Yes, I know Flux Factory is in Queens. For what it’s worth, they actually started in Brooklyn—in the Monster Island building—and they’re one of the longest-running art collectives currently active. More importantly, though, they are, individually and as a group, terrifically creative, sensationally ambitious, and just unbelievably fun. I change the standards of what I’m going to cover on this site all the time, but the best way to sum it up is this: If I think something is fabulous, I want to cover it. And Flux Factory is fabulous.

Housed in a converted greeting card factory in Long Island City, Flux has fourteen art studios and a staff of six. That’s around twenty people give or take, and in 2011 they held seventy-five different events (here’s a sampling), including art shows, installations, performances, screenings, workshops, lectures, and more. Everything at Flux is done, per their mission statement, with a “rigorous commitment to the collaborative process.” They have four major thematic group shows each year, involving art, performance, and community events, utterly transforming the gallery space each time. Recently there was “iSpy,” a “participatory collaborative game show” that encorporated guessing games, livestreaming, piñatas, feminism according to World of Warcraft, and tweets from the Flux toilet whenever it was flushed. Before that was “Banquet for America,” a month-long extravaganza that saw the gallery redone as an entire village, with a fifty-foot banquet table-cum-catwalk down the center and each artist manning his or her own shop, “selling” things like donuts and haircuts and feminist karaoke (I meant to sing “I Will Survive,” but I ran out of time). In addition, there are dozens of smaller projects, including educational initiatives, resident solo and group shows, guest-curated projects, Flux Radio, and a monthly potluck. There was a death match debate to discuss how artists are interacting with the #OWS movement. There have been lectures on social hijinx, interviewing skills, and kayak-building.

Have I given you a sense of the incredible creativity and diversity of the artists in this group? This is why we live in New York, you guys, or at least why I do: to be able to see and participate in this kind of expectation-thwarting, envelope-pushing, rambunctious creative glee. And listen: the Fluxers are always looking for new friends, new volunteers, and new collaborators, so please, go on up to Queens and check them out. But first check out my interview with Executive Director Christina Vassallo, Residency Director Douglas Paulson, Press & Curatorial fellow Georgia Muenster, and artists Jason Eppink, Adrian Owen, and Richard Nathaniel.

brooklyn spaces: Is there a unifying theme among the artists here? How do you decide who gets to have a studio?
Christina: We’re not focused on a specific genre or discipline. It’s really people who are interested in working collaboratively; that’s our main criteria.
Douglas: Flux is an intentional community, and we rely on consensus-based decision making. The artists choose the next residents, conceptualize and generate the work for the shows, figure out who’s doing the chores. We discuss everything, and everyone has the right to object or bring new terms. Of course, there’s never unanimous agreement on anything, but after a discussion, the people who might not necessarily agree at least feel like they’ve had a chance to be heard. One thing that comes up a lot is the idea of “fluxiness,” which is a word we all know but no one can actually define. It’s the way we describe whatever it takes for someone to endure being part of this crazy mess.
Adrian: I think it’s wrapped up with the idea that we often take on ambitious projects that we’re not quite sure how we’re going to do and then figure it out as we go.
Georgia: Fluxiness to me is a cross between ingenuity and impossibility. And the color green.
Adrian: We want to make sure we’re perceived as professional as well as fun. So that’s part of fluxiness too, knowing that we have the heads behind all these crazy things we’re trying to do.
Jason: Yeah, but also? Fuck professionality. I think it’s more being able to execute what you can and pulling it through somehow. A lot of our peers don’t execute at the level we do. We actually make shit happen.
Georgia: We do so so so much. It’s kind of preposterous how much we do.
Adrian: Getting a fully functional administration rolling has allowed us to produce so much more.

brooklyn spaces: Do you find any conflict between the organization required and the creative space of doing these sorts of projects?
Adrian: Yeah, that’s what we’re navigating all the time. It’s like herding cats trying to organize artists.

brooklyn spaces: Jordan from Silent Barn said exactly the same thing about musicians. Tell me about a favorite event or exhibit you’ve seen or been a part of here. I came to the opening of “Banquet for America” last month, and it was absolutely incredible.
Christina: That show was particularly fluxy in that it required extensive participation from the artists and the audience, with all the artists’ shops and performances. The more serious side of the show was an anti-capitalist statement about how mom-and-pop shops and independent retailers are getting pushed aside by big-box retail stores. Another show I loved was “Sea Worthy,” which, in typical Flux fashion, experimented with the boundaries of what an exhibition could be. It was in conjunction with the Gowanus Studio Space and EFA Project Space, and Swimming Cities contributed as well. We paired artists with boat builders to make a whole flotilla of artworks, and we brought members of the public around the New York City waterways. Again there was a serious discussion beneath the presentation: The water is the largest open space in New York City, and we wanted to show people that there are ways we can reclaim it.
Douglas: One of my favorites was “Congress of Collectives.” It was completely different from these sorts of spectacle-heavy shows. We invited representatives of more than thirty collectives from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and we set up projects, discussions, panels, and talks designed to explore what it means to work collectively.
Georgia: One of my favorites was “Going Places (Doing Stuff),” our bus tour series, where you’d get on a bus and not know where you were going.
Jason: That’s what I was going to say too!

brooklyn spaces: I didn’t know that was a Flux project. Where were some of the places that you took people?
Jason: This was a three-summer project. The first year I went on three of them, and it blew me away, it totally made my summer. I wasn’t part of Flux then, but when I heard they were doing it again, I had to get involved. My friend Matt Green and I led one called “Quest for Immortality.” First we went to visit the Self-Transcendence 3100, which is a 3100-mile foot race around a single city block, started by the late guru Sri Chinmoy. Then we met Ashrita Furman, who holds the most Guinness World Records, and we set our own records, like “most people flossing their teeth with the same string of dental floss at once.”
Adrian: I beat some fifteen-year-old girl’s record for speed-eating a bag of Skittles.
Jason: Next we went to visit a monument of Crete that this old guy has been building in his yard in Bay Ridge, and then we went to Staten Island and climbed these abandoned liquid natural gas towers. We finished at Lemon Creek State Park, where this guy has been building rock cairns along the beach for about ten years. It used to be this trashy, gross place, and he has completely transformed it.
Adrian: I have two favorite Flux experiences: “The End of the End of the End,” the last show at the previous space, and “Housebroken,” the first show at this one. They were absolute mayhem from a curatorial standpoint, but just so much fun. Every single room had something happening in it at all times. There were like 200 artists involved in each. Every nook and cranny was programmed. It was intense and awesome.

