Twentyfour years ago, the idea for WhiteBox as the original alternative art space in Manhattan’s nascent Chelsea neighborhood arose among a tightly knit local group of international emigre artists, architects, and intellectuals armed with a radical and refined pluralistic and aesthetic sensibility based on social justice, egalitarianism and inclusivity into the social fabric of New York City. It was their response to the New York-centric art scene’s lack of emphasis on social, political and international art engagement. During its first decade in Chelsea, WBX functioned as an artist-run alternative non-profit art space serving the nascent local art community as a platform for engagement with contemporary artist peers from around the World. As such, it developed a stream of potent site-specific work and survey exhibitions, and became a thriving laboratory for unique commissions, exhibitions, special events, salon series, and arts education programs shared with a large, isolated minority citizenry living in the giant Elliott Public Houses and surrounding West Chelsea working class inlets. Fourteen years ago, having relocated to the then backwater but soon to be vibrant arts community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, WBX continued its pioneering role combining local community initiatives with global engagement, becoming, just as it did in Chelsea, a vibrant and vital locus for cultural engagement. Twenty years later, in its third decade, WhiteBoxHarlem extended WBX cultural services to East Harlem, embracing an underserved, vibrant Latino/Hispanic and Afro-Caribbean alongside a dynamic multifarious immigrant community, offering a panoply of free, diverse, and accessible programs. On its 24th year, WhiteBox relocated to the intriguing, culturally and artistically underserved Alphabet City area of the East Village to continue its trademark mission by adding programs emphasizing youth education in the arts, urban sustainability and emigrè and ex-pat feminist progressive curatorial programs continuing to embrace and strengthen ties with this highly stimulating local citizenry.
Vision/Mission
As a community bound, fully accessible non-profit art space relocated to the East Village-Alphabet City, a neighborhood endowed with a majority Caribbean-Latinx citizenry, students and timeless cultural Bohemia, WhiteBox becomes more than just an indoor and outdoor garden exhibition space, a platform inspired by the diversity of human and local cultural histories concerned with art in all its manifestations, taking the pulse of the times. A forum for reflection with an inventive contemporary artistic and political vision, WBX provides local artists and curators with sustained, equitable exposure, as it nurtures a fresh environment for more in-depth local and emigrè cultural engagement, creating real-life healing dialogues between underserved community audiences and artists’ practices. WBX aims to be a space for invention inviting local and regional emerging and established multifaceted artists to reckon with themselves regarding our precarious moment in time, responding to its unique new ecological exhibition spaces in a hazardous urban environment with startling interventions or projects aiding and inspiring its citizenry in developing long-term social justice, highly aesthetic and hands-on participatory urban sustainability programs that also address the lack of affordable housing and its precarious human consequences. WhiteBox is a radically inclusive, dynamic diversified institution with a mission freely accessible for everyone—workers, students, youth and seniors in particular—to learn from the past, reflect upon the complex, politically and economically challenging present and contribute to participate in the creation of a more comfortable communal space construed beyond race, gender, class, credo, religion or belief from where to contemplate a better, more peaceful, egalitarian dignifying future seen or imagined through the healing lens of art. Handicap accessible, daily docent tours available to visitors, schools by trained interns and staff conducted in English, Spanish and Chinese.
History
WhiteBox was founded in 1998. Within its first two years, WhiteBox was nominated for “Best Group Show” by the International Art Critics Association for Plural Speech and for a survey of Viennese Actionists, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch. During its first decade, WhiteBox built a reputation for producing thought-provoking exhibitions and initiatives that fostered engagement among a broad audience, including neighborhood low-income housing communities such as the Elliot Houses, and the Bayview Women’s Prison. A second decade in the LES/Chinatown, while continuing its trajectory and traditions, WBX interacted with latent local and international Chinese and Asian communities, likewise five seasons in East Harlem created deeper links with the large Latinx, Afro-American and the more quiet, ubiquitous immigrant underserved local multicultural communities. The organization of WhiteBox is at a pivotal transitional stage; building upon its twenty plus year legacy of presenting contemporary art in the spirit of the avant-garde, imbued with a social, humanistic spirit. WhiteBox expanded its mission by incorporating ‘FireHouse Lit Lounge’, a cultural-literary-performance salon series, aiming to increase sustained support and exposure for a sister/brotherhood of local and international creators emphasizing the Local, African, Caribbean, Latin American-LatinX and succinct Asian projects.