ARTE Y DISEÑO ENTORNO PRESENTA
Entrevista Título del artículo de la Edición: Chloe Bass
Oscar Nombre Oliver-Didier del Autor
Tea will be Served ENTORNO: You are the core organizer for Arts in Bushwick. Tell us about the projects you have developed there. What tools and strategies have you utilized to develop them? What limitations have you confronted, if any? Chloe Bass: Arts
in Bushwick is an all-volunteer organization that arose out of the creation of Bushwick Open Studios. I wasn’t one of the founders, but I got involved as an artist during that first BOS in 2007. I was impressed with the commitment to getting artists out of their studios and into the streets (sometimes with their work, sometimes more for social purposes). I served as the co-lead organizer for Bushwick Open Studios 2010 and 2011, and also founded SITE Fest, a two-day performance festival that took place as a featured Brooklyn event of Armory Arts Week. I think the major limitation that Arts in Bushwick continues to face is the difficulty of maintaining a core group of volunteers who both have time to dedicate to the organization and the skills necessary to run it. This
goes hand in hand with one of the major successes: we’re running a series of projects that would likely cost several hundred thousand dollars on about $10,000 in cash and the rest in in-kind donations, local business support, and free labor. There is nothing that can really compare to this. We don’t have an office, we don’t have salaries –so we don’t really have anything to lose. Everything is possible, and can happen quickly. That AIB developed along the same timeline as social media: going from nerd-chic to absolute necessity is no accident. The Internet has allowed us to reach out to tons of people who we don’t know personally, and that’s great. For the 2011 Open Studios, we actually started to require that people who wanted to participate in the festival come to a meeting or a social mixer, in order to say hello. We’ve been so successful online that we wanted to remind everyone that we’re not a huge organization, we’re just a small group of people, and that the goal of
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this is to be neighborly in a certain kind of way. There are definitely more limitations when we present ourselves as people rather than as an institution, but I think these limitations go hand in hand with the more genuine successes that we’ve had. E: You have mentioned that there is
a lack of space for performances in the city. What should the urban realm provide in order for them to take place more easily? CB: When I first started to note
a lack of performance space in New York City, I was still thinking along the lines of a certain type of work: work that takes place inside, in safety, with a good floor underfoot. I don’t really make that kind of work anymore, although I still think there’s a lack of adequate space in which to do it. And even outside, where there’s plenty of space, it can be strangely unusable. I think the first thing New York –or any city– should do for performance is stop making it impossible through ridiculous behavior-based local legislation. It’s
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