brooklyn spaces: Did you perform or curate or make something for them?
Adrian: My metal band White Limo played both, and at “Housebroken” I sang opera in the shower with the door open and the shower curtain closed, wearing gold trunks. One girl actually pulled back the curtain because she probably thought it was a recording, and she just screamed and ran out.
Jason: Another awesome thing about that show was that everyone was invited to give us something we could keep, as a way to have artists help us finish the space. Most of the artworks that you see around this space came from that show.
Richard: I think my favorite experience is the monthly Flux Thursday. It’s all the people you know and tons of people you don’t, and everybody’s showing work and drinking and talking and high-fiving.
Georgia: Those are potlucks. We love to feed people.
Richard: Also the Greenpeace stuff was dope. We worked with them to sell real estate on top of black coal mountains. Just light stuff, you know.
Adrian: It was the performance-art portion of a project for a coal awareness tour they were doing with one of their Ice Breakers. It was in Chelsea Piers, right next to the driving range. One of our artists got hit by a golf ball.

brooklyn spaces: So when an artist has a studio here, is it only about working collectively?
Douglas: No, everyone here is pursuing their individual art and their own career in one way or another as well.
Christina: Through the years we’ve gotten really good at focusing on the collaborative aspects, and now we’re starting to get better at nurturing the individual simultaneously.
Douglas: Flux used to be a lot of people in their early twenties who just got out of school, but now it’s older, more serious. We had a Fulbright Scholar here, we have career artists. But we’re extremely conscientious about maintaining the existing community. We’ve dedicated one studio to people who have had a residency here already, so there are always former residents coming back. That’s extremely important, and it’s something that we’ve been very conscious of as we’ve transformed to a formal residency program: how to maintain that kind of cohesive fluxiness.

brooklyn spaces: How do you think Flux is affected by being in Long Island City?
Christina: There are so many things we get here that we wouldn’t get anywhere else. If we were in Manhattan we’d just be another group fighting for the same resources and the same eyeballs and audience.
Adrian: It definitely makes it harder to attract foot traffic, though. Queens holds such a stigma—even though it’s easier to get here than to most of Bushwick. It’s like, “Did you say Queens? I don’t know, man.” So that’s a big hurdle.
Georgia: It’s somewhat absurd to me; there are dozens of arts organizations out in Long Island City. Sculpture Center, Noguchi, PS1, Fisher Landau, Socrates Sculpture Park, Museum of the Moving Image…
Douglas: And the fact that we’re not in Brooklyn has allowed us to make our own identity rather than being just another Bushwick space.
Jason: I feel like if we were in Brooklyn we’d be overrun. I think it’s kind of to our advantage that people think it’s not as easy to get here. The people who want to get here, get here. It’s already an awesome, big community.
Adrian: We’re starting to get a few relationships locally. We’ve been here long enough, and people are starting to figure out what we’re up to.
Jason: I love that the people from the neighborhood see us as these crazy art people. We get to be that for a lot of New York. My first experiences of Flux were like, holy hell. This is much better than art. It’s wacky and playful people doing really exuberant things. I actually think that gets back to what fluxiness is. I think that’s sort of our legacy.
Adrian: I totally agree. That’s exactly what happened to me. I had a friend who lived in Queens and I was like “What? I’m not going over there.” And then Flux asked my band to play, so I made the trek—and I’ve been here for seven years. My eyes were opened in a whole new way. I was like, “You can do this?”
Georgia: It’s the same story for me too. The sense of playfulness is just unmatched anywhere else.
Jason: There’s no context for this sort of stuff in mainstream culture. To be exposed to this happening? It’s amazing.

Opening Reception: May 11th, 7-10 pm
Exhibition Dates: May 11th-18th, 2012
Hours: by appointment only, contact alison.c.nguyen@gmail.com
Location: The Oracle Club, 10-41 47th Ave., Long Island City, 11101

The newly opened Oracle Club in Long Island City, Queens presents Irreversible Damage, a solo exhibition of works by Flux Factory Artist-in-Residence Alison Nguyen, from May 11th-18th.

The site-specific arrangement of art is primarily comprised of Nguyen’s panoramic prints created with deceptively simple photographic devices such as plastic “toy” cameras and handmade pinhole cameras constructed from readymade objects. In the series Nguyen ignores the numbered frames of the film, treating the negative as a continuous image and bringing to light instances of time which fall outside the purview of conventional narrative form.

Nguyen’s in-camera multiple exposures reveal overlapping scenes; flickers of light; faces, shadows, and shades of color that at times merge in and out of abstraction. The stories told by each piece are slippery. They braid and unfold variously depending on where you stand in relation to the large, scroll-like prints which wrap around the corners and crevices of the space.

Cultural critic Brian Miller writes, “The clock is an unreliable narrator. In Alison Nguyen’s multi-layered narratives, it guides us to memories we’ve forgotten we ever had, to wonder wheels and wristwatches, to plates of unfinished breakfast and plaster saints, to luminous spaces somewhere outside of the demesnes of time. Like silent filmstrips loosed from the reel, Nguyen’s photographs dare us to form a story. But this plot we’ve been given is unmapped terrain; it is where the fiction slips away from the reality, where past cleaves from present to future…

…Most urgently, these beguilingly translucent images implore us to trace the material of our own lives; our findings are bound to be mutable. We can go in search of lost time, we may stand stolidly in the present or pine for the future, but Nguyen incisively seems to choose none of the above. If time is linear, then that line forms a circle; if it is a journey, then we are always en route. Perhaps it is nothing more than a trace, the faintest smear of lipstick lingering on a worn collar. We can only say what Nguyen shows us: that time exists; it is present, watchful, irreversible.”

About the Artist:
Alison Nguyen graduated from Brown University in 2009 with a B.A. in Literary Arts. Since, she has exhibited widely at both non-traditional and traditional venues including the The Tribeca Project Space, The Flux Factory, The Rogue Space, The Red Filter Gallery, 440 Gallery, The Target Gallery, The Westside Rifle & Pistol Range, and Gallery Hanahou. She has received awards from Mensa, Nikon, The Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, Brown University, and the New York Community Trust.

Alison Nguyen is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Flux Factory in Long Island City, where she balances her studio practice with art direction and design. Irreversible Damage is sponsored, in part, by Nguyen’s New York Community Trust fellowship through Flux Factory.

SEPTEMBER EXHIBITION: Public Trust
“Public Trust” will examine the relationship between our formal and informal cultural institutions and their audiences. Through sanctioned and guerrilla interventions in New York City and beyond, this project questions how institutions are delivering knowledge and if they meet the needs of contemporary society. By subverting the staid practices employed by our most popular pillars of culture, we hope to introduce challenging work, form new audiences for each site, and have existing audiences experience something unexpected.

