storefronts that engage alternative ways of teaching and learning in the neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn where she grew up. From a cooperatively-run alternative preschool to an afrocentric martial arts space, Harris-Babou unpacks how the pedagogical use of storefronts have become an essential artery to share knowledge within the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Wingate, Flatbush, and their shifting demographics.

 

About the Artist

Ilana Harris-Babou. Courtesy of Ilana Harris-Babou.

 

Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture and installation, and grounded in video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom. She has exhibited her work internationally, with recent survey exhibitions at Kunsthaus Hamburg & the ICA Chattanooga. Other venues include The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; The High Line; New York, USA; West Space, Melbourne, and Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Credits
On the Ground is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by PJ Rountree

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

 

 

On the Ground: Francisca Benítez


Francisca Benítez, 2022

 

On the Ground: Francisca Benítez

97 Kenmare St. New York, NY

 

Exhibition Opening:
Saturday, June 17th

 

From June 17th through September 9th, we will present an exhibition by artist Francisca Benítez and her explorations on the city through her work on performance and the politics of space. The exhibition will explore Benítez’s practice in relation to her participation in the defense of public space, including her engagement with groups such as Art Against Displacement, Chinatown Working Group, East River Park Action, and the Stop Shopping Choir. The latter currently occupies the storefront of a former bank at 36 Avenue C in the East Village, which has been transformed into the Earth Church, performing services on Sundays. This exhibition acts as an interlocutor between this site and Storefront’s gallery.

 

About the Artist


Pier 54: Francisca Benítez, Soliloquy in Signs, 2014. Photo by Liz Ligon. Copyright 2014 Francisca Benítez, Liz Ligon, and Friends of the High Line. Commissioned and produced by Friends of the High Line.

 

Francisca Benítez is an artist born in Chile in 1974, living and working in New York since 1998. Her art practice explores relations between space, politics, and language, being closely linked to the places where she lives and the communities she interacts with. Her videos, photographs, performances, and drawings are shown internationally. Recent exhibitions include: Riego at Die ecke, Santiago; In Support at The Kitchen, New York; New/Now at the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; Uprisings at the Jeu de Paume, Paris; Much wider than a line at SITE Santa Fe, NM. She graduated as an architect from Universidad de Chile (1998) and Master in Fine Arts from Hunter College of the City University of New York (2007). She is an alto singer in the Stop Shopping Choir, an anti-capitalist direct action performance group based in New York City.

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Credits
On the Ground is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by PJ Rountree 

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original

make money and good luck!, 2023. Photo: Canal Street Research Association

 

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original

Canal Street Research Association

 

Speculative research on the shifting landscapes of Canal Street,  featuring works by Ming Fay

 

Exhibition Opening:
Wednesday, March 1st from 6-8pm [RSVP]

 

Gallery Hours:
Wednesdays – Saturdays, 12-6 pm

 

#NewLandPlaza @canal_street_research @mingfaystudio @storefrontnyc 

 

“Whoever you are, wherever you are, we are going to shut you down.” 

— Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg during the “Counterfeit Triangle” raid press conference

February, 2008

 

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original looks at the spatial effects of the criminalization of informal markets and the contemporary repercussions this has on sidewalks and across the facades of Lower Manhattan. Over the course of the exhibit, Canal Street Research Association will attempt to “bootleg” a historic Canal Street counterfeit bust, by tracing the bust’s historical antecedents in order to understand current-day conditions. Anchored in Ming Fay’s seminal Monumental Fruit public artwork honoring street vendors, the archival and speculative research for this re-staging takes various modes: resurfacing of Fay’s proposals and artworks, creating a modular display system in collaboration with architectural collective common room, and pursuing an active intervention on Storefront’s facade. Canal Street Research Association is currently offering Storefront as ad space to mimic the increasingly frequent Lower Manhattan phenomenon that prioritizes buildings as billboards. This gesture attempts to invert the typical flow of corporate funding by redistributing any resources accrued through this experiment to support on the ground advertisers for luxury fashion houses: shanzhai luxury vendors themselves. 
 
Canal Street has long been the epicenter of counterfeit goods in New York City—a thoroughfare cutting through historically immigrant neighborhoods that has become a destination where tourists, as well as New Yorkers, engage with a unique economy. For some time, this confluence of global trade routes has been made possible by a clandestine setup: ground-floor storefronts that operated as NYC souvenir shops up front, but held secret compartments for bootleg luxury merchandise in the back. This slippery meeting of legitimate and illegitimate, real and fake, has been a guiding line of inquiry for Canal Street Research Association, a fictional office entity set up by poetic research unit Shanzhai Lyric in 2020. “Shanzhai” is a Chinese neologism that has come to mean bootleg or fake. The concept of shanzhai offers a different mode of thinking about authorship, unsettling understandings of property, theft, and the traditional flow of economic exchange. Canal Street is one site where the embrace of shanzhai concepts has enabled informal modes of commerce to survive within an increasingly hostile environment. Canal Street Research Association employs the bootleg as a method of re-staging, and therefore more closely examining, complex urban phenomena that may be overlooked due to their unofficial or illicit nature.

