The Romanesque public school in Long Island City, the concrete courtyard with its summer stage and the crowd, the classrooms turned galleries down long corridors, the boiler room, the works in the old school's bones.
Alanna Heiss founded the Institute for Art and Urban Resources in 1971 and in 1976 opened P.S.1 in a Romanesque Revival public school built in 1892 in Long Island City. The classrooms became galleries, and James Turrell cut his skyspace Meeting into the building in 1986. It joined MoMA in 2000, and its summer Warm Up parties fill the courtyard.
Source · MoMA PS1 ↗
The Victorian brick schoolhouse with its tower, the walled concrete courtyard with the summer installation and DJ stage, the long corridors of classrooms with their original wood and radiators, the sky room with the roof cut open. Mood: warm up saturday. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.