We are seeking proposals that celebrate the crucial roles public institutions fill, as well as their strategies to engage visitors and stay relevant to their lives. We invite artists to reveal the hidden values of our institutions, generate new social relationships, and explore and/or exploit the assumptions that our institutions and their patrons make.

We encourage artworks and actions that can be displayed within the Flux Factory gallery or that occur at public locations, such as: city tour buses, Staten Island Ferry, Times Square, New York Public Library, Bronx Zoo, Roosevelt Island gondola, Central Park, Hayden Planetarium, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and any other cultural destination you wish to celebrate and/or improve.

Art historical landmarks and watershed moments that influenced this exhibition concept include: the cancellation of Hans Haacke’s solo exhibition in 1971 at the Guggenheim Museum as a result of the aritist’s research into personal connections between the museum’s trustees; Fred Wilson’s work as a museum guard; the historic agreement that ensures the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon access to the Willamette Meteorite at the American Museum of Natural History for ceremonial purposes; Occupy Museums; and the Guerrilla Girls’ response to Kynaston McShine’s 1984 statement, “Any artist who is not in my show should rethink his career.”

The exhibition will take place in September, 2012. To apply, email exhibitions@fluxfactory.org a single PDF (5MB or less) containing your project proposal, support sketches or images, examples of similar work, and your resumé or biography, with “Public Trust Proposal” in the subject line, no later than May 31 at 11:59pm. Applicants will be notified of our decision on June 10, 2012.

Habitable Spaces Crew

Shane Heinemeier and Alison Ward left Flux in January to begin a non-profit arts and agricultural project titled Habitable Spaces in Kingsbury, Texas. Their goal is to build a sustainable farm and artist residency program that will act as a trading post, research outpost, and an experiment in collective living that will include public hands-on training sessions. They hope to be ready to receive their first artists in September, 2012. Habitable Spaces has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the construction of a kitchen pavilion.

Hannah Heilmann is curating a group show in Copenhagen titled Prune in the Sky at Toves Galleri Contemporary Workout Space that opens April 13th, and includes works by Wieteke Heldens (Netherlands), Anna Lundh (Sweden) and Matthew-Robin Nye (Canada).

Meg Keys has been accepted to Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide (SPARC), a community arts engagement that places artists-in-residence at senior centers across the five boroughs of NYC.

Chen Tamir is co-curating a group show titled Emotional Blackmail with Markús Þór Andrésson at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario. The show is open from May 9th – July 8th, 2012.

Douglas Paulson and the Parfyme crew will be re-imagining and re-filming King Kong in the Tingbjerg community.  It’s part of the Visit Tingbjerg project that’s happening in Copenhagen this May.  There’s a very dubious posting on wikipedia about Tingjberg.

Katrina Neumann has just been awarded a Master of Fine Arts Diploma through Tufts University in collaboration with The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She will be taking residence at the Elsewhere Collective from May to June.

Janne Höltermann is the Luther Gregg Sullivan Visiting Artist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and is currently teaching courses in Digital Media.

Angela Washko is one of four recipients of the 2012-2013 Terminal Award, granted to specific projects in new media and internet based art. She will have a solo exhibition at Terminal: Austing Peay State University Gallery in Clarksville, TN to present her new work The Founding of the ‘Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness’ in World of Warcraft, time TBA. In May 2012, she is participating in LEVEL  at The Arts Center for the Capital Region.

Tom Watson will be in residence at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia at their campus in Medellin from mid-April to mid-May. He plans to document and work in response to the practices to the inhabitants of the Moravia neighborhood, who sustain the community by recuperating recyclable materials from the municipal dump.

• Article about Flux and The Infamous Outpost
• Exhibition opening announcement at Spanien 19c gallery
• Photo of us preparing for our project during the opening of the new art center, Godsbanen
• Our cozy Flux Thursday events in Aarhus

Our very first Flux Death Match gladiator-debators got in the pugilistic spirit well before convening at the Flux gallery on March 21st for an historic art world melee. On the day of the event, Paddy Johnson allied herself with Hrag Vartanian in a debate-til-the-rhetorical-death against John Powers and William Powhida in this blog post on Art Fag City. There was also some trash talking on Twitter, where Hrag Vartanian promised to “eat their hearts” and John Powers chided that “reading about Occupy Museum in preparation for tomorrow’s #deathmatch is pissing me off.”

Our audience chimed in during the event via Twitter, too. Some highlights include:
@jen_dalton accused us of false advertising – “Flux factory Art and OWS #deathmatch surprisingly high-minded and un-deathy.”

@clairenicole – “@hrag asks ‘what if Rosa Parks had been a performance artist?’ Major #deathmatch impact question.”

@museumnerd – “Artists are poor people that rich people like and are not afraid of.”-@starwarsmodern at the @Flux_Facrtory #deathmatch.”

@manbartlett – “Strange that @starwarsmodern keeps saying ‘they’ and ‘you’ and then follows that up with how he wants #ows to look.”

@manbartlett – “Paddy says there’s a moral imperative for artists to get involved with the Occupy movement. #deathmatch.”

@dylanschenker observed, “@starwarsmodern is wrong. Nobody should say what #ows is about. Narrows Focus of movement. Must learn to sacrifice for nothing.”

@mariuswatz – “#deathmatch takeaway pt.2: How did it even get this messed up in the first place unless artists are complicit in their own demise?”

We at Flux were too fearful of the blood, guts, and gore to declare a real winner, so we determined all four panelists winners with a silent display of twinkle fingers. In case you missed it, you can hear the Flux Death Match broadcast on free103point9 on March 31 from 7 – 9 pm.

(photo courtesy Claire Sexton)

The exhibition of timeline paintings provide a people’s history of everything from the development of alternative lifestyles to the evolution of teen culture. Included in the show is Bohemian Tree V1, a version of the silkscreen on vellum piece included in Flux Factorys’ Box Set (which are still available for purchase!) The piece is also featured in a favorable Village Voice review of the exhibition.

Flux Factory is thrilled to be one of the initial recipients of a grant from A Blade of Grass, along with More Art. This year we have been awarded $20,000 for general operating costs and capacity-building initiatives.

Thank you for funding vital cultural production, A Blade of Grass!

Flux TV: March 12th from New Age Beverages on Vimeo.

