Workspace Open Studios

Our annual Open Studio Weekend will be April 26 and 27 this year. Visit our Open Studio Weekend page for more details.

Studio Open Hours: Works-in-Progress

See what our 15 artists- and 5 writers-in-residence have been working on since the start of their residency in September 2007. Whether you are art-fair-hopping or not, join us for a sneak preview of their works-in-progress! RSVP is required!

OUT OF SITE: EXHIBITION TOUR

The tour will visit the shows organized by guest curators who explored the vast 10 year archive of the LMCC residency program and curated exhibitions, combining artists from various years, locations, and mediums.

Meet Erin at Cuchifritos to kick the tour off with Imaginary Arsenals and we’ll make our way via the J/M/Z to Human Resources.

IMAGINARY ARSENALS

Addressing the subtle and subversive use of war imagery in art. Part of "Out of Site, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist Residency Marks a Decade Downtown"

MAKING NOISE

Sound Art as a tool for the organization of power. Part of "Out of Site, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist Residency Marks a Decade Downtown"

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

The art in this exhibition draws energy and vision fron Lower Manhattan. Part of "Out of Site, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist Residency Marks a Decade Downtown"

OUT OF SITE: EXHIBITION TOUR

Meet Erin Donnelly, LMCC Residency Director Curator at REDHEAD to kick the tour off with The Shape of Things to Come. We’ll make our way to Making Noise at the Melville Gallery, and arrive at Cuchifritos for the opening reception of Imaginary Arsenals. Part of "Out of Site, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist Residency Marks a Decade Downtown"

THE LAST SUPPER

Twelve artists/curators gather at one table with Nicolás Dumit Estévez in a reflection of the relationship of art to ritual. This is the culminating event of For Art’s Sake, a series of pilgrimages conceived of, and undertaken by Estévez over the past three years. Part of "Out of Site, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist Residency Marks a Decade Downtown"

Italian artist Carlo Bernardini inaugurates a new Swing Space at 5 Hanover Square with his installation Event Horizon. Working with a unique system of fiber optics, Bernardini creates a shifting, illusory network of illuminated lines that traverse the space in weblike formations. 

Watching from behind a window overlooking the site, viewers observe Bill Shannon and crew engage with the public space and pedestrian traffic in their freestyle performance that taps into the hip-hop/skateboard tradition of street improvisation.

Both public spectacle and September 11th memorial, One Million Forgotten Moments gathers 100 of New York City’s most talented artists in a performance that celebrates what makes our city special—its endless desire to create and its infinite ability to reinvent. Yehuda Duenyas (of the National Theater of the United States of America) invites the artists to offer their own valentine to the city, from the ridiculous and bizarre to the wondrous and magical.

Eva Perez de Vega Steele and Ian Gordon present: Choreographing Space, an interdisciplinary collaboration that explores the intersection of architecture, dance, and moving image. By enveloping the interior space at 145 Nassau with an interactive mesh capable of transformation.

Graffiti Research Lab (GRL) is not a collective of graffiti artists, but a collection of graffiti engineers and advocates. Try your hand at laser tagging with GRL’s Mobile Broadcast Unit: audio, projection, and laser tag systems mounted on a tricycle! An entire building is your canvas for making giant drawings with light during this outdoor evening adventure.

Incorporating shadow-play, text, and dance, and set in a field of dots, “States & Resemblance” is a collaboration between Japanese photographer and video artist Ryutaro Mishima, Indonesian dance and mask artist Restu Imansari Kusumaningrum, and choreographer and New York video artist Dean Moss.

A new work created by collaborators Andreya Ouamba, of Senegal, and Brooklyn-based Reggie Wilson and his Fist and Heel Performance Group wrestles with questions of memory and loss.

Free New World Music concerts on Governors Island every Saturday in August. Antibalas, Ogans, Sweet Micky, Si*Se, Toubab Krewe, DJ Rekha and Trojan Records are featured.

The Good Life is long-term video documentary project
(in-progress) composed of interviews with people on the streets of 12 Latin American cities about their perceptions of current and historical US foreign policy in the region and of local forms of democratic governance.

Anja Hitzenberger expands on The Body and Space—her project of photographing the human body in outdoor architectural spaces—by condensing into the intimate indoor space at 145 Nassau Street.

