ISSUE Receives Additional $1.1 Million For Construction of 110 Livingston
Dear Friends,
We are pleased to inform you that ISSUE Project Room has been granted an additional $1.1 million by the City of New York for construction of our theater at 110 Livingston Street! These funds are in addition to the $1 million previously granted in 2009 by the Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and comes from the NY Department of Cultural Affairs ($500K), and Council Member Stephen Levin together with the Brooklyn Delegation and Council Member Brad Lander ($600K).
ISSUE has now raised $2.3 million towards the $3.7 million in costs necessary for the project.
We owe a tremendous thanks to you and everyone in our community whose unwavering support during the past two years of intense transition, helped to insure that we could reach this successful point.
Our next task is to raise $425,000 by December 31, 2011 to support the architectural and engineering design of the space. This past winter, we developed our vision for the space and produced cost estimates and initial concept renderings. We now need to move forward with the full designs.
If we are successful in raising these funds by December, we can move forward swiftly with the design process and open our new home in the fall of 2013. If you would like to help with this campaign or support our ongoing programs, consider a donation online now or becoming a member.
Thank you again for all of your support. We’ll be in contact as the project progresses. Until then, please keep an eye out for our fall newsletter,which you will be receiving within a few weeks, as well as the invitation for our October 1st Fall Art Auction and November 2nd Benefit Gala.
Warm regards,
Steve Wax Ed Patuto
Board Chair Executive Director
ISSUE PROJECT ROOM and SAGIndie present “ACTOR AS AUTEUR” with STEVE BUSCEMI
John Hockenberry Leads Brunchtime Conversation
To Benefit ISSUE Project Room
Actor, writer, film director and ISSUE board member Steve Buscemi will talk with Emmy Award-winning journalist and Co-Host of WNYC Radio and PRI’s The Takeaway, John Hockenberry, about creating unforgettable characters that ultimately drive a film’s narrative and impact. The brunch which is presented in collaboration with SAGIndie, an organization that unites working thespians of the world with passionate filmmaking mavericks who buck the system. The afternoon will feature film clips from the actor’s career and will be held at Bussaco located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Actor as Auteur – There are numerous iconic characters in film history, from The Little Tramp to Charles Foster Kane to Colonel Kurtz to Travis Bickle, all of them well drawn and directed. However, had Chaplin, Welles, Brando or DeNiro not played these roles would the film had the same powerful impact on our culture? Can a case be made for actor as auteur?
It is difficult to imagine Buscemi’s roles and their indelible effect on each film without his personal, stylized approach in bringing them to life. They emit essential energies striking a balance between deeply held neuroses and outward bombast. From lead roles in films like Fargo, Resevoir Dogs, Living in Oblivion, Trees Lounge, and Ghost World to supporting roles and cameos in films such as The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink, his presence breathes life into every corner of a film. “Buscemi is a quiet tyrant of artistic fury who threatens to overrun every frame he’s in with the inner desperation he projects even in his most subtle performances,” says Hockenberry.
An active Board Member of ISSUE Project Room, Buscemi began his career in, and continues to support experimental theater, writing and performance. All proceeds from the event will benefit ISSUE Project Room, one of the country’s preeminent centers for experimental culture.
“Actor as Auteur” Brunch To Benefit ISSUE Project Room, Presented in Collaboration With SAGIndie
Sunday, June 6, 12 pm – 2 pm
Bussaco, 833 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
$125 Per Person ($95 tax-deductible, three-course brunch is included.)
SEATING IS LIMITED. Buy Tickets
For more information please call 718-330-0313.
NY Times features ISSUE’s new home at 110 Livingston
An Avant-Garde Arts Group Bites Off a Lot to Chew
When it comes to the avant-garde side of the arts, the numbers tend to be pretty small. Record sales of a thousand or two, if you’re lucky; theater audiences in the dozens, not hundreds.
But last year Issue Project Room, a nonprofit arts space that was founded in the East Village and for the last four years has been in Brooklyn, was dealt a dauntingly large number. As part of a city deal, a developer that was converting the former Board of Education building in downtown Brooklyn into condominiums was required to offer 5,000 square feet on its ground floor to a cultural group on a 20-year, rent-free lease.
Issue Project Room won the bid. (Yes!) But then found that the space needed $2.5 million in renovations. (No!)
The organization’s leaders managed to raise about $350,000 but finally were able to exhale when Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president, called late last month with the news that he was allocating $1.1 million for Issue Project Room’s renovations, as part of the $37.7 million in capital funds that he has the authority to distribute for the current fiscal year.
The building, at 110 Livingston Street, was designed by McKim, Mead & White and opened in 1926 as a home for the Elks club. By 1940 the Board of Education had taken it over, and the city sold it six years ago to the Brooklyn developer Two Trees Management for more than $45 million.
With Issue Project Room, whose proposal to Two Trees won over those from more than 100 other organizations, the building will become a home for all kinds of experimental music, theater, dance, literary readings and film. “A Carnegie Hall for the avant-garde,” Suzanne Fiol, the group’s founder and creative director, said.
“I truly believe that this is the work that keeps our culture going forward,” Ms. Fiol said. “We want to be an important space for music and film and literature and poetry and video and sound art. And a little bit of dance.”
Most of the space is a wide, marble-lined room somewhere between a courtroom and a dance hall, said Sarah Garvey, an Issue Project Room spokeswoman. In addition, there is room for offices and an additional space that could be used for a library.
Ms. Fiol opened the first Issue Project Room in 2003 in a former garage on Sixth Street in the East Village and two years later moved to a former oil silo on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, where she put on shows like an extremely rare visit by the reclusive Texas musician Jandek.
In 2007 Issue Project Room had to move again, to the former Old American Can Factory, nearby in Carroll Gardens. This month that space has its Floating Points Festival, with experimental musicians like Alan Licht and Tony Conrad (who is an Issue Project Room board member) making use of a custom-built hemispherical speaker system that hangs from the ceiling.
Whether the idea of a big, official institution like Carnegie Hall is antithetical to the spirit of the avant-garde is an open question. But with Manhattan rapidly losing performance spaces devoted to experimental arts — like Tonic on the Lower East Side, which closed in 2007 — some kind of home is necessary, and Mr. Markowitz believes that Brooklyn is the perfect place for it.
“Issue Project Room is well respected, avant-garde, cutting-edge, in-your-face — you know what? That’s Brooklyn too,” Mr. Markowitz said. “I don’t understand half the things they do, and when they tell me about them, they lose me. But that’s not the point.” The point, he added, was that “the arts create jobs.”
His contribution brings the renovation budget to within about $300,000 of what it needs for the nuts-and-bolts first phase.
Ms. Fiol said she was at first reluctant to apply for the new space because at the time her organization had no money. But having three homes in six years taught her to keep an open mind.
“Everybody gets kicked out of their space, or they end up shutting down,” Ms. Fiol said. “But instead of getting all flipped out about that, I took the road of just finding a new space. And I’ve been really lucky.”
On January 25, ISSUE Project Room will inaugurate its new space at 110 Livingston with Gaudeamus Muziekweek, a four-day festival celebrating groundbreaking and challenging new music by emerging composers from around the world. Working in partnership ...
ISSUE is starting off the New Year with a change of scenery. That's right, Issue Project Room is moving out of our space at the Old American Can Factory and into 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn. We've had a great run at the Can Factory,...