The New Museum's Ideas City, a Four-Day Festival of Art, Education, & Community Activism, Takes Over Downtown Starting May 1st
SSPNY Heads Downtown for New Museum's Ideas City, A Four-Day Festival of Art, Education & Activism Starting May 1st
Two years ago The New Museum organized the great Festival of Ideas For a New City, which included nighttime projections all over Nolita (and all over the New Museum itself), dozens of workshops and performances, and a huge street fair that sprawled throughout the Lower East Side. It was probably my favorite thing that happened in this town that spring. All pictures in this post are from then. I was so disappointed when it didn't materialize last year.
But now, excellent news, the whole spectacle is back, slightly reconfigured, maybe bigger than before, and renamed Ideas City! Turns out it was conceived as a bi-annual festival in the first place, so it arrives next month exactly on time, starting on Wednesday evening, May 1, and running almost continuously through late Saturday night, May 4. There's no way to see and do it all, and even planning my weekend at Ideas City feels overwhelming--there's SO much going on--so I'm probably going to just show up and wing it. There do seem to be a few must-do, however...
The theme at Ideas City will be Untapped Capital, which the organizers describe as “under-recognized and underutilized resources and surpluses that can be harnessed as catalysts for change.” It'll be interesting to hear what Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab, has to say about that in his keynote address, on Wednesday night at Cooper Union's Great Hall. Though to ensure attendance there you'll probably need to buy a $50 Festival Pass, which guarantees access to all the workshops and panels.
The majority of Ideas City festival is readily accessible, however, with or without a pass, and totally free. Such as the Saturday night festival-capper, Change of State, for which the folks at Nuit Blanche New York are going to once again throw a series of projections onto the New Museum's Bowery facade. The Ideas City biggest draw, Street Fest, goes on all day Saturday, with some 125 “artists, architects, poets, technologists, historians, community activists, entrepreneurs, and ecologists” setting up booths and painting murals and staging all kinds of wild performances along Bowery and its environs. And on Friday night 14 different artists will be re-muralizing those store gates on Bowery, so stop by and say hi on your way home.