JUNE EXHIBITION: Lawrence’s Hanging Garden
Calling all architects, urban planners, green thumbs, seed bombers, urban farmers, permaculturalists, builders, designers, and artists! Flux Factory requests your hacks and innovative approaches toward urban gardening and farming for Lawrence’s Hanging Garden, an exhibition that will debut June 2012.

Flux Factory’s venue houses a unique artist residency program and ambitious exhibition schedule. Our building features over 2,000 square feet of south-east exposed terrace roofs as well as a dark courtyard and a large gallery space. We’d like you to help us turn them into a garden, a social space, and an urban farm.

Lawrence’s Hanging Garden will reflect the diversity of relationships that New Yorkers have with their plants. Projects, installations, and artworks will be displayed in the Flux Factory gallery (naturally dark, cool, protected, insular), on its roof (unpredictable, exposed, bright), and ideally reaching out to the random patches of earth in our neighborhood of Long Island City (ripe with potential). Re-imagine urban spaces both private and public in an effort to bring resourcefulness and ingenuity to our immediate community.

We’re open to any suggestion, but are specifically looking for artists to design a deck, sitting area, shaded area, an outdoor theatre, a composting system, a water catchment system, and a greenhouse. The exhibition will be further enriched by a series of classes/workshops exploring various ideas presented, a gardening residency to maintain the plantworks and installations throughout the duration of the show, and a neighborhood fruit produce exchange.

To apply, email exhibitions@fluxfactory.org a multi-page PDF (5MB or less) containing your project proposal, sketches/images to support your proposal, examples of similar work, and resumé or bio, no later than March 15th at 11:59pm. Applicants will be notified of our decision the first week of April.

APRIL EXHIBITION: iSpy
Flux Factory is seeking proposals from game designers, technical wizards, emcees, performers, set designers, house bands, and all manner of mischief makers! We need your help to create iSpy, a live reality show meets stage show spectacle meets video game that combines game design and theater with the topsy-turvy power of networked cameras in public spaces.

The experience will revolve around players carrying networked cameras in public space, beaming images back to the gallery-turned-theater as they compete to finish absurd challenges with the audience’s help (e.g.: corralling strangers to swing at pinatas, in-store scavenger hunts, and impromptu games of Balderdash on the street). The Flux theater will be rigged with cameras and surprises too, turning everyone into unwitting players.

As an interactive and theatrical game experience, this project is not limited to the gallery. The production of iSpy will be highly collaborative, with all invited creators helping to form events open to the public during the last two weekends of April 2012.  We need collaborators to make mini-games, elaborate scoreboards, 70’s game show-style sets, spectacular lighting design, and surprising interactions, and we need house bands, emcees, actors, technical crew, facilitators, and much more to make it happen.

To apply, please submit the following to fluxfactory.ispy@gmail.com

I) A short proposal that details your conceptual or logistical involvement, 500 words max. Include any applicable sketches, designs, instructions, etc. as a JPG or PDF.
II) Documentation of previous related work or a list of applicable skills, maximum 2 pages, 5 images, or 5 minutes of video, sent as PDFs, JPGs, or a website link.
III) Resumé or bio, maximum 2 pages. Include a website if you have one.

Proposals are due no later than Feb 28th at 11:59pm, and applicants will be notified by mid-March.

Journalist in Exile: A Profile of Lawman Lynch from FramingTheCausePictures on Vimeo.

In collaboration with Vaudeville Park (Brooklyn), Flux Factory presents a television episode for Video Vaudeville, a weekly show on Manhattan Neighborhood Networks. Flux Factory’s episode, featuring works from Flux Factory Artists-in-Residence and Alumni: Alexandra Wolkowicz, Jean Barberis and Alexis Lautier, Sanaz Mazinani, Miatta Kawinzi, Angela Washko, and Douglas Paulson. The episode will air on December 17 at 10pm (TWC Channel 67, RCN Channel 55).

Bo Bartlett, "Magical Thinking"

Flux Factory’s Not-So-Silent Auction & Gala is swiftly approaching! We’ve put together an auction website so that you can bid online early and from afar, in case you can’t make it to the event on December 20th.

Do you love street art? Then take a look at SWOON’s gorgeous “Ice Queen” print. For digital art enthusiasts we’re offering three Manfred Mohr works from the Klangfarben series and a laser engraved work by Marius Watz. And for diehard New Yorkers, we have a signed Duke Riley print that was on display in subway cars this year, and Jer Thorp’s word frequency data visualization of “hope” and “crisis” as they appeared in The New York Times over the course of two decades. Any one interested in current and recent Flux Factory residents would be tickled by the work of Man Bartlett, Ben Dierckx, Angela Washko, and Alex Young.

We also have some incredible works by Holly Coulis, Lori Field, Bo Bartlett, and over 100 other artists!

Bid like you vote: early and often.

image from Gretta Louw's "Controlling_Connectivity"

DECEMBER

Action Club (Chris Domenick, Kerry Downey, Douglas Paulson, and Jo Q Nelson), is working with Hatuey Ramos Fermin and Elizabeth Hamby to examine the oldest record store in NYC – Casa Amadeo.  It’s part of the Bronx River Arts Center’s Shifting Communities series, opening December 2nd.

Miatta Kawinzi‘s solo exhibition of new works, “Am I Phthalo Blue?” opens Thursday December 8th at 3rdEye(Sol)ation Gallery in Brooklyn.

In Paris, Paula Castro will show drawings in “Palindromes,” at Galerie de Roussan, and installing the 2nd part of ”PLANORGA. Plan, Organisation, Désir et Volonté,” at Galeria APDV.  In Buenos Aires, she her show “Esto No Se Mueve De Aca” will be opening at Museo La Ene.

Man Bartlett begins a three month residency at Wassaic Project.

Daupo‘s year long labor, The 2012 Cthulhu Mythos Calendar, is finished.

Gretta Louw‘s project Controlling_Connectivity will be continuing. The exhibition at Art Laboratory Berlin is open through December and into January. On the 16th of January there’ll be an artist talk at the gallery.  She’ll also be showing a work at the European Performance Art Festival at a castle in Poland.

Cecilia Enberg has been awarded Rubus Arcticus, the Culture Grant Award of Norrbotten County Council in Sweden.

Flux Factory has been awarded the DIVA grant by the Danish Arts Council to create a site-specific installation at Spanien 19C in Aarhus, Denmark! In spring, 2012, eight artists will create a temporary Consulate of Flux Factory titled The Infamous and Only Somewhat Ambassadorial Outpost of the Semi-Legitimate Nation of Flux.

We will construct a miniature version of our space within the gallery as a representation of ourselves on foreign soil while inhabiting and space and performing “business as usual,” and in doing so exploring the nature of cultural exchange and mutual pedagogy.

