If you are not already aware, some big changes were made this spring and consequently we have made great leaps forward this year.

Formally known as the Salt Gallery, then Salt ArtSpace, we are now Salt Space. Moving from being exclusively arts focused we now define ourselves as “a transformable venue designed to provide a neutral platform for dialogue and community engagement.”

For more information head over to the new site saltspacenyc.com. We hope you are excited about the evolution of our vision. We certainly are!

Also, if you were previously a fan of The Salt Gallery on facebook, we would love for you to show your support and become a fan of the new Salt Space page. If you are subscribed to this blog, we encourage you to subscribe to our new blog, appropriately named “The Pinch”.

We hope you continue to be involved with what is happening here at the Salt Space.

On July 10, we had the second of an ongoing series called, “Social Supper @ SALT,” as an extension of the conversation from June’s GoodMeet@SALT on finding sanctuary.

We gathered food from the various stations set up around the room, to encourage us to move around and mingle. Good food; lovely fresh fruit platters and peach mint soup, home made pizza and thai peanut noodles. After filling our plates with all the yummy food we circled up for an introduction and all answered the question, “Where do you find sanctuary.” Some knew exactly where they found it: in long walks in good books in friendship. Others thought a while before answering: in meditation and prayer, with tea, in the living room.

We heard from Glenda Reed on “The Living Room” project as she showed us video and photographs of people improvising their bodies as moving and breathing living spaces.

Michele Brody shared a very special tea ceremony with us. She had an array of wonderful organic teas set up to choose from. After finishing the tea, she dried out the tea bags for us with an iron and invited us to write our reflections on the bags. We took some time to write about what tea and sanctuary and this social supper meant to us and afterwards hung up the bags on the same lines that we used for the “social experiment on community exhibit.”  Michele will be back to collect these bags and use them as art material for a window installation at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side.

Joe Garrad puts up his tea bag reflection

Claude invited us to journal about  Sanctuary: How do I get there and why is it so hard to get there? in one of the several interesting notebooks he provided for us. Those journals may appear in our next Social Supper.

Joe Garrad showed us a video that he created in order to translate a child’s (Jonah Ramey 8 ) recollection of his dreams through video footage and images. It evoked both smiles and mystery.

We listened to the debut album project of Devin Martin and David Wesson, The Emergence:  an album created by mailing beats and tracks back and forth from Brooklyn to Boston to chronicle stories of homelessness and waking to realization that our purpose might be greater than the immediate selfishness found in the lives around us.  The project’s aim is to give away 1000 CDs in exchange for your contact info which Devin has plans to use to create a shared network of people’s passion projects.

The entire night was filled with great conversation and new friends and we are looking forward to hosting the next Social Supper@SALT and will post more details soon!

For 4 Mondays in the summer, SALT opened its doors from 10AM-5PM for Open Office Hours, a beta co-working group hosted by Erik Fabian of Double Happiness.  Come in and use the space all day for a donation of $5-$10, coffee and WIFI provided. These co-working days will continue until August 10th. Come and tell a friend! You can RSVP for Aug 3 or Aug 10.

SALT was full of people sharing creative ideas and collaborating!

Lucid NYC used the SALT artspace for an event coordinated by David Friedlander on July 16th. It was part-symposium, part-party, and all but banal where three speakers, experts in their fields, spoke for twenty minutes. Daniel Pinchbeck, Dickson Despommier, and Amanda Parks all shared intriguing ideas on future innovations and thought processes, including 2012, vertical farming, and robotics.

Chloe Bass and TJ Hospodar of The Work Office performed SOUP KITCHEN: a Dinner Party for Un- and Underemployed Professionals at SALT on July 20th from 6 – 9pm.  Thinking of people close to them affected by the recent cutbacks and layoffs, the two artists sought to fill this need by offering warm, home-cooked meals to anyone hungry.  Some responded to the invitations sent out by Chloe and TJ, as well as The Work Office, but most were passersby pulled off the street with the promise of “FREE FOOD!”  The artists wondered, “Can we beat the odds by eating communally? Considering our neighbors? Sharing our resources?  And how much sharing is too much?”

Excerpt from the project statement: SOUP KITCHEN adopts the structure of a true soup kitchen: meals cooked in bulk, food served cafeteria style with very little individual control over portion size or item choice, and tables where one may be forced to sit with (and interact with the eating habits of) strangers. Who is willing to attend a soup kitchen? Who only feels comfortable at a dinner party?  SOUP KITCHEN walks the line between economic reality, perceived status, and dining preference.

It was a pretty diverse audience group and many Soup Kitchen attendees participated in the SALT’s “social experiment on community” by contributing and arranging drawings.  Those being fed were able to give back to the space in an unorthodox but beautiful way, hopefully giving them a sense of pride and purpose in a situation where they would normally only be takers.

SALT is being blogged about! Check out:

The Neighborbee Blog and Asphalt Eden for more SALTy goodness!

