AN empty pizza box was propped against a black fiberglass urn in the hallway outside Three’s Company, a gallery that is also the living room of Alex Gartenfeld and Piper Marshall, roommates in a tiny tenement walkup in Chinatown.

“That’s what can happen to the art after a show,” said Mr. Gartenfeld, indicating the urn, which he explained had been part of an installation last spring by AIDS-3D, a Berlin-based duo who were in the “Younger Than Jesus” show at the New Museum. That the urn was still there was a source of annoyance to both Mr. Gartenfeld and his roommate, he said. “We just don’t have the room.”

It was noon on a recent Saturday, and Mr. Gartenfeld, 23, a slight young man who favors owlish glasses and black-and-white clothing, had just awakened, brushed his teeth in the kitchen sink and opened the gallery for business. Et voilà: There were pieces by Asher Penn, who prints the words “KATE MOSS RORSHACH” over and over on white tape and then makes collages from the tape, set out on a shelf that ringed the narrow living room. A projector on a table was loaded with a film by another artist, Tobias Kaspar, apparently featuring a close-up of hands flipping through a fanzine devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio. But because Mr. Gartenfeld does not know how to work the projector — that’s Ms. Marshall’s talent and she was at work — this reporter had to imagine it.

But she got the picture. Fastidious obsession, with both making stuff and celebrity culture, was the theme of the current show, which is open by appointment and up indefinitely.

Also on view: a sofa, a lamp and a few molded plastic chairs, one with a beer can on its seat. Art?

“Not art,” said Mr. Gartenfeld, whisking the can away.

In a home gallery, sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Mr. Gartenfeld and Ms. Marshall, both of whom have day jobs in the art world (he’s the online editor at Interview and Art in America; she’s the assistant curator at the Swiss Institute), are part of a new wave of gallerists who for a grab-bag of reasons — economic, philosophical and purely pragmatic — are turning their homes into art galleries.

Some are creating roving galleries, this year’s version of the “Happening” for the post-grad set, or one-night events in other people’s homes, like the Apartment Show or Parlour, which are put together by young artists or curators, and romp from living room to living room and neighborhood to neighborhood like punk bands “touring” suburban basements.

Even at the high end, established dealers like the glamorous Palm Beach, Fla., gallerist Sarah Gavlak are opening their homes: through Dec. 19, Ms. Gavlak’s one-bedroom pied-à-terre, in a prim ’60s white brick building on 57th Street, is given over to the paintings of Christopher Milne, an artist who creates stylized images inspired by women’s magazines of the “Mad Men” era.

Like 17th-century salonistes, home gallerists use the intimacy of their homes — or other people’s — to incite discussion and forge a deeper connection to the art.

“You can get comfortable in someone’s home,” said Leslie Rosa-Stumpf, an independent curator who is half of Parlour, a nomadic gallery that will appear this Saturday in a town house in Bushwick, Brooklyn. “It’s not a white room with no furniture. People sit on the couch, have a drink, stay for hours and really take it all in.”

While noting that apartment shows do not exactly represent a new format, David Rimanelli, a longtime contributor to Artforum who teaches criticism and art history at New York University, described them as “the ultimate destination galleries.”

AT the opening for Mr. Milne’s show last month, Ms. Gavlak, 40, wore a scarlet shift with a nipped-in waist and plunging décolletage, neatly matching Mr. Milne’s idealized vision of womanhood. In her bedroom, which is open to gallery goers, her bed wore ivory satin, and a Hollywood Regency-style acrylic vanity table, a gift from Beth Rudin DeWoody, the collector, displayed carefully curated personal effects: perfume bottles, a clutch of embroidered handkerchiefs, roses in a vase. Draped above was a knitted banner by the artist Lisa Anne Auerbach that read “Vive La Révolution d’amour.”

“I’m really interested in the history of the boudoir and what went on there,” Ms. Gavlak said. “It’s fun to watch people when they come into the bedroom. Some are really uncomfortable and just walk out. Others flop down on the bed and hang out for a while. If you look at the apartment as a whole, everything is an aesthetic design in a way, including me, and each thing informs the other things.”

Ms. Gavlak’s apartment began its gallery career by accident. After showing photographs by Ms. Auerbach during Art Basel Miami Beach two years ago, Ms. Gavlak brought the photos to New York, where she spends half the year, and gave a party for Ms. Auerbach in the apartment.

“People were like, ‘When’s the next show?’ ” she said. “Or they said, ‘It looks like a gallery in here, do you really live here? Where’s all your stuff?’ ”

It is stunningly spare. Ms. Gavlak’s personal effects are in one of two walk-in closets; artwork is in the other. Like a good saloniste, she eats breakfast on a tray in bed and then slides it underneath the dust ruffle. Her kitchen is as clean and uncluttered as that of a model apartment in a new condominium. (Home gallerists as a whole are not given to the display of random tchotchkes; further, they know how to hide their hair brushes and the Verizon bill.)