We are grateful to Experimental TV Center and the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts for recognizing Flux Factory in this way.

NOVEMBER
In November, Gretta Louw is doing a 10 day residential performance at Art Laboratory Berlin, followed later in the month with a solo exhibition at the same space. The opening for that show will be the 25th of November.

Alexandra Wolkowicz will be taking part in “Home and Away,” at ISE Cultural Foundation opening November 4th.

Gretta Louw is also taking part in the Neukoelln Import annual exhibition “Koffer” and the WerkStadt KunstSatellit exhibition for Nachtundnebel in Berlin during November.

OCTOBER
Alexandra Wolkowicz will be taking part in ‘Art in Odd Places’ with her ‘Birds’ Ear View’ collective. Birds Ear View collective will be active on 14th Street from October 1st – 4th. Free birds, free art, free money.

Join Alexandra Wolkowicz and Birds Ear View for a one-off audiovisual installation at Theaterlab on October 2nd.

Alex Young has a site specific installation in Dwell, an exhibition at Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy NY (71 Mill Street) opening Saturday, October 8th.

The Field of Distribution at Making, Meaning, and Context: A Radical Reconsideration of Arts’ Work is a panel discussion Alex Young is speaking in. (Goddard College- Plainfield, VT.  Friday, October 14th at 3:30.)

Miatta Kawinzi’s film Amrka will be a part of the Reel Sisters of the African Diaspora film festival held October 15th & 16th at the Kumble Theater in Brooklyn.

Alison Ward and Shane Heinemeier are having a fundraiser party/silent auction/performance event at Flux Factory on October 29th to support their Habitable Spaces project.

SEPTEMBER
In September, Douglas Paulson and Ward Shelley will be traveling through the DeCordova Museum without ever touching the floor, building a piece called Grow Or Die as we go.  It’s part of Temporary Structures: Performing Architecture in Contemporary Art.

Inspired by an old Fluxer expression, Nick Normal will be exhibiting his interactive toy-sculpture Your Lack of Stress is Stressing Me Out at the 2nd annual World Maker Faire at the NY Hall of Science, September 17 & 18.

Alison Ward and Angela Washko are collaborating on a live performance as the featured artists at ACNY’s annual donor cultivation event on September 27th.

AUGUST
In August, Douglas Paulson is participating in the EFA’s Studio Residency for New York City Arts Workers.

Fluxer Gretta Louw recently presented work at MarinArt. Video documentation can be viewed here.  This summer the MarinArt series at Marina 59 has been curated by new Flux contributor Arthur Poisson.

Miatta Kawinzi will be one of the artists in the 2nd annual Black August Art Exhibition at the Brecht Forum, with the reception held Saturday, August 20th.

Alex Young‘s Space Was the Place at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts – North Adams, is on display from August 25 – September 25.  The opening reception is at 6 – 9 pm on Thursday, August 25.

Adrian Owen will be performing in Panoply Lab’s new opera project Institute_Institut at The LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (31-10 Thomson Avenue Long Island City, NY) on Thursday August 25th at 7 pm. There are more dates throughout August and September.

A video work by Angela Washko is being screened in Paradoxes in Video at Garage Gallery in San Diego, CA.

Say Something Nice happened. Jason Eppink and Alex Young designed the podium and Alex fabricated it. Jason also shot the video.

I’m going to suggest that collectors look at work being done by a variety of up-and-coming artists associated with the Flux Factory art collective in LIC. There is a vibrance and connection that just feels very tangible and relevant to me and captures a certain zeitgeist that I don’t see reflected as much in more established galleries these days.

Mr. Griffin, love is a two way street.

JULY

Ivan Argote has a one-week solo exhibition at NURTUREart in Brooklyn (910 Grand Street). The opening reception is Friday July 8th from 7pm to 11pm.

Wieteke Heldens will be participating in “Dashes & Dots,” a group show organized through the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership. Curated by Flux Executive Director Christina Vassallo, this exhibition will show artworks inside of storefronts along Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Wieteke’s work will be on display in the Bechamel storefront, located at 441 Myrtle Avenue, from June 17 – July 8, 2011.

Alex Young’s solo exhibition ‘Worldshaving’ at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center – Buffalo, NY, is on view until July 8, 2011.

Recent Flux Factory resident Hannah Heilmann has an exhibition called Hannah Heilmann & Fausto Falchi at Viafarini in Milan, Italy.  The opening is Tuesday 12 July, at 18.30 (6.30pm), and the artists are showing work from their residency at ‘Memories and Encounters.’

Fluxers Angela Washko and Alex Young are participating in Chain Letter an exhibition taking place world-wide at a number of galleries.  Their works will be at Samsøn Gallery in Boston (450 Harrison Avenue/29 Thayer Street-Boston, MA 02118). The opening reception is the evening of Saturday July 16th.

Alison Ward is doing a large scale street performance in Manchester, England on July 30th.

AUGUST

Why Participate?, an exhibition curated by Angela Washko opens at Flux Factory on Friday August 5th at 6:30 pm and goes late.  Flux Factory resident Jason Eppink and Flux Factory’s Residency Director Douglas Paulson are among the 11 exhibiting artists.

Cheap Paradise of Familiar Tasks and Places, a two-person exhibition featuring Yana Dimitrova and Angela Washko opens at Flux Factory on Friday August 19th from 6:30 pm – 10 pm.

Alex Young’s Space Was the Place at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts – North Adams, is on display from August 25 – September 25.  The opening reception is at 6 – 9 pm on Thursday, August 25.

ONGOING

Residency Director Douglas Paulson and board member Chen Tamir are featured in a social practice panel in conjunction with the exhibition Double Take Triple Give at Moby Bat Yam (also curated by Tamir). http://vimeo.com/23902948

Alison Ward and Shane Heinemeier are participating in a residency exchange starting mid-June and ending in August at the Islington Mill in Manchester UK.  In exchange Flux Factory welcomes Tom Watson from the Mill.

Jean Barberis and Georgia Muenster are organizing a series of excursions for Sea Worthy, this summer’s nautical and boat-building show! Read more about it here: http://www.fluxfactory.org/projects/sea-worthy/

Flux resident Gretta Louw just received a grant for a 3-month artist residency at Warnayaka Arts Centre in Lajamanu (an outback desert Aboriginal town in central Australia) for next year!

Fluxers Alison Ward and Shane Heinemeier are currently doing research for their Habitable Spaces Project they are launching in Texas.  They have also been invited to participate in the 2014 Rural England Biennial.

