Life Between Buildings
Life Between Buildings
Jun 2, 2022 – Jan 16, 2023
- Past
- Exhibition
Becky Howland. Tied Grass. 1977. Site-specific installation on traffic island bounded by Franklin Street, Varick Street, and West Broadway
Courtesy the artist. Photo: Becky Howland.Inspired by the history of community gardens in New York City, Life Between Buildings explores how artists have engaged the city’s interstitial spaces—“vacant” lots, sidewalk cracks, traffic islands, and parks, among others—to consider the politics of public space through an ecological lens. Bringing together select archival materials and artworks from the 1970s through the present day, the exhibition looks beyond a history of artists transforming buildings (such as MoMA PS1) to how they have engaged the spaces in between, turning negative spaces into sites for common life: gardens, installations, performances, and gatherings.
Beginning in the 1970s, at a moment when New York City faced a severe fiscal crisis, grassroots groups across New York City began converting lots into community gardens. This coincided with artists’ efforts to think beyond the confines of the studio, gallery, and museum as sites for their work. At certain moments, these histories intertwined: artists made work in conversation with, and sometimes directly joining, community efforts to rethink the cityscape, recovering space towards creative, communal, and ecological ends. By repurposing liminal and overlooked sites, these groups and artists ask us to rethink how life—human and non-human—can grow in a city where space has become increasingly scarce and nature progressively imperiled.
Artists
Tom Burr
b. 1963
Mel Chin
b. 1951
Danielle De Jesus
b. 1987
Niloufar Emamifar
Becky Howland
b. 1951
David L. Johnson
b. 1993
Gordon Matta-Clark
b. 1943, d. 1978
Margaret Morton
b. 1948, d. 2020
Aki Onda
b. 1967
Poncili Creación
est. 2012
POOL (Performance On One Leg)
est. 1981
Matthew Schrader
b. 1984
jackie sumell
b. 1973
The Lower Eastside Girls Club
est. 1996
Cecilia Vicuña
b. 1948