‘a social experiment on community‘ is the current installation at SALT:

Built in 2 days, with 2 projects, 4 carts and 200 balloons, it will continue to evolve over the span of the next 2 months.

As SALT continues to define its identity as a contemporary community art space, we solicited drawings and photographs from the streets and squares of New York for a ‘community exhibition’.   An initial 349 drawings and 293 photographs were collected from this unusual call for proposals asking different communities in NYC for their participation and response to:

•    ‘what would you draw if you had one second for every year you’ve been alive?’
•    find and photograph ‘purity in the city’

The installation was collaboratively designed and built in three days by a team of volunteers, incorporating a hanging system of twine weighted by water balloons.

Viewers are encouraged to become participants by arranging images or contributing responses of their own.

Together we are organizing and defining communities as temporal, fluid, dynamic, interconnected;  based on but not limited to demographics, experiences, memories, needs…

Come to public hours on Mondays from 6 – 8pm (or email saltartspace(at) gmail.com and suggest a time you want to come).  We’ll introduce different materials and see the installation change over the course of 2 months.

more about the projects:

Modified granny carts-turned-art carts loaded with luscious Rives printmaking paper, charcoal pencils, stopwatches, and a can of fixative galavanted about Central Park, Washington Square, Tompkins Square, (and 4 other locations) with speakers blaring a playlist to provoke curiosity if not downright disarm NY-ers from their 9 to 5 workday.

Asking people to sketch one second for the amount of years they’ve been alive was inspired by an idea Noah Ramey had as he turned 12 this year and calls it, appropriately: “the 12-second sketch“.

‘Purity in the City’ was initially a personal photo project of Neil Brown‘s that he graciously let us appropriate on a larger scale, taking balloons from Riverside Park to The Highline to Coney Island.  Some additional photos uploaded on our flickr.

mmm… smells like paint and glue…

will we finish installing in time???

come find out! 6:30 – 8:30pm tonight @ SALT

SOUNDRAISER

Originally uploaded by saltartspace

rolling out the red carpet for our peeps…!

we raised over $1000 tonight – and that makes you a VIP!

if you took photos at SOUNDRAISER tonight, be sure to tag them ‘haven’ on your flickr to add to our set!

Continue the conversations from Goodmeet@SALT, aka “artsy-fartsy conference-y type thing“

July 10, 2009
7pm – 10pm
RSVP here
1160 Broadway 5th floor @ 27th St

Glenda Reed finds it in The Living Room

Michele Brody creates it with strangers over a mobile tea ceremony

Michele will perform TEA CART STORIES as part of the
series at Lower East Side Tenement Museum
July 9 & 23
from 4 to 7 pm, 108 Orchard Street

Claude Hubbard invites you to respond to the prompt:
Sanctuary: How do I get there and why is it so hard to get there?

Others to be announced.

social supper @ SALT is an intimate potluck dinner where a Host chooses a theme for the evening; Attendees bring their favorite dish, drink or dessert; and Artists bring their new works – either ones in progress, just completed, or in the ideation stage.  Flavorful conversations ensue.

If you’d like to share your work, please bring a flash drive with images in powerpoint to screen during the evening.

contact saltartspace (at) gmail (dot) com for any questions.
RSVPs required!

For your listening pleasure, Soundraiser is presented in 3 acts packed with a power punch!  Come for one, stay for all!

6pm
Jacob Steele
Peter Layton
Jerrold Jackson
Lion’s Share

8pm
Suzie Sellout
Joanna Williams
Lucas Kwong
Tom LoSchiavo

10pm
Joely Pittman
Jay Reitz (of Raise the Wolf)
Dusty Brown

Tired of overproduced, underbuilt music and art in our culture?

Come to the Soundraiser at SALT artspace and see those walls torn down!

11 Haven artists perform in the MUST-SEE event of the summer!
The lineup:

Dusty Brown
Joely Pittman
Suzy Sellout
Lucas Kwong
Jay Reitz (of Raise the Wolf)
Jerrold Jackson
Lion’s Share
Joanna Williams
and more!

When: Saturday, June 27th 6pm-12midnight
Where: Salt Art Space, 1160 Broadway, 5th Floor (27th Street)
How Much: $10 cover, suggested donation for drinks and food items.
Who to contact with any questions? peter.layton (at) gmail (dot) com

ABOUT HAVEN:
Every Monday night for the past decade artists have sought refuge from the city, from the cacophony, from the stress. They come together to wrestle with their art and to wrestle with their faith. They come with joys and sorrows seeking renewal, healing, safety, community. They come to Haven.  For the past four years Haven, has been the artist-in-residence at Calvary Church.

Nothing makes an evening better than getting outside of yourself. Our city is a big place and it THRIVES on people being giving, compassionate, and caring.  Come join a group of folks like these and watch your heart grow several sizes bigger!