Time Republik is a kinetic/intellectual/pop experience that takes the great 20th century utopian ideologies as a departure point.  Onstage, performers interact with a low-tech light bulb installation that delivers a high-intensity retinal impact to the audience.

Showgirls dressed in red and white gowns dance to the live searing guitar of Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner, presenting the crowd with delightful surprises. Goldhuber’s new choreography lets Las Vegas meet (and beat) Wall Street.

Full-day performances where the two groups will play off each other, the environment and the denizens of downtown. Expect sly alterations of everyday life, outlandish costumes, and surprises around every corner.

The Council presents Gernika/Guernica, a multimedia site-specific public art project by Anita Glesta in Lower Manhattan. Glesta’s work commemorates the 70th anniversary of the tragic bombing of the Basque town Gernika by Nazi Germany at the behest of General Franco.

The Council presents Ripon a series of installations integrating an original video game with large-scale digital prints that use the setting of a violent dystopic society to upset the conventions of gaming culture.

Fall Forward a new play by Daniel Reitz and directed by Daniel Talbott, features two short vignettes in and around the evocative courtyards of John Street United Methodist Church, Manhattan’s oldest Methodist church.

Martha Graham Dance Company will launch this year’s series with Steps In the Streets and Prelude to Action from the 1936 piece Chronicle, a work created by Martha Graham in response to the menace of fascism in Europe.

An exhibition featuring six installations by a new generation of digital artists who explore the poetics of sound and image/light through electronic media. Works by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Hisao Ihara, LoVid/Douglas Repetto, Terry Nauheim, Rashaad Newsome, and Phoenix Perry.

Our annual fundraising gala located on the top floor of WTC 7. This year we are honoring Governor Eliot Spitzer, Governor Jon Corzine, Klara and Larry Silverstein, Bjork and Michel Gondry.

Friday, April 27 - Sunday, April 29, 2007

Starting with a party, the Council will open both studio spaces to the public with screenings, artist led walking tours, and good old fashioned studio visits.

First Tuesdays Reading Series was started by Christopher Stackhouse in the fall of 2002 at a gallery and café in Tribeca. In the Spring of 2005, the series re-located to Zieher-Smith Gallery in Chelsea. The series now moves to LMCC’s gallery space.

Featuring Martha Colburn, Aissa Deebi, Gautam Kansara, Charles LaBelle, Huong Ngo, and smudge studio, the six artists in this exhibition reflect the increasing breakdown of geographic borders in today’s world.

During New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival, 15 Nassau serves as an information center, a venue for open rehearsals and video presentations, and a lounge for artists and audiences to relax and meet.

The Performance Mix Festival presents the developing work of over 30 experimental choreographers, composers and multi-disciplined artists.

In 2007, the Council awarded over $320,000 in grants to 156 artists and arts organizations throughout the borough of Manhattan.  The grant season will culminate on March 20th with the Manhattan Borough Arts Bash - an evening filled with music, dance, visual art, and theater.

Melinda Lee and to think the thought performance present Things to Do With Your Mouth, a performance exploring the intersection between movement, design, technology, and sound.

Friday, February 23: 1-6 PM
Sunday, February 25: 1-6PM
(closed Saturday)

Moved to action by the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans artist Jana Napoli collected hundreds of drawers from the flooded and abandoned neighborhoods in the days and months that followed.

In this site-specific installation, the drawers sit upright along a 230 foot long platform, which spans the length of Liberty Street Bridge – standing like empty luggage without their passengers and flowing like a levee, broken in places.

This version of DAGGER (a performance based loosely on Shakespeare’s Macbeth) takes over the abandoned bank space at 15 Nassau, bringing the outside in and incorporating the raw empty space into the performance. Watchers become watched, and the traveling viewers are kept on their toes by video ghosts and an eerie soundtrack. In a rich atmosphere of menace and the seductions of authority, Clarinda Mac Low gets up close and personal with the audience in person and on screen, spinning out an intimate multimedia spectacle that seeks to reveal the states of being that lie behind the various masks of physical and temporal power.

Making of a Governor is a unique exhibition of photojournalism and rare political art and historical memorabilia that will run in Governor Spitzer's inaugural month.

