Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, is the new home to the brainchild of Cordy and Ethan Ryman: Art Cake. Inside a 13,000 square-foot industrial building, renovated by architects Smith&Sauer, the organisation boasts "a flexible multiroom exhibition and event space" on the ground floor, and ten affordably priced studios with one communal space upstairs. The profits made from different events — art exhibitions, installations, film shoots, lectures and dinners — will go towards financing the studios, in which artists can reside from one to two years.
Showing until November 24, the inaugural exhibition is dedicated to American artist Suzanne Bocanegra.
Founder Ethan Ryman spoke to us about the space...
The artists in residence will share a communal space; do you hope they will be influenced and inspired by each other's work, or is it very much a space for independent development?
I think the answer is both. Cordy’s vision was to have a hive of creative thought and production on the residency floor that can also be symbiotic to an extent with the events and hosted shows that happen in the exhibition space. We don’t make any demands of the artists in terms of collaboration, but it is certainly a welcome mode if it works for them. I would say cross-influence and learning is a natural part of being in that environment and that’s one reason diversity of practice and age and background are ideally what we go for. But it is of course up to the selectors to decide in the end.
Suzanne Bocanegra, Valley (2018)
A selection committee will be responsible for choosing the artists who can benefit from the spaces. Will you be looking for a particular common factor between artists - a specific attitude or "vibe”?
The selection committee has no guidelines with regard to any specific attributes for the artists they select. We are tapping some very busy people for this task and so we didn’t want to burden them with meetings or applications or slide shows. They can nominate anyone they want. We get the benefit of what Marina Gluckman (executive director) calls “a circle of trust”; we choose the selectors and trust them with selecting artists who will benefit the program and benefit from the program, the selectors trust the artists they choose to represent them well in the program and the artists trust us to make the program work well and be beneficial to everyone. Out of that pool of nominees, Marina and Cordy choose the class not on quality of work, but with a mind to achieving the greatest diversity of practice, age and background possible.
Photo of Eve Aschheim’s studio at Art Cake
How do you hope the works created as part of the project will interact with the newly refurbished space? Are they expected to adapt specifically to it, as Suzanne Bocanegra's does, in any way?
Although it is certainly possible the artists will have the opportunity to show in the space during their residency, it isn’t something we are offering as part of the deal. Our inaugural show with Suzanne was what we are calling an "Art Cake hosted show" in that we are doing it ourselves. Suzanne is not part of the residency. We will only have the chance to do these hosted shows once a year or so because we expect most of the time we will have to rent the space to keep the residency going. The plan is that if rentals are going well and we know we can pay for everything for the year, we will either host a show ourselves or give the space to a curator at cost.