We are so grateful to Bloomberg Philanthropies for awarding Flux Factory a grant this year in the amount of $15,000. Their Arts Advancement Initiative supports small and mid-sized arts and cultural organizations that are integral to the strength of New York City. The initiative is designed to provide unrestricted general operating funds on an annual basis for up to two years.

As a fiscally lean organization that runs on the blood, sweat, and giggles of our fantastic volunteers, this grant will have a major impact on what we can offer our audience and participants. Flux is thrilled to be recognized by this important program!

Flux Factory’s Board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Christina Vassallo as Executive Director. She succeeds Chen Tamir, who, after five years of involvement with Flux as a Curator and Executive Director, had a major impact on its artistic programming and greatly expanded its organizational capacity.

According to Board member Nick Griffin, “Chen Tamir has done so much in her role as Executive Director to guide Flux through what has been a very challenging, but also very fruitful period. So it is of course with much sadness, and a great deal of whining, that I have accepted her decision to step down. That said, I could not be more excited or confident about the prospect of working with Christina Vassallo. She brings the aesthetic sensibility of a curator, the organizational skills of an administrator, and the passion of a true believer in the transformative power of an organization like Flux.”

Christina Vassallo joined Flux Factory in January 2010. As Adjunct Curator she co-curated the most recent Flux exhibition, The Typhoon Continues and So Do You. She is spearhearding additional upcoming projects, including hosting a quarterly meet-up and curator’s support network, as well as an interlocking series of events that address key concepts of collaborative art-making practices (Congress of the Collectives). As Executive Director of Flux Factory, she plans to preserve the best of Flux Factory’s unique culture and mission while further define the organization’s relationship to the larger cultural landscape of New York City. By procuring resources for projects, arranging collaborations with other collectives and partnering organizations, and providing a welcoming context for seemingly impossible ideas, Vassallo hopes to expand Flux Factory’s profile as an incubator for the creation of new artworks.

Vassallo made her curatorial debut in 2003 with a series of weekend-long exhibitions in a Queens apartment. Since then she has organized projects for a variety of venues. Notable projects include a 40-person exhibition in the abandoned St. Cecilia’s convent (system:system), a miniature golf course inspired by US immigration policy for Jersey City Museum (The Golden Door), a program of digital artworks projected onto the Manhattan Bridge through NYC DOT (Bright Nights), and a traveling show about macabre tendencies in contemporary Norwegian art at chashama and Lafayette College (DARKNESS DESCENDS: Norwegian Art Now). Vassallo previously served as Associate Director of Kinz, Tillou + Feigen gallery and ART&IDEA gallery, as well as Assistant Curator at American Federation of Arts. In 2007 she founded Random Number, her curatorial platform. She holds a B.A. in art history from New York University and an M.A. in visual arts management from NYU.

If you can imagine yourself as part of this group portrait, the Flux Artist-in-Residence program may be right for you! We are currently accepting applications from cultural producers–artists, curators, musicians, philosophers, whathaveyou–for the end of 2011 through 2012. Read more about the residency program here and apply here.

EFA Project Space, Flux Factory, and The Gowanus Studio Space partner to bring you Sea Worthy (working title), an experiment in, exploration of, and tribute to maritime art. Beginning in late spring and continuing through the summer of 2011, Sea Worthy will combine exhibitions, workshops, and artist-led events in and around New York City’s waterways and waterfronts.

With over 70 islands and 700 miles of coastline, New York City is a formidable archipelago; this collective project aims to prompt a discussion of access to and use of the waterways of New York – and to reclaim, if modestly, the largest open space in the city – while engaging with related themes in contemporary art practice.  We are seeking artists, boat builders, and creative people to participate in this collective and layered endeavor, and we are soliciting proposals for workshops, construction projects, performances, interactive events, and exhibition-ready artwork. Participants will contribute to one or more of the three main project areas:

Exhibition:
EFA Project Space, on West 39th Street in Manhattan, will host an exhibition exploring the notion that artists and makers employ boats not just as vehicles but as open platforms for social experimentation and as metaphors for personal, artistic, and collective freedom. Plans, diagrams, live footage, photo documentation, animations, re-enactments, and models are all welcome. For more info on EFA Project Space, click here.

Workshops and Projects:
The Gowanus Studio Space will provide a venue for workshops and projects directly connected to maritime activities and culture. We invite boat building workshops, presentations, lectures, book clubs, community meetings, talks, and debriefings that allow the public to participate in the artistic process. Proposals can be for single events and happenings or for projects that span multiple weeks, making use of our open gallery space, wood, metal, and printmaking facilities.  In order to inform your proposal, please see our website for more information about our facilities, past projects, and ongoing programs.

Boats for Public Voyages:
Flux Factory will enlist a crew of boat builders and designers to build a fleet of seaworthy boats. The public will be invited to sail off with Flux Factory and go on expeditions exploring the waterways of New York throughout the summer, on over a dozen ships specially designed and built for this project.  Additional events may include boat jousting, a circumnavigation of Manhattan, bird watching expeditions, and various discussions and panels with experts to be held on the subject of all things nautical.

For more information, submission guidelines, or to apply please click here!

Deadline: Entries must be received via e-mail on or before 5 pm EST on March 7, 2011. Applicants will be notified of their involvement on April 2, 2011.

If you have any questions, please e-mail ben (at ) gowanusstudio.org.

What- EXPERT ODDITIES: SHOW AND TELL (a night of demonstrations and presentations and celebrations!)
Where- FLUX FACTORY, 39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101
When- Wednesday, January 5, 2010, starts at 8 pm
Contact- Angela Washko (angela.washko@gmail.com)

Do you have an unusual collection of things OR are you an expert on a topic that is oddly specific and unexplored by most of the population? If so…..you should share it at EXPERT ODDITIES: SHOW AND TELL at Flux Factory in Queens!  We recommend a 6-10 minute lecture (or performance…or demonstration) paired with images (via powerpoint, computer slideshow, hand-made large diagrams, or other computer visual aid program). Feel free to also experiment with the format and incorporate performance (if you like!). You do not have to consider yourself an artist to participate!! The more diverse the expertise and collections- the better! Email angela.washko@gmail.com your completed entry form (or to get more information) by November 7th.

ENTRY FORM
Expert Oddities: Show and Tell

Name(s):
Address:
Phone:
Email:
Brief Description of who you are/what you do:
Short Description of Odd Collection or Topic of Expertise:
Will you use Microsoft Powerpoint?
If not using Powerpoint, what software/visual aids will you use?