Relations with artists can be very cozy. When she was courting Mr. Milne, whose work she had seen at a collector’s home in Palm Beach, and arranging for a studio visit on the phone one day, she and Mr. Milne realized they lived in the same building.

“We were both in our apartments when I phoned, and when we figured it out, he said, ‘Omigosh, I’m coming downstairs right now,’ ” Ms. Gavlak said.

Perhaps the most famously intimate home gallery is Gracie Mansion’s bathroom, otherwise known as the “Loo Division.” As Ms. Mansion, an impresario of the ’80s-era East Village art scene, recalled recently, it was the spring of 1982, and she came up with the idea of doing a show — or having a party, really — with the proceeds of her tax refund.

Ms. Mansion, now a private art adviser and a modern and contemporary specialist for artnet’s online auctions, was making art and living in a fifth-floor walkup on East Ninth Street. It was the kind of apartment that had a bathtub in the kitchen and a toilet in a closet, the latter “an intimate setting,” she realized, uniquely positioned “for one-at-a-time viewing.”

She had been given a few photographs by her friend Tim Greathouse — who, like so many of her peers, has since died of AIDS — and had hung them inside the bathroom. “While contemplating them one day,” Ms. Mansion said, “I came up with the idea of giving him a show in there.”

The arts culture that erupted in Ms. Mansion’s neighborhood around that time was at a literal and emotional distance from chilly SoHo and glitzy 57th Street: it was, in the beginning anyway, a community by and for artists, she stressed. “These were not market-driven events,” she said.

Today, suggested Jed Perl, the art critic for the New Republic and author of “New Art City,” a social history of Manhattan’s ’50s-era art scene, when art is atomized all over town and across the East River, a home gallery is “maybe just part of a broader mix-it-up mentality: i.e., an industrial loft can be a home, a home can be a gallery, et cetera.”

“Is there a history to it?” he continued. “I’m not sure. My impression of many of the hostess/salon-running/gallerist types — from Peggy Guggenheim to Holly Solomon — is that they made a fairly clear distinction between home and gallery. Certainly in the secondary market there has always been a strong tradition of people who deal out of their homes, where ‘everything’ is for sale: the Tiffany lamp, the Navajo rug, the Guercino drawing.

“As for the East Village-to-today galleries in the home, maybe in spirit it’s related to Happenings and so forth. But isn’t the truth that as soon as the cash flow is strong enough, people prefer to move the business to a separate location? So it’s also — let’s face it — a style born of necessity?”

True, yet a low overhead, as some gallerists point out, means you can support and show artists whose work is not market-oriented.

BERNARD LEIBOV was itching for a life change when he was downsized as managing director of a design studio last January. A few years earlier, Mr. Leibov, an investment banker turned brand strategist who is now 46, had attended a Landmark Education workshop — a self-actualizing program that owes a lot to the ’70s-era est movement — eager to shake a corporate career and start one in the arts. He began curating shows featuring artists from his native South Africa. He also made a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree, the art world’s alternative universe in the California desert, which inspired him to make his own work.

Back in New York, “my relationship with my apartment had grown stale,” Mr. Leibov said of the Printing House loft he has lived in for 12 years. “I had fallen out of love with it, it didn’t inspire me anymore.”

The day he was laid off, he said, he felt a kind of release. “I was like, O.K., now I know what I’m doing,” which was to bring a larger audience to the Joshua Tree community he’d become a part of.

In March, he had his first home show, of the work of the Joshua Tree artist John Luckett, who makes abstract mixed-media pieces. Mr. Leibov’s current show, his fourth, is called “Satellite of Love” and features armfuls of glowing cast-glass sex toys in rainbow colors tucked into strappy handbags, also made of cast-glass, which makes an exciting backdrop for his morning coffee. The show, up through Dec. 19, is the work of another Joshua Tree resident, Randy Polumbo.

Mr. Leibov’s relationship with his apartment has been similarly rejuvenated. “I’d been looking for ways to pep it up,” he said. “I had felt a lack of energy when I came home. Now, it’s fantastic. I get to live like a big-time collector.”

ON the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Jill Greenwood, 26, an architectural designer, lent the large railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, she was about to vacate to the Apartment Show organizers, Joshua Smith and Denise Kupferschmidt, who are friends of friends. Ms. Greenwood had already half-decamped, but there was still a lot of her stuff there, including a pile of shoes in a corner, when the show opened that night.

Schooled in the viewing of conceptual art, some attendees were puzzled, Ms. Greenwood said. “People definitely confused my shoes for artwork, and thought I’d messed up the art when I changed out of my flats to heels for the show.”

