Flux Factory

Founded in 1994, Flux Factory is run as a laboratory for artistic experimentation.

While exhibitions are part of the nonprofit’s programming in a former greeting card factory in Long Island City, the nonprofit art collective also hosts artist residencies and an adventurous events program. This has included “Long Walks on the Beach” where strangers met up for a stroll on the Rockaway Beach sands, a series called “Seaworthy” that had artists building boats for the New York waterways, and “Going Places (Doing Stuff)” with artist-led bus tours.

Flux Factory has fourteen art studios and a staff of six. That’s around twenty people give or take, and in 2011 they held 75 different events, including art shows, installations, performances, screenings, workshops, and lectures. There have been lectures on social hijinx, interviewing skills, and kayak-building. They have four major thematic group shows each year, involving art, performance, and community events, that transform the gallery space.

Recently there was “iSpy,” a “participatory collaborative game show” that incorporated guessing games, livestreaming, piñatas, feminism according to World of Warcraft, and tweets from the Flux toilet whenever it was flushed. Before that was “Banquet for America,” a month-long extravaganza that saw the gallery redone as an entire village, with a fifty-foot banquet table-cum-catwalk down the center and each artist manning his or her own shop, “selling” things like donuts and haircuts and feminist karaoke. 

** portion of article adapted with permission from this piece on Brooklyn Spaces.