Trends and Entertainment

Art Show on a Shoestring

Painting by Lara Allen

When Brooklyn artist Lara Allen scored a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space grant last year, she thought she had secured both a great gallery and up to $3,000 in funding for a meditation on myth and female power entitled I, Daughter of Kong.

Then the funding LMCC hoped to provide fell victim to the recession.

But instead of canceling the show, Allen brought new meaning to her original idea of an artistic collaboration. She began securing donations and soliciting not just creative work from artists, but contributions of time and labor. As a result, the show has gone on—and is, perhaps, even more creative that it would have been. It opened last week and runs through May 10.

The LMCC pitched in by giving her the space for three months instead of six weeks, which allowed Allen to keep her day job while curating works by 22 artists, including R. Crumb and New York painter/perfumer Alexis Karl. Painter Anna Betbeze took up a brush to cover the pristine white 900-square-foot gallery with red paint donated from New York City’s Materials for the Arts program.

Allen managed to keep her total cash outlay to about $200—to buy food for the artists’ reception tonight from 6 to 9 p.m. at the LMCC(125 Maiden Lane, 2nd floor).

She was inspired by the 1980 Times Square Show organized by the New York artists’ cooperative Colab. That June, Jenny Holzer, Julian Schnabel and more a hundred other artists thumbed their noses at recession—and the art establishment—with a historic group show of political, feminist and graffiti art in a former massage parlor near Times Square. Created on a shoestring budget, the show is now widely seen as a crucial launching point for the East Village art scene.

Allen isn’t claiming to have created a similarly pivotal event. But Erin Donnelly, LMCC’s Director of Artist Residencies, says that extending the amount of time Allen could access the space gave rise to additional creativity, including a site-specific installation by Matthew Lusk, that would not have happened otherwise. Donnelly expects more artists to follow Allen’s path of stretching scarce resources to make their visions reality despite the recession.

“Not having any money forced me to be creative and ask for things I would have been afraid to ask for,” Allen says. “Art in general, it’s being creative and willing to sacrifice whatever it is, be it time, materials, money.”

Catherine Curan is a writer based in New York City. She has contributed to the New York Post, Condé Nast Portfolio.com, Time Out New York Kids, Newsday, Crain’s New York Business and many other publications. Her short stories have appeared in Fiction, Many Mountains Moving and Salon Zine.

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