The work of six artists was on view, and there were 150 or so guests at the opening, the 12th Apartment Show organized by Mr. Kupferschmidt and Mr. Smith, both of whom are artists and were inspired, they said, to show the work of their peers to their peers.

When they began last year, Mr. Smith said: “I felt like everyone was throwing around the word ‘context’ all the time, meaning they all wanted their work to be shown ‘in the proper context,’ typically code for a well-branded institutional space. This is a way to get people to loosen up a little and just hang out and relax.”

Since their first show last January, at another friend’s apartment in Greenpoint, they have never wanted for a space, for artists to show or for guests, whom they found by drawing from the mailing lists of the galleries where they worked and by tapping the Facebook “friends” of Jerry Saltz, the art critic at New York magazine.

“He has like 3,000 friends,” Mr. Smith said. (Actually, as of this week he had 4,230.)

As most of the apartments donated are rentals, given at the end of a lease, Ms. Kupferschmidt said: “Often, we’re the last people in them. We clean up after the party, but it’s like we’re cleaning up after them, too. It’s like the apartment was ours and we’re leaving it forever.”

NINE years ago, Brookie Maxwell, an artist, was running a nonprofit arts group for at-risk inner-city children, but wanted a job that would allow her to be a work-at-home mother to her son, Ellis, who was then 4. She bought a loft on West 17th Street, put her living quarters in the back, and created a wide-open central space ringed with canvas on three sides. Ms. Maxwell, who is 53 and the daughter of the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, has been showing art in all media there ever since.

The other day, a video by Zefrey Throwell was playing on one canvas wall — an extremely upsetting film depicting the artist’s girlfriend as she tries (and succeeds) to make herself faint by hyperventilating. Happily, the inevitable doesn’t take too long; afterward, as this reporter recovered, Ms. Maxwell pulled back the canvas to show Ellis’s basketball hoop. “It’s good when I have a video show,” she said, “because then he and his friends can play basketball.”

Indeed, Ellis and his friends have accrued many perks from Gallery 138, as it’s known. Five years ago, for a show commemorating Brown v. Board of Education, the artist Satch Hoyt was working on a life-size cast-sugar bust of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Trying to get it just right, he made several tests during the course of a week, all of which were stored in the fridge (the kitchen is hidden behind another curtain).

“Ellis’s friends would come over and ask, ‘Can I lick Thurgood Marshall’s face again?’ ” Ms. Maxwell said.

Most gallery goers don’t realize that Gallery 138 is also a home until they use the bathroom, at which point human nature asserts itself and they start to snoop.

“I can always hear them pull the shower curtain back,” Ms. Maxwell said. “So I put something in there for them to see.”

It’s not bath toys. Nosy art hounds will discover the pelvis bone of some animal topped with a toy alligator. No one has ever commented, she said.

Asking for donations is a possibility, but it’s not sustainable.  Unless it’s toward a certain end (“help us buy this building or pull of this one event”), you’ll saturate your audience by asking for donations all the time.  We are creating value in this community, and people are willing to engage in a monetary exchange for that!

• Sell things we make, like T-shirts and postcards online and at all events
• Charge cover / solicit donations at events
• Make/Sell larger collaborative projects to notable community businesses (like Art Cube)
• Individual Membership: person gets magazine subscription and T-shirt
• Business Membership: business gets “We support Chords & Oil” sticker for their front window, in addition to X magazine subscriptions and X T-shirts.

We could also work out some symbiosis with for-profit businesses – a percentage of sales go to C&O in exchange for C&O hosting events at their venue… things like that.

The 1st Annual ReThink Topeka Exhibition and Art Walk will occur in the city’s downtown on Saturday April 17th, 2010 from 1 – 6 pm.  Local businesses, vacant buildings, and outdoor spaces will serve as venues for the display and performance of the Topeka-based artwork created and selected specifically for this Event.  A large array of original artwork about Topeka will be displayed including: 2D and 3D visual art, music, film, dance, performance art, and poetry.

No entry fee for artists!  Purchase Awards will be given.  Other incentives can be discovered at www.rethinktopeka.com.  For much, much more information check out www.rethinktopeka.com

Become a  fan of ReThink Topeka on Facebook as well.

Chords and Oil and the Chesney Park NIA have been working together the past several months to establish a community garden, from which the produce goes to neighborhood residents.  The goals of this garden project are to foster a greater sense of community while promoting healthy eating.  Topeka can be a much better place to live when all of its residents come together for the betterment of the community.

Chords and Oil (C &O) has been active in Topeka, KS since its formation less than a year ago working to improve our community using artistic creativity as a common, underlying thread to achieve progressive goals.  These young professionals strive to: improve Topeka’s image, educate the public on art and community-building topics, work with schools to educate students, provide a greater number of quality options for connecting people socially and revitalize the downtown area.   The community garden represents only one public service initiative that Chords and Oil has taken on during the short time the collective has existed.

