Broken City Lab

Broken City Lab is an artist-led interdisciplinary creative research group that tactically disrupts and engages the city, its communities, and its infrastructures to reimagine the potential for action in the collapsing post-industrial city of Windsor, Ontario.

The processes of Broken City Lab remain grounded in the lab’s observations and concerns about Windsor, as a city, as a community, and as a network of infrastructure, and aim to do two things: first, Broken City Lab works through interventionist tactics to adjust, critique, annotate, and re-imagine the city that we encounter; secondly, through these interventions, the lab seeks to educate, inspire, and facilitate a new way of viewing the potential for interacting with and in the city.

Broken City Lab’s creative activity is located at the intersection of social practice, performance, and activism. The lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace. It is not about doing the work of the city’s officials, or social workers, or politicians; it is about finding new creative ways to address our concerns with the city, while recognizing that our concerns may be similar to those of other community members.

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The Bronx Blue Bedroom Project

BBBP is an artist-run project located in the bedroom of the artist Blanka Amezkua in Mott Haven, South Bronx. Her intention is to create an intimate art space where contemporary artists can exhibit their work in a setting that differs radically from the already established art venues. Artists have the opportunity to participate in BBBP for the duration of one month. Blanka asks that the participating artists commit to offering a workshop in the local community, or by preparing a dinner to be shared with other artists and individuals interested in the arts, during their show.

BBBP encourages the participating artists to use this exchange as an asset for their continued artistic growth. Artist eligibility is based on the quality of the work and the individual’s commitment to the local community.

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Lower East Side Printshop

Lower East Side Printshop, founded in 1968, is a not-for-profit studio in New York City that helps contemporary artists create new artwork and advance their careers.

Through the Printshop’s workspace residency programs, artists receive space and time to work, stipends, technical assistance, career development, and public exposure.

With its exhibitions, open studios, education, and other public programs, the Printshop serves as a junction for artists, collectors, museums, galleries, and educational institutions to access and engage in contemporary art.

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GRIDSPACE

The purpose of GRIDSPACE is to provide an architecturally and sculpturally specific curatorial outlet that engages the rapidly changing neighborhood of northern Crown Heights. The non-traditional storefront gallery is in the front window of Charles Goldman’s studio — POWELL. The “space” itself is a wooden grid of 12 individually lit 2 foot square by 8 inch deep “cubicles,” custom built to fit into the specially designed storefront.

The inaugural exhibition is a yearlong exhibition, involving 12 solo and 1 group show (which will include works by different combinations of the initial 12 artists.) The year will begin with the group exhibition. There will be a “real time” website and an informal catalogue to mark the completion of the first cycle. Unscheduled programming will continue in the space throughout the year. The solo exhibitions will be as long or as short as deemed necessary by each participant.

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Storefront Library

The Chinatown Storefront Library has transformed one of Boston Chinatown’s vacant, commercial, street-level spaces into a temporary public library. Operating from October 2009 through January 2010, the project has created a memorable event for Chinatown, while providing a selection of urgently needed services for a community that has been without a library since 1956. The library offers: books, Internet access, newspapers, a children’s reading area, and a mix of programs and activities—all visible to passersby on the street.

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Sugar City

Sugar City exists to organize alternative community arts and cultural events in the Buffalo area. Our goal is to share and create art based on participatory culture and a do-it-together attitude. Events and initiatives include, but are not limited to music, films, poetry readings, a zine library, meeting space, local craft corner, art gallery, workshops, and workspaces. We want to break down the barriers of what is and isn’t “art” because in some way everyone is an artist. Sugar City is about sharing creativity and energy. This organization focuses itself on the exhibition, performance, and creation of art for those who cannot obtain space from traditional sources.

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Exploring SPURA

Exploring SPURA is an exhibition by students of the City Studio at Eugene Lang College, the New School & Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, in collaboration with SPURA Matters. The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) is the largest undeveloped city-owned parcel of land south of 96th Street, and it has been a contested site since it was cleared for “renewal” more than 40 years ago.