 

About the Artists

 

Canal Street Research Association at New Land Plaza. Photo: PJ Rountree

 

Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, and storage units—and are currently located in a basement under Canal Street.

 

The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that take inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.

 

Ming Fay, Monumental Fruit (sketch) from Public Art in Chinatown (Asian American Arts Centre, 1988)

 

Ming Fay is a New York City-based sculptor celebrated for his large-scale, life-like sculptural renditions of plants, fruits, trees, and other organic forms.Fay has exhibited internationally and has been commissioned by numerous cities to create large-scale public sculptures.

 

Born in Shanghai in 1943, Ming Fay grew up in Hong Kong, moving to the United States in 1961 to attend the Columbus College of Art and Design. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

 

On the Ground

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original is presented as part of On the Ground, a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Credits

New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original by Canal Street Research Association. Organized by the Storefront Team. Graphic design by Estudio Herrera. 

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture Team:

José Esparza Chong Cuy, Executive Director and Chief Curator

Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa, Curator of Programs and Public Affairs

Jessica Kwok, Assistant Curator

Eduardo Meneses, Environments and Production Manager

Andrea Molina Cuadro, Gallery and Exhibitions Fellow

Maya Whites, Gallery and Community Engagement Fellow

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

On the Ground

 

On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the critical role storefronts play in shaping public life. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Informed by Storefront for Art and Architecture’s peculiar relationship with the sidewalk, On the Ground reflects on the critical role storefronts play in shaping public life. While empty storefronts have been ubiquitous in the city long before the pandemic, the impact of the last two years has seen an even greater proliferation of ground floor vacancies which has altered the urban fabric, and in doing so, the experience of moving through the city.

 

This themed series looks at how ground floor retail spaces are markers of social, political, and economic transformation. Both inside and on the sidewalk, social infrastructures are set in motion (and sustained) on the ground floor of cities. Retail establishments sit at the intersection of a cultural ecosystem underpinned by local merchants, developers, supply chains, local governments, and ultimately, an amalgam of individual interests and collective identities. On the Ground invites artists, architects, designers, writers, scholars, and the public at large to engage with the unique stories of the storefronts that give identity to New York City’s changing built environment.
 
The threat to these evanescent urban spaces is not easily untangled. Small business storefronts, especially in a “post-pandemic” condition, are signs of economic dissonance. The voids visible by their vacancies across the city are evidence of a real and symbolic rise in eviction. Booming real estate markets and speculative rent increases are effectively decimating this mode of social resilience. Furthermore, commercial displacement is experienced differently across neighborhoods, having disproportionate effects on various socioeconomic and racial demographics. A focused study on storefronts is also a way to explore the spatial challenges of the rise in online consumption that has reshaped the street, threatening brick-and-mortar retail while inundating neighborhoods with delivery vehicles.  
 
On the Ground probes how this fragile urban form can enable carescapes within diverse communities, providing refuge and belonging by maintaining an intimacy of local life.
 

 

On the Ground: Exhibitions
Storefront will present three newly commissioned solo exhibitions from New York-based artists under the framework of On the Ground. Each project will be in dialogue with an off-site ground floor space somewhere in New York City that acts as a launch pad to study these polemics. 
 
From March 1st through May 27th, we will open with an exhibition by Canal Street Research Association, a fictional office of the poetic research collective Shanzhai Lyric. Titled New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original, the exhibition will explore shanzhai methodologies such as mimicking, redistribution of resources, and parody to create a portrait of New Land Plaza, a former marble storage facility turned mini-mall on Canal Street that was the site of the infamous Bloomberg “Counterfeit Triangle” bust of 2008. 
Read more
 
From June 17th through September 9th, we will present an exhibition by artist Francisca Benítez and her explorations of the city through her work on performance and the politics of space. The exhibition will explore Benítez’s practice in relation to her participation in the defense of public space, including her engagement with groups such as Art Against Displacement, Chinatown Working Group, East River Park Action, and the Stop Shopping Choir. The latter currently occupies the storefront of a former bank at 36 Avenue C in the East Village, which has been transformed into the Earth Church, performing services on Sundays. This exhibition acts as an interlocutor between this site and Storefront’s gallery. 
Read more
 
From September 23rd to December 23rd, we will present the work of artist Ilana Harris-Babou, an exhibition that reflects on storefronts that engage alternative ways of teaching and learning in the neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn where she grew up. From a cooperatively-run alternative preschool to an Afrocentric martial arts space, Harris-Babou unpacks how the pedagogical use of storefronts has become an essential artery to share knowledge within the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Wingate, Flatbush, and their shifting demographics. 
Read more
 
On the Ground: Open Call
Alongside our exhibitions, we are also launching an open call—a strategy used by Storefront since its early years—to engage a wider public with this theme and serve as a platform for new ideas. The open call will be launched this Spring and invites artists, architects, writers, curators, and creative individuals to submit proposals for a month long exhibition to be presented at Storefront’s gallery in January 2024. The selected application will receive institutional support, a budget, and a fee to develop and realize the project.  
 
