Artistic Interns Offered Space Of Their Own

By DOMENICK RAFTER

Deep in the heart of industrial Long Island City, where taxi drivers rest during their breaks and the clanging sounds of workers in auto body shops echo through the streets, there is a place on the corner of 41st Avenue ad 27th Street, hidden from the gritty surroundings, where Northwest Queens’ thriving arts scene has one of its many hidden homes.

Elena Solli, an intern at Long Island City’s The Space, along with the the gallery’s founder Kristi Schopper, with one of Solli’s works. Tribune Photo by Domenick Rafter

Since Aug. 6, The Space has been showing off works of art by their seven summer interns in its Fardom Gallery at 25-17 41st Ave. The show, which runs through Sept. 24, is one of many the gallery hosts for new and emerging artists in the neighborhood. The two-room gallery, which sits adjacent to an auto body shop, not only serves as a mini-museum, but also as workspace for the aspiring artists. The Space hosts another workspace in the neighborhood at 46th Road and 5th Street, behind the famed Pepsi-Cola sign on the East River.

The Space is the brainchild of Long Island City resident Kristi Schopper. An Arizona native, Schopper was living in Manhattan when she moved to Long Island City in the late 1990s in search of a new place for artists.

“It was between DUMBO and Long Island City,” Schopper said. She chose to come to Queens because Brooklyn’s DUMBO was already under gentrification; Long Island City held more promise.

“I was hoping to be a part of the up and coming neighborhood,” she said. Thanks to financial help from the Mathis-Pfohl Foundation and Arthur Levine Foundation, The Space was able to open its Fardom Gallery on 41st Avenue. Schopper said the location was smart because it was equidistant between two popular local places for art lovers; PS 1 in Long Island City and the Museum of Modern Art’s Sunnyside location, where MoMA lived while its Manhattan home was under renovation. The gallery hosts multiple shows a year.

For the summer interns at The Space, the experience is more than just showing off their work, they get experience on how to run a gallery. Intern Elena Solli said the experience taught her a lot she didn’t already know about the art world.

“I had no idea how a gallery works before I started interning,” she said.

Schopper, who will have her own show at Fardom in October, said the experience has yielded a lot of positive results for interns.

“We have yet to see an artist not get the residency they wanted or get into the school they wanted to go to,” she said.

The show has been a success as well. Seven paintings have already been sold.

The current show runs through Sept. 24 and gallery hours are Wednesday through Friday, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Reach Reporter Domenick Rafter at drafter@queenstribune.com or (718) 357-7400, Ext. 125.