East Village, NY – Trust Art proudly welcomes its eleventh project, led by artist Legacy Russell, to the Trust Art community. Russell’s project, OPEN CEREMONY, will be a contemporary exploration of ceremony, ritual, and idolatry through site-specific performative and interactive installations (dubbed by the artist as “social shrinesâ€) throughout Lower Manhattan.
Russell is the first new artist to be introduced to the Trust Art platform since its inception in early 2009; her arrival marks the beginning of Trust Art’s plan to open its shareholder-based funding model to the wider artist community.
Beginning in late June, the OPEN CEREMONY project will be broken up into four “rites,†each of which will be gradually released into the public realm over the coming months. Each rite will aim to experiment with a different facet of public worship and remembrance, as inspired by the cultural and social milieu of the East Village and the Lower East Side. The hope for this project is that it will build upon the collective consciousness and visual vernacular of two sites undergoing change.
The first of the four, “Rite of Remembrance: Memory Transcriptionâ€, investigates how narrative history acts as a vehicle in building collective consciousness within a community. With a table, two chairs, and a typewriter, Russell will take to the streets of the East Village and Lower East Side as a native stenographer of public diary, asking of residents both old and new: “What memories do you have of living in this neighborhood?â€
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An online map will be updated with the artist's location in the coming months. Participants can also follow @OpenCeremony on Twitter to keep updated on the project's location.
Introduced at the 2009 TED Conference in Palm Springs, Trust Art is an experimental funding platform for socially-engaged artist projects. Trust Art empowers artists to fund projects by sharing the projects' economic benefits with small donors, collaborators, and community stakeholders. Projects that ‘go public’ on the Trust Art platform issue financial shares and invite people to become shareholders. Every dollar, volunteer hour, or other resource contributed to a project translates into shares for the giver. Artworks emerging from the project's creative process are sold and proceeds split 50/50 between the artist and the collective pool of project shareholders, who are encouraged to “gift forward†any returns beyond their original contributions. The inaugural Trust Art Triennial Auction, slated for Spring 2012, will bring a radical and playful transparency into the economic performance of Trust Art's model.
Trust Art launched with ten hand-selected artists, whose projects would serve as a pilot program to help test, develop, and refine the economic, storytelling, and community-building components of the model. With the inaugural auction in sight and programming and partnerships being put into place, Trust Art is beginning to codify its processes, re-design its website, and prepare to open the platform to new artists, shareholders, and even Trust Art satellites beyond its Brooklyn headquarters.
Russell marks the first artist in this expansion. An East Village born and bred artist, curator, and creative producer, she completed the Independent Curators International (iCI) Curatorial Intensive, Curating in the Public Realm in the Fall of 2010. The proposal for OPEN CEREMONY was selected by iCI jury for participation in the highly competitive program.
Watch Russell's Miniature Shrines video:Â
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Keep up with the OPEN CEREMONY project on facebook. You can also follow @TrustArt, @OpenCeremony, and @LegacyRussell on twitter.
(Photo of artist by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich)
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