Through the Baltzerglass
Two NYC artists are building their own New Jersey refuge from an art market that’s proven as uninspired as their gentrified Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.
By John Tyler Allen, Bryse Ciallella, and Micaela Heck
Artists Mikel Glass and Daniel Baltzer — working under the collaborative “baltzerglass” — didn’t complain when they were told their Hell’s Kitchen studio space of 25 years was slated for a residential remodel. Unlike many of the other tenants at 500 West 52nd St., who saw the eviction as more evidence of the continued demise of an artistic community, Glass, 54, and Baltzer, 45, saw it as an opportunity.
Like Manhattan’s rising costs and shrinking square footage, the New York art market had become stifling in its own way. “In fall of 2008, the bottom fell out of the economic world and in much the same way it affected banking in America…I think it did a similar thing in the art world,” Baltzer said. “There was this consolidation of power in the art world where, instead of having lots of competition…there was a consolidation of things, and very few people were now making money at making art.” This new environment, as Baltzer and Glass see it, leaves less and less room for “art for art’s sake.”
True to the form, Baltzer and Glass are taking the adversity and turning it into art. The baltzerglass collaboration will serve as a model for a collaborative art community in Passaic, NJ. Their non-traditional agreement with the owners of the old Manhattan Rubber Manufacturing plant in Passaic, New Jersey will give them 3,000-square-feet of free studio space in exchange for their help filling the unused spaces in the industrial complex with a vibrant artistic community.
It’s an ambitious experiment, and an important one. And to believe in its success, one only has to hear baltzerglass outline the purity in their vision of a burgeoning community returning to art for art’s sake.
