The nonprofit Center for Art and Advocacy, designed as a steppingstone to the art world, opens a public exhibition and education space in Bedford-Stuyvesant.
The Center for Art and Advocacy, a nonprofit that assists artists who have served time in prison, will inaugurate its first physical space on Thursday. The hub, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, opens to the public with an exhibition, “Collective Gestures: Building Community Through Practice,” featuring works by the organization’s fellows.
Jesse Krimes, the center’s founder and executive director, who has leveraged his successful art career to help other formerly incarcerated artists, says the center’s home “is a learning space and exhibition venue where we’re trying to get our artists out into the art world.”
The exhibition includes visual art, writing and film by recipients of the center’s interdisciplinary fellowship. The $20,000 award has been granted to 42 recipients since the program began in 2017. Beyond fellowships, the center offers mentoring, professional development and creative opportunities to its cohort of artists.
“Collective Gestures” was curated by Krimes and Kate Fowle, the chairwoman of the center’s board and the former director of MoMA PS1, where she brought the groundbreaking “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” in 2020 during her tenure. All the work in “Collective Gestures” is for sale, at prices from $5,000 to $40,000. The artists will receive 100 percent of the proceeds for their art (as opposed to a typical 50-50 split at commercial galleries).
The 2,600-square-foot ground-floor space, housed in a recently built mixed-use business development, is a concrete next step in Krimes’s long-term vision to amplify the perspectives of formerly incarcerated artists nationwide.
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