Kabir Carter gathers and combines frequency streams and acoustic events derived from multiple communications systems to create a sound installation that rests somewhere between a multi speaker environment and a rundown consumer electronics outlet.

Joe Ben Plummer (1968 – 2004) specialized in the field of pyrography, more commonly known as “wood burning.” Etched into the surfaces of scraps of wood collected from the streets of the Lower East Side, his work reveals what is beneath the surface of the worlds of professional sports, music, and popular culture.

A series of performances of this work-in-progress for electric komungo (Korean zither) and live video mix.

The Tank and 8bitpeoples are pleased to present the Blip Festival, a four-day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit videogame consoles and home computers used as creative tools.

Curtis Carman creates an indoor observation deck and boardwalk from everyday materials in "Observation Point," a playful installation addressing issues of urbanism, tourism, and surveillance. Part of Carman's "make-do" art practice, "Observation Point" is a humorous intervention in the ongoing debate over Lower Manhattan.

Incited by her landlord's ongoing threat of eviction, Beaumont has created an active archiving of her displaced work amid pillars of boxes.

All benefits are not created equal. On November 8, 2006, guests are invited to indulge in cocktails, sample Danny Meyer’s delights, or challenge one of our celebrity guests to a round of Pictionary, a new video game, or a put on the green. Tickets available now!

Come hear from some of NYC’s leading marketing figures. How can big business ideas relate to non profits? Join us for breakfast and find out.

Best Before is an evolving project about the relationships between individual and object. 'Expired' items from people around New York City have been collected and recorded with the stories they contain. By reinserting these objects into the everyday, we investigate ideas of how each moment of the everyday can be constructed and captured as chance possibility as much as documented reality.

Estévez travels on his knees from the offices of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Maiden Lane to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian at Bowling Green, carrying in his hands a piece of casabe, a type of bread prepared from the cassava root, thus transporting a legacy of the Caribbean Taíno culture to be presented as a gift to the host institution.

The South Wing presents a world premiere rock opera, based on Japanese theatre artist Terayama Shuji's masterwork, Death in the Country

A site-specific sculptural installation resembling the outcroppings of the familiar Manhattan bedrock that surfaces throughout the city. This "bedrock" is created with wood, staples and craft paper in an indoor commercial space. The artists transform a former commercial storefront into a space imbued with a sense of renewal by employing an image of the very foundation on which the entire city is built.

Meghan Trainor and Jamie Allen, principles at the Northern Electronics Research Division in downtown Manhattan's Financial District, invite you to join them in part of a continuing effort to bring the tomorrow of the arts to the world of today. They will present the results of the sound and communications research initiatives they have been undertaking for the past 2 months in Northern Electronics Research Division.

Hung-Chih Peng presents two videos from his Canine Monk series. Heart Sutra and Exerpts from the Holy Bible in Arabic Translation feature the artist’s dog quoting religious scripture in different languages.

How do you define uptown or downtown work? Through aesthetics? Culture? Geography? For six weeks this summer, we brought together a group of artists, five from “uptown,” five from “downtown,” to explore these questions while developing short works for performance. There are never simple answers. Join us.

Artists open their studios to the public for Swing Space's semi-annual Open House.

Looking for art in all the odd places? Join Alec Appelbaum in a panel to imagine new public space with Bill Brown of Surveillance Media Players, Clarinda MacLow, choreographer and performer and Paul Carter, interdisciplinary scholar and public artist.

From Sarajevo to New Orleans, from Kigali to Beirut, artists have commented forcefully on their contemporary political and cultural predicament. As a witness, as a way of mourning, as indictment, as critique, as testament, as an olive branch, and as a herald of hope, art form the bedrock of recovery. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council hosts the second international summit of artists, architects, poets, writers, performers, filmmakers, and musicians, to consider the role of art and culture after crisis in cities across the globe. From September 14 - 17, 2006.

World-class dance in the enchanting outdoor setting of Battery Park

A presentation by Itala Schmelz, director of Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros in Mexico City, about the eclectic and vast archives of the Mexican modernist David Alfaro Siqueiros, and new projects inspired by, or drawing source materials from, this unique resource. With an introduction by art historian Anna Indych-López, screening by filmmaker Mariana Rodríguez, artist’s talk by Mona Marzouk, and special viewing of Rubén Ortiz Torres' new video installation.