Please join us at a new exhibition by the New School’s City Studio, Exploring SPURA, which delves into the experience of living at SPURA now – the resources and restrictions – as well as the stories of today and the experience of the SPURA diaspora, displaced many years ago. The exhibition springs from the City Studio’s research in the community and hopes to continue encouraging productive conversation about the site’s future.

Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) (www.goles.org) was founded in 1977 and is a neighborhood housing and preservation organization, dedicated to tenants’ rights, homelessness prevention and community revitalization through organizing and advocacy.

The Pratt Center for Community Development (www.prattcenter.net) empowers low- and moderate-income communities in New York to plan for and realize their futures. As part of Pratt Institute, it uses urban planning, architecture, and public policy to support community-based organizations in their efforts to improve quality of life, create economic opportunity, and advance sustainable development.

Place Matters (www.placematters.net) was founded in 1998 by City Lore (www.citylore.org) and the Municipal Art Society (www.mas.org) to foster the conservation of New York City’s historically and culturally significant places. It conducts a citywide survey called the “Census of Places that Matter” to discover places that evoke associations with history, memory, and tradition.

February 4 – April 3, 2010

Opening Reception:
Thursday February 4, 6-8pm
common room 2 is a room in manhattan’s lower east side that explores the production and use of the built environment.

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A Brief Account of Two Artist-Run Spaces

By Michele Faguet – There is a contradiction implicit in the idea of the alternative or artist-run space as a phenomenon specific to developed countries or contexts in which a highly organized, sophisticated cultural infrastructure is clearly not lacking. One might argue that the very modus operandi of this kind of space—rejection or critique of both the institutional structure and the art market with their respective (often overlapping) processes of legitimation, a spontaneous manner of operating based on immediate material conditions along with a desire to adapt to (and make the most of) limited resources, and perhaps most importantly the mapping out of a self-defined position or space of marginality (in the positive sense of the term)—would find its natural habitat in a “marginal” context characterized by the presence of dysfunctional institutions and the absence of a real art market. In other words, what is an alternative way of working in one context might be a necessary manner of operating in another. Yet, the history of alternative spaces in Latin America is a very short one and difficult to research because it is a history that is fragmented, largely undocumented, and too often forgotten as many of these initiatives have fallen victim to a selective amnesia resulting from territorial alliances and interests typical to cultural contexts in which there are so few opportunities. This text treats two specific cases from the 1990s: La Panadería, an artist-run space in Mexico that is often looked to as the model for alternative spaces in Latin America, and Galería Chilena, a lesser known artist-run, nomadic, commercial gallery that moved around Santiago over the course of several years, organizing exhibitions in borrowed spaces. Read More

Fillip Magazine

Fill in the Blank Gallery

A small, women-run gallery that serves as an exhibition space engaging with the community of Chicago. They offer classes and workshops, accept open submissions from artists, and host a variety of events that appeal to more than just scenesters out for a free glass of wine and some snarky commentary. Their website also features a blog and artist interviews so fans can keep up with what’s what. (From Proximity)

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Artist Run Chicago + Studio Chicago

New blog in

Studio Chicago is a yearlong collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio through exhibitions, talks, publications, tours, and research. It is a collaboration between core partners: The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Columbia College Chicago, Gallery 400 at UIC, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and threewalls. The project’s website is www.studiochicago.org.

The Studio Chicago blog is a forum for discussion about topics generated by the project over the course of the year. Guest bloggers are invited by Studio Chicago Core Partners to post for one week, and these posts are moderated by Core Partners.

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Artists Run Chicago is an exhibition showcasing the energy and audacity of some of the most noteworthy artist-run spaces that have influenced the Chicago contemporary art scene over the past decade. Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts. The participating artist-run venues have transformed storefronts, sheds, apartments, lofts, industrial warehouses, garages and roving spaces into contemporary art galleries testing the notion of “exhibition” while complicating the definition of art. Coinciding with the Hyde Park Art Center’s 70th anniversary, Artists Run Chicago reconnects the Art Center to its beginnings as an artist-run space by showcasing spaces that continue the legacy.

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