If you have images of your collection, please attach some images for reference.

NYC’s most interesting residency program is now accepting applications for residencies beginning this fall!

Flux Factory is calling all artists, urban explorers, rogue historians, tour guides, academics, and anyone interested to pitch tours for Going Places (Doing Stuff) III, a social practice oriented show taking place this summer.

Going Places (Doing Stuff) — you get on a bus, you don’t know where you’re going, and then something happens. Flux Factory invites artists to lead a bus-full of people on an adventure around the greater New York (or even Tri-State area) carte blanche. The content of the tours is entirely up to you, though the itinerary is kept secret from participants. Tours can range from a single afternoon to three days, and will take place from late June through August.

Each touree is given only the following information: artist, title, duration, and a list of needed supplies. In other words, when someone signs up for a tour, they know what to bring and how long they will be gone, but they will have no idea where they are actually going or what they will experience. All tours will be first-come first-serve.

There is always mystery in traveling, even if you know where you are headed. Going Places (Doing Stuff) is all about this mystery, asking the general public to give themselves over to our artists. The excitement of simply stepping on a bus to who-knows-where becomes a metaphor and catalyst for the leap of faith inherent to aesthetic experience in general.

For info on past tours, please visit:

For press on past tours, please visit:

http://www.nypress.com/article-20170-gut-instinct-holy-moses.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTH-UsiiOQo

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/arts/11wspare.html?ex=1373515200&en=5ddc117d0609ba4c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

http://actiondirection.blogspot.com/2008/09/lost-in-hudson-river-vol-74-bannermans.html

Proposals should include:

-A brief letter explaining your motivation for taking part in this show. (300 words Maximum. Please title your document in this format: LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_LETTER.DOC or .RTF)

-An itinerary, time line, and budget for the tour

-Resumé or bio (Maximum 2 pages. Titled LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_BIO.DOC or .RTF)

The deadline is Monday, April 26th, 2010.

The call for proposals is closed!

We’ve commissioned 15 limited edition box sets of prints, sculptures, drawings, and paintings by a stellar selection of wonderful artists.   Our boxes are handmade and contain works by Brandstifter, Bread & Butter Collective, Andrea Dezsö, Kerry Downey, Heather Jones, Aya Kakeda, Miwa Koizumi, Simone Meltesen, Nick Normal, Ward Shelley, and Swoon.  The collection is curated by Flux Factory’s artistic director, Jean Barberis.  Priced at $1500 per box, it’s probably the best deal ever.

Sky Is Not Heaven
Recycled tin, 6 x 6”
Stefan Brandstifter was born 1968 in Bad Kreuznach, Rhineland-Palatine, Germany. The Head of Mainzer Kunstverein Walpodenstraße, Stefan is an interdisciplinary artist and networker, transforming his visual and performance art, sound and music as well as lyrics by means of social interaction to intermedia.

Untitled
Silkscreen on paper, 11 x 9.5”
The Bread and Butter Collective is a small collectively owned and operated silkscreening studio based at Flux Factory, dedicated to earning their daily bread while creating a space to enjoy life’s butter: community, progressive change, and creative process.

View from the Roof
Silkscreen on paper, 11 x 15”
Andrea Dezsö, a visual artist and writer, creates deeply personal narratives across a broad range of media including drawing, artist’s books, cut paper, embroidery, sculpture, installation, animation, and large-scale murals.

History of 39-31 29th Street, LIC, NY
Silkscreen on paper, 30 x 12”
Aya Kakeda was born and raised in Tokyo Japan.  She now works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.  She likes cats, seals , and receiving postcards and she has ever changing weekly obsessions, now it’s Clavariaceae and star nosed mole.  She also elaborates lots of theories about lot of things. When she doesn’t indulge in her obsessions she paints and draws, creating her own whimsical narratives.

A Dozen Eggs Dropped on the Ground
Charcoal on paper, 14.5 x 16”
Heather Jones holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing. Previous projects include Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects and Sol Lewitt Retrospective at MASSMoCA.

Everybody Loves Conduit
Silkscreen on recycled insulation, 8.5 x 11”
Kerry Downey was born in sunny South Florida in 1979.  She graduated from Bard College in 2002 and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College making mixed media installations out of New York City detritus, book works, prints, and the like.  She has been member of nonprofit artist collective Flux Factory since 2003, where she curated the What the Book?, NOVEL, and worked on various other shows and projects.  Kerry is currently working as a freelance educator at MoMA.

Jellyfish
Recycled plastic, dimensions variable
Miwa Koizumi was born in Japan.  She studied at Ecole de Beaux Artes de Paris.  Her shows include Oct Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York at the Japan Society in New York City.  Koizumi has been collaborating with Flux Factory for three years.

Soft Flux
Sewn felt, 4 x 2.5 x 5”
Simone Meltesen’s work consists of series of portable soft sculpture objects photographed in different environments, as well as a series of embroideries and drawings of a group of young feral girls who live by the sea and constitute a self-sufficient society. Her choice of materials and techniques, particularly thread, cloth, and embroidery, was initially inspired by work made by women in the 1970s during the Feminist Art movement. Her small, portable sculptures made of soft materials, embodying domestic themes, challenge the traditionally monolithic nature of sculpture in the western world.

Hecho con Precision
Cardboard and staples, approximately 5 x 1 x 3”
Born-n-bred in St. Louis, Missouri, Nick Normal pursued his undergraduate degree overseas at Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design (London, UK) where he graduated with ‘honours’ in Fine Arts. With a firm approach to working with whatever he can get his hands and mind on, Nick enjoys making scale models, maquettes and installations and buying dollar-store items to integrate into his surroundings – that is, both his life and his work. He is also a lifelong biblioholic, which has recently turned into assembling an ‘expansive library’ of cardboard books. Nick is also building an archive of press releases, postcards, flyers, brochures, etc. related to art exhibitions – in progress now since November 2003, it is estimated at 11,000 individual items and spans a plethora of three-ring binders and milk-crates (an archive of archives).

Untitled
Silkscreen on vellum, 18 x 12”
Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.  Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes.

Ward Shelley’s work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Last year Shelley received a painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, as well as private foundation grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He is represented by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Untitled
Silkscreen on paper, 11.5 x 8”
Swoon is a Brooklyn-based street artist who creates life-sized portraits of people she meets, using woodcut block prints and paper cutouts. Swoon’s galleries are city walls, often in the environments that inspired the prints. She is an international artist with major pieces in the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Flux Factory Box Set

Box Set $1,500.00 Box Set + continental US shipping $1,550.00 Box Set + international shipping $1,600.00

2009 was a milestone year for Flux Factory. After hundreds of people wouldn’t let us shut our doors in 2008 as our building was claimed for a public works project, we took it as a necessary growth opportunity and renovated an old warehouse in Long Island City, Queens. The building is bigger, more centrally located, and has a gallery that gives us lots of room to promote the work of emerging artists.