Fire on Wall Street exposes the passion and power of twenty women in an environment where these qualities are not usually celebrated. In an arresting, raw exploration of the element fire, the women of Ellis Wood Dance manipulate their bodies and command the grandiose architecture of 55 Wall Street with sensual abandon. Sheathed in endless mesh fabric and little else, the dancers writhe and pull its limits, as their embers intensify into a reckless blaze.

Parks serve as public gathering spaces for thousands of individuals to relax and socialize. Despite a seeming complexity, this work seeks to expose the universal themes of relaxation, rest and “downtime” that are experienced within the context of the park.

A group exhibition curated by artist Lou Laurita frustrates the edge between the handmade and the autobiographical. From Jonathan Peck's Burberry coats meticulously rendered in paper to Tawnie Silva's love note stitched on velcro, At Hand is a push-pull between the heart, the head, and the haptic. Featuring works by Alexander Seth Cameron, Daniel Cartier, Adriana Farmiga, Jonathan Peck, Tawnie Silva, and Johannes Vanderbeek.

Dallas-based artist Randall Garrett presents a sprawling assortment of temporary artist installations in various textural materials, opening night artist and band performances, hacked-video games and traditional video installations.

bluemouth inc. brings their award-winning performance installation, evoking the struggle for acceptance in the calm before the family storm with dance, theater, and video.

As visitors walk through the space, their movements trigger excerpts of radio transmissions and video footage using images of the World Trade Center. Transcripts read over walkie-talkies by live performers are integrated into a strings and electronics recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

The dance looks at the plight of the housewife within the context of the Laundromat, a commodity disappearing from gentrified neighborhoods. Dancers spin in dryers, climb in and out of washing machines and hang from clothes baskets, gradually removing three layers of clothing to perform to Stand By Your Man.

New York is Here! is a site-specific performance that honors the mythology of our great metropolis. Parts funhouse, historical narrative, and performance art, New York is Here! goes inside the City’s chaotic mass.

Staged in historic Castle Clinton and the majestic surrounding gardens, Mary Queen of Scots awaits her execution by Elizabeth I. Both decendents of the famous Henry VIII, these cousins never exchanged more than letters in real life, but Schiller helps us imagine a confrontation between two of Europe's mightiest female monarchs while overlooking the Statue of Liberty!

Disjointed movements of twists, torques, and overextended limbs. Bodily distortions that simulate dizzying and disorienting effects. If dancing is a tying together of moves, what is it to undo them? If dancing is a merging of body & space, can we disconnect them? If dancing is identity of flesh and fantasy, what will we suffer to sever them?

If you could imagine a Surreal world with a Gorky painting married to a Mondrian, but having an affair with a silent Brakhage, simultaneously flirting with Truffaut’s eye capturing moments that have little to do with the story, but with life passing by, then you will know what to expect in Eng’s video performances.

Set against the nautical backdrop of the South Street Seaport - at once a reminder of New York's maritime past and its overwhelmingly mercantile present – Hope & Anchor dredges up ghosts and modern-day denizens then sends them crashing together in a gruff display of bad temper, dashed hopes and delayed deliverance.

When is a fire escape a stage? When is the marble adorned lobby of a corporate headquarters an intimate playhouse? When is a ballerina’s tutu a sound studio? Only during Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s annual Sitelines series.

This summer, from May 8 - August 30th, consider all of Downtown as the best seat in the house

Get swept away with veteran producers Great Small Works as they lead a parade like no other. Join us at any of the six key points for characters on stilts, do it yourself inflatable architectures, an orchestra of bicycle instruments, and more! Spectacle and surprise are around every bend as the pageant winds through the canyons of Downtown

Media changes the public spaces we inhabit, opening -- and sometimes closing -- channels for daily living and civic engagement. The projects in this exhibition invite visitors to investigate the relationship between media and public space.

Swing Space studio, installation and office grantees show off their work in progress.

The AUDIO BALLERINAS employ a variety of choreographies using electronic instruments (digital samplers, light sensors, contact microphones, music sticks, and radio receivers) that allow them to work with the sounds, surfaces, electro-magnetic waves and physical topography of the space around them.