EMERGENCY ARTS

CHELSEA, NY

Emergency Arts is a collective of artists located in a 55,000 square feet warehouse in the middle of Chelsea, NY, a neighborhood known for its hundreds of galleries with important and glamorous names. The idea started from a collaboration between Alf Namen (a very influent real estate developer in Chelsea ) and a gallerist/curator with a very bizarre personality, Melody Weir. Melody convinced Alf to give one of his 4 stories buildings to several artists so that they could renovate it and set their studios in it. The space opened on September 2006 after 4 months of hard and hectic work, during which several artists - some of them pretty renowned - have collaborated to rebuild the abandoned building, using only recycled and recyclable materials. At the end of the work every artist had his own studio at a very low price and in a space that looks like coming out of Alice in the Wonderland. All this in the middle of a neighborhood renown for its austere, formal and often luxury galleries. The feeling of the place decisively reminds of the Soho of the 70s or the East Village of the 80s, and inside you find not only studios but also some galleries run by the artists themselves and non-profit organizations ( Susan Sarandon and Matthew Modine organized a couple of fundraising events inside the space). It is a real oasis of quiet and creativity, neat and capable of breath in large spaces, founded on sustainable technology as well as social and 'green' concepts. In fact all the artists who took part in the project, among whom the well-known street artist Swoon, are involved in projects with social focus, and often collaborate with other organizations with similar goals, such as the UN World Food Program. The basic idea of Emergency Arts in is fact that of "introducing a social conscience and the concept of community in a art world so often suffocated by greed and egotism."

New York, July 2007