“I don’t travel above 14th Street” is a phrase commonly thrown around among the downtown New York set. But last night, the lower Manhattan art-goers put their anti-midtown sentiments aside and hauled their cameras and skateboards up north—all the way to East 46th Street's 222 Blue—to feast their eyes on a collaborative art exhibit curated by the downtown collective SprezzaturaNY.
While the sheer number of up-and-coming artists involved can feel overwhelming, each young creative managed to turn the giant warehouse into an eclectic and cohesive exhibition space. Walking into the 46th Street renovated warehouse/brownstone space was a bit like walking into the chaotic art school party that you never want to leave, beer and graffiti-splattered brick walls included. The gigantic space is set up like a maze so that each room takes you into a separate installation with aesthetically different mediums and artists. Skate videos from artist Adam Zhu play on loop on an old-school Panasonic television near a room of #veryinternet art involving sexts and Tinder traps. Richard Clarkson’s interactive lamp and speaker system, designed as a hanging cloud with motion-triggered lightning, entertained viewers and inspired a whole slew of Drake Nothing Was the Same album cover selfies.
OC's Michael Elijah also had a dark and slightly twisted installation set up that included a video projection and sound recording. His piece, a social commentary on the recent spike in police brutality, was a stark contrast to the rest of the featured artwork, with a distorted image of a pig showering (“cleaning away the filth”) and audio recording of Eric Garner’s police attack playing in the background.
“The greatest thing about this installation was that it basically came together in one week. Things didn’t really unfold until the last few days when people actually started putting up their pieces,” Elijah told us. “Curating an exhibit and having artists come in and build a show in a week is insane, because people usually take weeks or months to set something to this extent up. It just blends together pretty well because it’s all friends working together.”
After a spellbinding collaborative performance from Brooklyn-based rapper Salomon Faye and saxophonist Isaiah Barr, SprezzaturaNY co-founder Kevin Rivera shared the first time he and his other partners initially looked at the space. “It was empty and beautiful and amazing, and we realized we had to do something here," he said. "Our website’s main objective is to bring artists, musicians, skaters, and other creative people together, so then we just started to hit people up and it ended up becoming a little bit like the six degrees of separation.”
Rivera seems to have as high of hopes as we do for the future of SprezzaturaNY and the artists they feature. “It was such a success; it’s been so great. We would love to do this again and do something different each time. Going forward, we just want to keep this collective that we’re working with and keep them moving and see how it goes.” With an already-hyped opening and an enormous slew of up-and-coming artists contributing to the very first event, we’re guessing the only way to go is up, even if it is to midtown, for these artists.
The 222 Blue exhibit will be up tonight for the last time, so stop by to check it out!
222 East 46th Street
New York, NY
While the sheer number of up-and-coming artists involved can feel overwhelming, each young creative managed to turn the giant warehouse into an eclectic and cohesive exhibition space. Walking into the 46th Street renovated warehouse/brownstone space was a bit like walking into the chaotic art school party that you never want to leave, beer and graffiti-splattered brick walls included. The gigantic space is set up like a maze so that each room takes you into a separate installation with aesthetically different mediums and artists. Skate videos from artist Adam Zhu play on loop on an old-school Panasonic television near a room of #veryinternet art involving sexts and Tinder traps. Richard Clarkson’s interactive lamp and speaker system, designed as a hanging cloud with motion-triggered lightning, entertained viewers and inspired a whole slew of Drake Nothing Was the Same album cover selfies.
OC's Michael Elijah also had a dark and slightly twisted installation set up that included a video projection and sound recording. His piece, a social commentary on the recent spike in police brutality, was a stark contrast to the rest of the featured artwork, with a distorted image of a pig showering (“cleaning away the filth”) and audio recording of Eric Garner’s police attack playing in the background.
“The greatest thing about this installation was that it basically came together in one week. Things didn’t really unfold until the last few days when people actually started putting up their pieces,” Elijah told us. “Curating an exhibit and having artists come in and build a show in a week is insane, because people usually take weeks or months to set something to this extent up. It just blends together pretty well because it’s all friends working together.”
After a spellbinding collaborative performance from Brooklyn-based rapper Salomon Faye and saxophonist Isaiah Barr, SprezzaturaNY co-founder Kevin Rivera shared the first time he and his other partners initially looked at the space. “It was empty and beautiful and amazing, and we realized we had to do something here," he said. "Our website’s main objective is to bring artists, musicians, skaters, and other creative people together, so then we just started to hit people up and it ended up becoming a little bit like the six degrees of separation.”
Rivera seems to have as high of hopes as we do for the future of SprezzaturaNY and the artists they feature. “It was such a success; it’s been so great. We would love to do this again and do something different each time. Going forward, we just want to keep this collective that we’re working with and keep them moving and see how it goes.” With an already-hyped opening and an enormous slew of up-and-coming artists contributing to the very first event, we’re guessing the only way to go is up, even if it is to midtown, for these artists.
The 222 Blue exhibit will be up tonight for the last time, so stop by to check it out!
222 East 46th Street
New York, NY