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Creative Minds Call LIC Their Home

Melissa Wolf, one of the LIC art pioneers, works with another artist at the Women’s Studio Center.

By Ellen Thompson

By the early 1980s, rents in Greenwich Village, TriBeCa and SoHo were through the roof. Starving artists, who for years had been creating in spacious lofts, were suddenly left searching for spaces that would work with their struggling salaries.

Just over the East River there was a neighborhood of deceased factories and warehouses, where sat an emerging museum of contemporary work that caught the artists’ eyes. The wide-open spaces behind the walls of the dormant buildings were perfect. Packing up the acrylic paints, gigantic canvases, heaps of metal, and whatever other raw material that were hanging around their studios, dozens of emerging artists began making the move to Long Island City.

P.S.1, which was founded as The Institute of Art and Urban Resources Inc., and opened on June 21, 1976, was primarily dedicated to the transformation of abandoned and underutilized buildings in New York City into exhibition, performance, and studio spaces for artists. Bringing together 78 artists, who were instructed to fill the former schoolhouse with studio-produced or site-specific work, Long Island City was on its way to being established in the art world.

By the time 1986 rolled around, whispers of the still undeveloped neighborhood began getting louder as they spread through the prominent artistic neighborhoods in Manhattan. Long Island City was the buzz; it was becoming the city’s up and coming artistic enclave and art critics were beginning to focus their attention toward Queens.

At that time, a small group of artists living in the neighborhood, with the help of painter Margret Dreikausen, established Long Island City Artists to showcase the buzz through Open Studios Exhibitions. After becoming incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1989, LICA worked to expand the range of opportunities available for area artists and develop a sense of community and camaraderie among area artists.

Today, 20 years later, the still largely undeveloped, industrial neighborhood is experiencing a surge of artists from Manhattan or those who has totally bypassed Greenwich Village, Tribeca and Soho, as developers work to build up LIC.

The rents may be rising, but artists have found a solid community that LICA says has no chance of disappearing. Which is quite understandable, since some of the city’s most important museums and art galleries call Long Island City home, such as Sculpture Center, Dorsky Gallery and Socrates Sculpture Park; each gives local artists the chance to exhibit work that was created in their own backyard.

Even the Museum of Modern Art acknowledged Long Island City’s potential for artistic development, taking refuge in the neighborhood for two years on 33rd Street near Queens Boulevard in 2003 and 2004 while its 53rd Street headquarters in Manhattan was being renovated.

MoMA may be gone, but art in Long Island City is here to stay.