Recession Era: Three Non-Profit Responses

Dire reports of the financial crisis have bred a feel-good journalistic counterpart: human interest stories with a creative-response-to-the-recession twist. Arts journalism has been no exception, with tales of closing galleries piling up alongside reports of DIY ingenuity. Rather than mourn a failing commercial sector, the community newspaper hope is that artists will show their work in ways that bypass such systems entirely. What this marketing of the recession fails to acknowledge, of course, is that artists have always worked both within and without of commercial galleries and traditional non-profits. Three venues in New York that have formed in the last year—Parlour, 106 Green, and Specials—look for site flexibility, providing meaningful frameworks for viewing work outside of a commercial context by artists and curators intimately familiar with that very context.
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