Here are some other examples of C & O’s dedication to community:-Members collaborated to beautify and re-vitalize neighborhoods by painting murals on the outer walls of  old buildings.

-In collaboration with ARTSConnect, oh!mr., Topeka Metropolitan Transit Authority (TMTA), Heartland Visioning, and the Heartland Healthy Neighborhoods group, Chords and Oil brought about the Metropolitan Murals project.  This was kicked off at the TMTA’s downtown station where artists painted panels to replace some of the square glass panels that comprised the central bus loading zone.  Metropolitan Murals will provide the opportunity for artists with volunteer groups to replace panels with art on bus waiting stations all around town.

-Members have guided and educated many students in camps and schools, sponsoring artistic initiatives for them while promoting diversity and unity.

-Organized and promoted many art shows highlighting the music, film, painting, drawing, poetry, photography, body art, and other media of local artists while promoting local businesses and aiming to re-vitalize downtown Topeka.

While working in the Chesney Park garden on Saturday, many neighbors stopped by excited about the improvements taking place in their neighborhood, and some even pitched in. Chords and Oil is helping to get the project started, and when the neighbors take it over for themselves a new garden will be started in another neighborhood.  It was a very productive morning and afternoon. We cleared huge amounts of brush, trimmed back overgrown trees, mowed the lots, edged the sidewalks, established a compost pile, maintained the existing garden, expanded the hand-tilled area of the garden, planted day lilies, irises, grasses, and other perennials, and created a circular, hand-tilled plot bordered by large limestone pieces donated by a neighbor.  ”This is what community looks like,” said Chad Manspeaker while clearing brush.

Our project on Saturday coincided with many community service events in Kansas and across the nation. Democrats Work has served to bring Democrats and community members together on a vast number of  occasions all across the country to put their “values into action.”  When everybody in a community chips in to make improvements, the entire community benefits across the board and not just the Chamber of Commerce.  As Forward Kansas previously reported, the Topeka service project was just one of many in our area.

The primary organizer of the Topeka event bringing together C & O and the Shawnee County Democrats was Chad Manspeaker, who is also one of the founding Chords and Oil members.  Chords and Oil leaders Karl Fundenberger, Ashley Laird and Justin Marable were part of this extraordinary effort, as were Kansas Democratic Party Executive Director Kenny Johnston and Kansas Young Democrats President Colin Curtis.

Republished from ForwardKansas.

The Dems cut down brush, mowed, cut back weeds, pulled weeds from the existing plot, planted a new flower bed, and started a compost pile.

Neighbors came out with mowers and rakes to help the effort.

Facebook photo Gallery

Republished from CJOnline.

Highland Park High School students will return to school this month with a new work of art adorning one of their halls.

A mural celebrating diversity was unveiled Monday by the YWCA of Topeka R.A.C.E. Committee, which commissioned the design by St. Louis artist and Kansas State University graduate Billy Williams. About 75 children, including YWCA day campers, painted the mural this summer.

Williams, who was at the school Monday to paint underneath the mural the names of the organizations and businesses that sponsored it, said diversity was the theme he was given. Those who look closely at Williams’ design will the shapes and postures of the people he depicted in the art form letters which spell out the word “unity.”

“It’s kind of hidden,” he said.

Williams laid out the outline of the mural, leaving it to the children to paint in the colors. None of those selected are the actual colors of any race or ethnicity. The blue, green and purple hues were the choice of the young artists and the adult painter who supervised their work, Linda Humphries, of the Topeka Art Guild.

“The kids were great,” Humphries said. “Once they saw it, they really went for it.”

The children ranged in age from 8 to 16. In addition to the mural, they also did individual collages with the assistance of two artists from the Chord and Oil art group.

Karl Fundenberger and Ashley Laird gave the young artists magazines and other material to take images from for their collages. At first, Fundenberger said, they chose celebrities or products they liked. However, the day campers also were getting presentations about different ethnic and cultural groups, and before the project ended, they were incorporating those ideas into their art.

The individual art projects will be displayed from 6 to 8 p.m. Aug. 20 at the next Thoughtful Thursdays program at the YWCA of Topeka, 225 S.W. 12th. Lover Chancler, YWCA racial justice director, said R.A.C.E., which stands for Resource and Advocacy for Change and Equity, Committee is working with the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site to have the collages displayed there in the future.

Chancler said she was pleased with those artworks and the mural.

“This project has been an incredible experience,” she said. “It is amazing to see a blank wall become something of value these students can take pride in developing.

Sponsors of the mural include: Chords and Oil, Topeka Arts Guild, ARTSConnect of Topeka, Golden City Sertoma, Diamond Vogel Paints, Benjamin Moore Allied Paint and Decorating, Color Works Paint and Supply, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Kiwanis Club of Topeka and the YWCA of Topeka.

Thoughtful Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. Aug. 20