Jasper Johns is behind a new venue in New York’s Meatpacking District dedicated exclusively to artist-curated exhibitions. Last year, Johns suggested that the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the non-profit he founded with the composer John Cage, convert a 496-square-foot room next to its offices into a project space. (It was previously used for the occasional meeting.) The board agreed. With that, the Other Room—the foundation’s first foray into public programming—was born.
The foundation has tapped the artist Rachel Foullon, its former programme manager, to organise the inaugural exhibition. Six Doors (19 May-7 August) brings together one work by six artists, each of which evokes a portal, door or barrier. Moving forward, the foundation hopes to present two to three exhibitions every year at 820 Greenwich Street. Each will be organised by a young artist sel ected by the organisation’s artist-heavy board of trustees, which includes Robert Gober, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker and Cecily Brown.
“We’re not really set up to be a gallery—we have regular office hours except for the occasional Saturday—but the idea was to do something artist-centric,” says Stacy Stark, the executive director of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The organisation will provide administrative support and a small honorarium to the curator, but otherwise take “a hands-off approach”, she says.
Some works in the inaugural exhibition are for sale; others are on loan. Stark plans to give “the lion’s share” of the proceeds from any sales back to the artists themselves. What is left over will be used to help fund the Other Room.
The opening show includes two new site-specific works—an ambitious move for a space the size of a small studio apartment. Marianne Vitale’s Joint Fence (for Jasper) (2015) is a 4,000-pound, fence-like sculpture made with steel railroad tracks and hulking wooden beams. Andrea Longacre-White created Dark Corner (2015), a rectangle of black liquid latex and lubricant applied directly to a brick wall that “appears to pull the entire room out of square”, Foullon says.
The Other Room represents an “extraordinarily rare” opportunity “to curate an exhibition that has no commercial aims or other agendas from ‘powers that be’,” Foullon says. The foundation may now have to take meetings elsewh ere, but it’s not a bad trade-off.