The New York Non-Profit Artists Space Reopens With an 8,000-Square-Foot Home in the New Gallery Mecca of Tribeca

The non-profit
gallery Artists Space has served as a polestar for the downtown New
York art scene since its founding in 1972, but its livelihood was threatened
recently when the owners of the building that housed it
made plans to convert the space into a luxury
penthouse. 

For some businesses, this news
would have been a death knell. For Artists Space, it was just the
latest hurdle in a decades-long game of real-estate chess that it
has so far managed to win, allowing the gallery to remain downtown
while countless others have been priced out.

The organization just opened its
new two-story, 8,000-square-foot home at 11 Cortlandt Alley—still
within the same seven-block radius where it has operated five
previous locations. It inaugurated the space last Friday with an exhibition of new
work by Danica Barboza,
Jason Hirata, Yuki Kimura, and Duane Linklater. With intermixed
art, no proper title or curatorial conceit, the show is a nod to
the organization’s early model of exhibiting three or four artists
in a format that’s “somewhere between a series of overlaid solo
shows and a group show,” according to Artists Space executive
director Jay Sanders.

“That’s something I’ve always
loved about Artists Space: the primacy of artists controlling the
conditions of their own presentation,” says Sanders, who signed on as
director just before the
organization closed its previous space on Greene Street. “It feels
like artists really come and occupy and make their most articulated
vision with the least amount of institutional framing and
branding.”

The building on Cortlandt Alley,
a cozy, three-block byway, has graffiti-adorned freight doors and
fire escapes that harken back to the neighborhood’s grittier past.
It was built in 1867 by a carpet dealer and purchased in the 1950s
by its current owner, the construction tool manufacturing company
General Tools. 

General Tools approached Artists
Space with the keys to its ground-level space in 2017 and Sanders
said the two parties negotiated a 20-year lease with “very good
terms.”

But there was still a lot of
work to be done. The space was virtually raw; there was no elevator
or staircase, no lighting or heating or bathroom. The non-profit
was tasked with the full renovation, an undertaking that cost
“several million dollars,” which it quietly raised through private
donors, including Barbara Gladstone, Friedrich Petzel,
David Zwirner, Jeff Koons, Trisha Donnelly, Richard Serra, and
Allan Schwartzman.

Today, it’s hard to tell that
the interior is new. The gallery looks and feels like Artists
Space’s previous homes, with wood floors, off-white walls, exposed
brick and ribbed pillars. Nearly every artist on the museum’s
board—a list that includes Rachel Harrison, Joan Jonas, and Seth
Price, among others—weighed in on the renovation, Sanders
says. 

Nodding to the organization’s
own history was a central theme of their conversations, as was
creating a hybridized space that would allow for the two sides of
Artists Space’s protean identity—exhibitions and live
programming—to coexist.

“The thought was to re-fuse
those strands into one whole and see how that would play out in
different parts of the building,” Sanders says. “I hope that in the
first year we can experiment with all the different ways that
static art, performance, and discursive and social events can
occupy different temporal and architectural frames in the
building.” 

“We’re living in a moment where
people are asking a lot of questions about art making and how art
lives in the culture,” says Sanders. “I think we’re really going to learn more about
our future as we live through this first chapter of projects. Then
we’ll see what the next steps may be, responding to what emerging
artists need, to what New York needs, and hopefully be very porous
and thoughtful and sensitive in the process.”

“Danica Barboza, Jason
Hirata, Yuki Kimura, Duane Linklater” is on view through
February 9, 2020 at Artists Space.

The post The New York Non-Profit Artists Space Reopens With
an 8,000-Square-Foot Home in the New Gallery Mecca of Tribeca
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