Thanks to our broad community, dozens of volunteers helped us for months to breathe life into this new building, painting walls, setting up spaces, putting up lights, and all the glorious work that comes with rejuvenating buildings. But there was one thing we couldn’t do ourselves — get a proper HEATING SYSTEM. Ours was old and barely functioned, so we hired the extremely sweet Fire and Ice Heating and Cooling Company to get us through the winter. What would have cost us over $150,000 is now costing us a fraction, but it’s still too rich for our blood. Your dollars would go directly to fostering a creative community that works for itself and helps others along the way.

We even made an awesome little video explaining our plight! Yes, we’re only a few weeks shy of the arrival of spring. We’re definitely through the thick of winter, but as there are more winters to come, this is a long term investment!

There is no minimum, and donating is easy. Here’s how it works:
1) Go to our Kickstarter page (or click on the image): http://kck.st/bUplx9
2) Take a look at the rewards and see how much you’d be willing to donate. No matter how small, ALL donations are deeply appreciated.
3) Click on “Back This Project.”
4) Enter your amount and select your reward.
5) You will need to sign up with Kickstarter.com.
6) Enter your credit card info using a secure Amazon.com account.

If we don’t meet our goal in the end, you won’t get charged!

Please visit Kickstarter to donate now, and help us spread the word!

Science Fair will be a collaborative effort that examines science based projects and concepts through the lens of art. Artists will be encouraged to create their own Science Fair “booths” and experiments to be on display at the Fair. It is our hope to discover the potential for science as a breeding ground for art: a way to inform and inspire art as a springboard for creative thought.

The Fair will showcase several projects including a room of kinetic/robotic sculptures, a gallery-space-as-fish tank, an artist-run weather station, and homemade hot air balloons. Science Fair will also feature workshops and panel discussions with scientists, artists, and other professionals.

We invite you to apply with your best Hypotheses, Inventions, and Experiments.

Interested parties should submit:

-One paragraph explaining your project and its requirements (electrical, etc). 300 words maximum. Please title your document in this format: LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_LETTER.DOC or .RTF

-Documentation of previous work: Maximum 2 page PDF document or 5 JPEG images (72 dpi only)
Images should be titled: LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_IMAGE#
Or 5 minutes of video. Please do send movie files. Instead, include a link to your work online in the proposal paragraph.

-Resumé or bio, maximum 2 pages. Titled LAST NAME_FIRST NAME_BIO.DOC or .RTF

The deadline is Monday, April 12th.  Please put “Science Fair Proposal” as the subject of your email. And for goodness’ sake, put your name and email on everything.

Submissions should be sent to sciencefair@fluxfactory.org. If you have any questions, please send an email with “Science Fair Question” as the subject line.

Do not send original material. Nothing will be mailed back to you.

We’re looking forward to your proposals!!!

Residency Unlimited is pleased to announce its first collaborative partnership with Flux Factory effective July 1st, 2009. Flux Factory and Residency Unlimited are teaming up to organize a six-month-long residency for the German artist, Brandstifter, whose stay is made possible by Schloss Balmoral, Stiftung Rheinland Pfalz für Kultur (Germany) (http://balmoral.de/). In line with its mission, Residency Unlimited is supporting Flux Factory’s endeavor to build an international residency program, and provides highly personalised support to each of its resident artists.

We’re excited to report that we’ll be occupying an 8000 square foot, 3 story building just two blocks north of Queens Plaza at 39-31 29th street. We’re working with the wonderful HWKN design team to create a multi-purpose arts center with galleries, studios, and production facilities.

The new Flux Factory will still be devoted to producing collaborative projects and providing affordable work residencies for artists. We’ve got wonderful projects coming up in 2009, including our famous bus tours and a grande science fair! And of course an inaugural show once we’re done renovations.

You can check out photos of the new space here.

We’ve got a lot of work to do- and we want your help! We’re working in the space every Tuesday through Saturday from about 10-6, sometimes later, from now until mid-July.  We need volunteers to help with all aspects of demolition and construction. Come ready to learn all about how to renovate a building using green techniques and recycled materials, or spend an afternoon showing off your superhuman sheetrock skills for a good cause.  We’re also looking for administrative volunteers to help us with different aspects of running a sprawling non-profit, like alternative materials acquisitions, event production, mailings, and other fun office stuff.  We’ll make you lunch, give you beer after you’re done with the sledgehammer, and have so much fun together.  All levels of ability, from 98 pound weakling to master carpenter, are welcome and encouraged to come by for as much or little time as you’d like.

Interested? Call or email Shalin at 678.936.7721  or shalin.scupham@gmail.com.

We need your help in the form of donations!
Tax-deductible donations can be sent via check or Paypal:

Please make cheques payable to Flux Factory Inc.	Paypal
and mail them to:  P.O. BOX 370700 Brooklyn, NY 11237

Examples of past shows include turning the gallery into a giant music box, a exhibition inspired by a movie, an exquisite-corpse exercise in a derelict building, an interdisciplinary monument to Tatlin, an edible art show, bus tours by artists, and many many more.

Since we’re temporarily losing our headquarters, we’re looking for itinerant projects, or ones that we could find specific venues for. Budgets for each show are around $4000 all inclusive.

Think big!

Submissions should be no longer than a one page description of the project, and should be emailed to info@fluxfactory.org with the subject heading “Proposal.” Deadline for submissions is November 26th, 2008.A bit about us:

Flux Factory began as a collective living space in 1994, in an old spice factory in Williamsburg, New York City. Its original members were undergraduates at the New School For Social Research (now New School University). About four years later, with a new stage built and twice as many members, the Flux Factory living room evolved into a site for art events and performances of all kinds. Flux became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1999 and moved to Long Island City, Queens in 2002.

We have since evolved into one of the major arts organizations in the Queens cultural life, producing art shows attended by thousands. Our mission is to commission innovative collaborative art projects. These projects force participants to work with people they’ve never worked with before, or with unfamiliar media, or formal constraints. Over 500
international and local artists have collaborated with and through Flux Factory.

Since becoming incorporated in 1998 our funding has grown steadily. We have recently received funding from the Greenwall Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, New York State Council on the Arts, Puffin Foundation, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Queens Council on the Arts.

On The Dancefloor Heavy