Reported today on The New York Times For the full article visit:
Artist's Studio: How About the Living Room?As rents for studios and lofts rise, many young artists find themselves working from home and adjusting their art to fit into smaller spaces.Erin Lorek is an artist whose practice involves casting sheets of glass using large iron plates, work that would ideally be done in a concrete-floored, industrial warehouse with a freight elevator, rather than the living room of a shared, three-bedroom apartment in a Bedford-Stuyvesant brownstone."Mine is not a very romantic situation - the huge beautiful Brooklyn loft. It's never been that for me," said Ms. Lorek, 41, who works full-time doing production lighting and pays $1,250 a month for her live/work arrangement. "I could never justify a $700 or $1,000 studio space. You can't get anything in this city for less; $500 will get you a tiny, shared windowless room."Ms. Lorek is fortunate that her roommates - other artists who also work out of the apartment - and her landlord have always been supportive of the setup, but working out of a shared apartment has its difficulties. She has to carry 50-pound iron plates up the stairs and she's limited mostly to prototyping there, though when her roommates are out she'll cut metal and bend steel, then take it to a friend's place to weld. Her studio storage is her sister's Westchester garage.ImageImage"It's a constant negotiation of moving stuff around and finding space to do this," Ms. Lorek said. "But I was like, 'What is more important? Having a studio space or time for my work?' "Being an artist in New York City has always required a fair amount of negotiation, thrift and ingenuity - the time when non-blue-chip artists lived and worked out of expansive SoHo and TriBeCa lofts is, of course, long gone. But for decades, artists continued to fin
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