New York 2044: Launch Event at WhiteBox

Join us on Saturday, June 22nd from 2-5pm for the launch of New York 2044, a speculative social sculpture by artist, writer, and organizer Noah Fischer, presented with WhiteBox.

Commissioned by More Art, Fischer’s research-based artwork takes the form of a newspaper that proposes the city we want to inhabit in 2044, and how to get there. The first issue, focused on Housing, features reports from the imaginations of New York’s committed citizens, along with their personal stories in comic form. A digitally-activated newspaper and zines of New Yorkers’ housing stories will be available to read and take at the June 22nd launch event, and the project will be available in WhiteBox’s The Front Window News Kiosk throughout 2024.

This Saturday’s project launch coincides with Mary Mattingly’s Building a Bundle workshop as part of Expanded Narratives on Art & Ecology's ’s ISLA x GreenBox@WBX Environmental Summer Workshops ’24. This workshop will creatively explore how our daily lives are shaped by the objects bought, used, and often then discarded through a series of prompts. Participants are asked to bring two objects that they can donate to help build a large sculpture: a bundle of our objects to be displayed at WhiteBox Art Space, which we'll document through research, drawing, and writing. By examining their origins, production, and use, we'll create an archive that tells the story of these items before they are added to the bundle

Learn more about New York 2044 on our website. Follow More Art on social media @moreartnyc and subscribe to our newsletter for updates on upcoming events & activations! 

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About the Artist

Brooklyn based artist and writer Noah Fischer gazed out the window of his studio towards lower Manhattan. He was frustrated by the gallery system and wondered how art might better address the gaping financial inequality of the day. Donning a giant coin mask, he staged street performances at the Wall Street Stock Exchange. As the performances continued, the Occupy Movement emerged, and a new art practice along with it. In the heat of Zuccotti Park, Noah co founded Occupy Museums, organizing direct actions that recast art institutions as political stages. Occupy Museums also organized around artist debt, staging Debtfair at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and he joined the Gulf Labor Coalition to challenge the Guggenheim’s labor practices abroad. Jostled by the political rollercoaster of the last few years, Noah became concerned with the widespread inability to imagine a better future. He turned to graphic stories and essays as a tool for telling stories beyond binary thinking, and worldbuilding possible futures. He has also recently completed a science fiction novel which imagines a revolution and its aftermath. Noah is a unionized adjunct art professor at Parsons and NYU. 

Explore Noah’s work at noahfischer.com and follow along on social media at @n_o_a_h_fischer.

About More Art

More Art is a NYC-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that collaborates with artists across their careers to catalyze social change by producing meaningful participatory public art for a broad audience. Through creative engagement, More Art empowers all people to utilize art to connect with others, build awareness, and drive action on topics that affect our lives and communities. Since its inception in 2004, More Art has produced a wide range of projects reflecting the concerns and challenges of various New York City communities. More Art focused on building collaborations between our neighbors by creating opportunities for a creative community education and public art projects. Consequently, our projects have gone increasingly ambitious, transcending the traditional boundaries of public art and expanding into workshops, lectures and panel discussions. Learn more about our work and explore our 20-year archive of public art at moreart.org. 

About WhiteBox

As a community bound, fully accessible non-profit art space relocated to the East Village-Alphabet City, a neighborhood endowed with a majority Caribbean-Latinx citizenry, students and timeless cultural Bohemia, WhiteBox becomes more than just an indoor and outdoor garden exhibition space, a platform inspired by the diversity of human and local cultural histories concerned with art in all its manifestations, taking the pulse of the times. A forum for reflection with an inventive contemporary artistic and political vision, WBX provides local artists and curators with sustained, equitable exposure, as it nurtures a fresh environment for more in-depth local and emigrè cultural engagement, creating real-life healing dialogues between underserved community audiences and artists’ practices. WBX aims to be a space for invention inviting local and regional emerging and established multifaceted artists to reckon with themselves regarding our precarious moment in time, responding to its unique new ecological exhibition spaces in a hazardous urban environment with startling interventions or projects aiding and inspiring its citizenry in developing long-term social justice, highly aesthetic and hands-on participatory urban sustainability programs that also address the lack of affordable housing and its precarious human consequences. WhiteBox is a radically inclusive, dynamic diversified institution with a mission freely accessible for everyone—workers, students, youth and seniors in particular—to learn from the past, reflect upon the complex, politically and economically challenging present and contribute to participate in the creation of a more comfortable communal space construed beyond race, gender, class, credo, religion or belief from where to contemplate a better, more peaceful, egalitarian dignifying future seen or imagined through the healing lens of art. Handicap accessible, daily docent tours available to visitors, schools by trained interns and staff conducted in English, Spanish and Chinese.