Keith Schweitzer

In April of 2011, Coney Island invited me to organize a series of large scale murals throughout the amusement park as part of No Longer Empty‘s ongoing mural program.  Beginning with the main entrances to the park and working our way inward, six artists covered more than 4,000 square feet of exterior surfaces with artwork referencing Coney Island‘s legendary iconography and the surrounding beachfront boardwalk’s imagery. I captured the above video during the first phase of the project.

Featured Artists: Ephameron, ND’A, OverUnder, Radical & Veng

In March of 2011, I worked with the MaNY Project and artist duo “How & Nosm” to organize this street facing mural on the exterior roll-down gate of a storefront located on East 14th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.

Invited by the organizers of Dumbo Arts Festival, I organized and curated four large outdoor murals throughout the festival grounds in Dumbo, Brooklyn. This outdoor component of No Longer Empty’s “Watch This Space” featured artists Chris Stain, Imminent Disaster, Jordan Seiler and Helen Dennis. The site-specific murals were inspired by Dumbo’s rich industrial history and its hulking architectural elements and were installed on large lengths of wooden scaffolding and construction shedding.

 

 

Concurrent to No Longer Empty’s “Re-Purpose” exhibition, I organized and documented a mural on the roll-down gate at the store-front’s exterior, with artist GAIA, as a continuation of NLE’s ongoing site-specific mural program.

In the autumn of 2009, I organized this mural by London-based artist D*FACE across 3 large roll-down gates on the exterior of a vacant building located at 200 Clinton Street in Manhattan. The artwork is part of my ongoing mural project with No Longer Empty and was produced in participation with Jonathan LeVine Gallery, coinciding with D*Face’s solo exhibition “Ludovico Aversion Therapy / All Your Dreams Belong To Us”  September 12 – October 10, 2009

In July of 2009, I organized a mural on the street-level exterior of the Hotel Chelsea (222 West 23rd Street, NYC) to commemorate our first exhibition as No Longer Empty.  Israeli artist “Know Hope“, in collaboration with Chris Stain, created this site-specific artwork directly upon the roll-down gate of NLE’s inaugural exhibition. I documented the artists at work by creating the time-lapse video below:

No Longer Empty began exhibiting at two storefronts at the Chelsea Hotel, the historical art heart of Manhattan. Artists such as Michael Bevilacqua, Alina and Jeff Bliumis and Diana Puntar filled economy-ravaged spaces with installations while responding to the present dire financial straits and its effect on the urban landscape and national psyche. Resident artists at the Hotel Chelsea also exhibited.

No Longer Empty´s first exhibition took the name of its location. The Chelsea Hotel offered a forum for artistic dialogue. The spaces here were not gallery or museum locales and the resulting works and conversations were not defined by such conventional exhibition spaces. Indeed, the exhibition was the pioneer of No Longer Empty´s new model of community art. The project strived to stem any potential neighborhood decline resulting from unused and abandoned buildings by lavishing them with art.