On the Ground: Broadcasts
Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release On the Ground: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. Set in their recording studio and performance space in Chinatown, these broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together. The first one, titled Threshold, will air on Sunday, March 26.
 
On the Ground: Open Sessions
During the last week of each month Storefront will open the gallery for On the Ground: Open Sessions, inviting a different guest to curate and host the evening. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding the transformation of New York’s ground floor are shared and discussed. 
 
On the Ground: Reader
A publication with excerpts from the cumulative research, new commissions, and archival materials will be published at the end of this yearlong program. 

 

2023 – 2024 Calendar

Canal Street Research Association March 1 – May 27
        Broadcast 1: Threshold March 26
        Open Session 1 March 29
        Open Session 2  April 26
        Open Session 3  May 31
Francisca Benítez June 17 – September 9
        Broadcast 2: Void June 21
        Open Session 4 June 28
        Open Session 5 July 26
        Open Session 6 August 30
Ilana Harris-Babou September 23 – December 23
        Open Session 7 September 27
        Open Session 8 October 25
        Broadcast 3: Public October 26
        Open Session 9 November 29
        Broadcast 4: Analogue November 30
Open Call Exhibition

January 20, 2024 – February 17, 2024

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Credits
On the Ground is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by PJ Rountree 

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Member’s Event: Guided Tour of Public Space in a Private Time with Justin Beal

Public Space in a Private Time: Building Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2022. 
Photo by Michael Oliver.

 

Wednesday, November 16

6:30pm 

97 Kenmare St, New York, NY

 
Join us for a guided tour with artist Justin Beal as he walks us through our 40th-anniversary exhibition Public Space in a Private Time: Building Storefront for Art and Architecture.
 
This exhibition connects our focus on the built environment with New York City’s social and political challenges at the time of its founding in 1982. Through a close reading of early shows and projects, Public Space in a Private Time showcases the leading role Storefront has played in the defense of public space through artistic practice. 
 
Justin Beal is an artist and writer based in New York. His first book, Sandfuture, was published by the MIT Press in September 2021. Beal was a co-organizer of Public Space in a Private Time and will lead a small group of Storefront members in an intimate conversation around the show.
 
If you would like to join and are not yet a Storefront member, please sign up here, or contact us at membership@storefrontnews.org.
 
Note to members: This event has limited capacity. Please RSVP by Friday November 11.
 

—-

Support 

Storefront’s 40th Anniversary program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

People’s Gardens: Walking Tour with the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space


Adam’s House in Paradise, 1984. Photo by Glenn Weiss. Storefront for Art and Architecture.

 

Saturday, November 12

2:30pm – 4pm

97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY

 

[RSVP]

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, invites you to join a walking tour of community gardens in Lower Manhattan. Led by Bill Di Paola and Marco Lanier from MoRUS, the walk will begin at Storefront’s gallery at 97 Kenmare Street and will culminate at La Plaza Cultural on East 9th Street in the East Village, meandering through six other sites along the route. Each of these gardens hold historical and political significance as places of resistance in the struggles against increasing real estate expansion and austerity. Stops include:
 
1. Elizabeth Street Garden
2. Liz Christy Garden
3. Garden of Eden Site
4. Children’s Magical Garden
5. 6B Garden
6. Carmen’s Garden
7. La Plaza Cultural
 
As a living history of urban activism, the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MoRUS) chronicles the East Village community’s history of grassroots action. It celebrates the local activists who transformed abandoned spaces and vacant lots into vibrant community spaces and gardens. Many of these innovative, sustainable concepts and designs have since spread out to the rest of the city and beyond.

 

This event has a limited capacity. Please RSVP to join us for this special afternoon.

 

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Support 

Storefront’s 40th Anniversary program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

Members Event: The Architects by Amie Seigel at The Museum of Modern Art

Amie Siegel, The Architects, 2014. © 2014 Amie Siegel

 

Tuesday, October 25

4:30pm 

The Museum of Modern Art

11 W 53rd St, New York, NY

 

[RSVP]

 

Join us for a viewing of The Architects with artist Amie Siegel at The Museum of Modern Art. As a special event for our Storefront Members, Siegel will host an intimate conversation around this piece. 
 
The Architects, originally commissioned by Storefront for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale as part of OfficeUS, is a film that cuts transversely through the city of New York, moving through ten architecture studios, unveiling the operational territories and landscapes of global architecture production. The piece was recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art and is currently on view in the Philip Johnson Galleries. 
 
If you would like to join and are not yet a Storefront member, please sign up here, or contact us at members@storefrontnews.org.
 
Note to members: This event has limited capacity. Please RSVP by Friday, October 21st
 
Amie Siegel works variously in film, video, photography, sound, sculpture, and installation. She is known for her meticulously constructed works that trace and perform systems of value, examine relationships between objects, materials, and spaces, and expose the plasticity of the moving image through sound and performance. The artist’s current and recent exhibitions include The Silence, ArkDes, Stockholm (2022); Bloodlines, Scottish National Museum Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2022); 34th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil; (2021); Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); Winter, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017); Strata, South London Gallery (2017), Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016) and Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2016). Siegel has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation and a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award recipient. She lives and works in New York City.