Documentation from Derek Frech’s “Counter Measures” solo exhibition at Interstate Projects. Credit: Interstate Projects
Good news for artists. Interstate Projects has announced a studio program that will launch in April. The Bushwick gallery will be providing one artist a free 300-square foot studio space for the period of four months at its two-story building on 66 Knickerbocker. The open submission residency, which will be selected by a juried panel, will have three residency periods: April-July, August-November and December to March 2017.
Tom Weinrich and Jamie Sterns, executive director and curatorial director of Interstate Projects respectively, explained their motivation for starting the residency programme in an e-newsletter sent out this morning:
Interstate Projects Studio Program has been created to support artists in the face of unsustainable demands made by real estate and market effects on studio practices. Through this program, artists will have the opportunity to nurture experimentation and the conceptual incubation of ideas. This residency will give artists access to creative resources and networks in New York and its surrounding area through studio visits, critiques and introductions made through Interstate Projects’ network of peers.
This is a big deal, since many non-profits in the city only offer subsidized studios in their residency programmes — NURTUREart, just a block away, is one such organization, the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, another. The news also comes just a year after Interstate abandoned its profit-seeking status to become a non-profit, befitting for a gallery that has supported genre-defying narrative-based works, often granting post-MFA graduates their first solo shows.
Since securing its registered 501c3 tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, Interstate Projects has now been able to apply for grants and get more stable, organizational funding to support their ambitious large-scale solo and group projects that push artists into an “un-capitalized zone of experimentation”. In 2015, the NADA member have continued to garner critical acclaim: AFC’s Whitney Kimball favorably reviewed Nick DeMarco’s “Here On Earth” solo show, and the New York Times’s Martha Schwendener called Sueng-Min Lee’s “Sing’s Millenium Mart” a “humorous, sometimes political, sometimes poetic take on the minimart.” More recently, Nicolas O’Brien filed a Rhizome editorial on Jacob Ciocci’s fall solo dealing with the apathy and empathy within American culture.
The residency program will be open to visual artists in the United States and internationally. Deadline for the first residency period is February 15. The recipient will be announced on March 31.
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