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On the Ground: Exhibitions
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Storefront will present three newly commissioned solo exhibitions from New York-based artists under the framework of On the Ground. Each project will be in dialogue with an off-site ground floor space somewhere in New York City that acts as a launch pad to study these polemics.
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Opening March 1st and running through May 20th, we will open with an exhibition by Canal Street Research Association, a fictional office of the poetic research collective Shanzhai Lyric. Titled New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original, the exhibition will explore shanzhai methodologies such as mimicking, redistribution of resources, and parody to create a portrait of New Land Plaza, a former marble storage facility turned mini-mall on Canal Street that was the site of the infamous Bloomberg “Counterfeit Triangle” bust of 2008. Read more
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From June 10th through August 19th, we will present an exhibition by artist Francisca Benítez and her explorations of the city through her work on performance and the politics of space. The exhibition will explore Benítez’s practice in relation to her participation in the defense of public space, including her engagement with groups such as Art Against Displacement, Chinatown Working Group, East River Park Action, and the Stop Shopping Choir. The latter currently occupies the storefront of a former bank at 36 Avenue C in the East Village, which has been transformed into the Earth Church, performing services on Sundays. This exhibition acts as an interlocutor between this site and Storefront’s gallery. Read more
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From September 9th to December 16th, we will present the work of artist Ilana Harris-Babou, an exhibition that reflects on storefronts that engage alternative ways of teaching and learning in the neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn where she grew up. From a cooperatively-run alternative preschool to an Afrocentric martial arts space, Harris-Babou unpacks how the pedagogical use of storefronts has become an essential artery to share knowledge within the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Wingate, Flatbush, and their shifting demographics. Read more
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On the Ground: Open Call
Alongside our exhibitions, we are also launching an open call—a strategy used by Storefront since its early years—to engage a wider public with this theme and serve as a platform for new ideas. The open call will be launched this Spring and invites artists, architects, writers, curators, and creative individuals to submit proposals for a month long exhibition to be presented at Storefront’s gallery in January 2024. The selected application will receive institutional support, a budget, and a fee to develop and realize the project. Open Call details to be released March, 2023.
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On the Ground: Broadcasts
Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release On the Ground: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. Set in their recording studio and performance space in Chinatown, these broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together. The first one, titled Threshold, will air on Sunday, March 26.
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On the Ground: Open Sessions
On the last Wednesday of each month Storefront will open the gallery for On the Ground: Open Sessions, inviting a different guest to curate and host the evening. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding the transformation of New York’s ground floor are shared and discussed.
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On the Ground: Reader
A publication with excerpts from the cumulative research, new commissions, and archival materials will be published at the end of this year-long program.
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