Celebration of New York

A festival of audio and video installations written for specific places in three boroughs. September 2021

Intimate Spaces

A virtual festival of public works written for and performed in private spaces. Ran on Instagram starting April, 2020.

View here.

When the pandemic began in March 2020, The Motor Company looked for ways to continue to produce new, site-responsive work that would provide our artists with artistic purpose and income while simultaneously remaining safe for our audiences. We began with Intimate Spaces in April 2020, a festival of new works written to be filmed in the director’s home. Each director sent a playwright a video of their living space, along with a list of the people (and animals) they had available to them in lockdown, and the playwright wrote a piece specifically for that location and those “actors.” The following year, we approached six artists and asked them to create an aural or visual installation for a specific place (or places) anywhere in the city that had particular meaning for them. This Celebration of New York was available all September 2021 via QR codes at each of these locations, so the audiences could listen to the piece in the place that inspired it. The Celebration was so successful that we wanted to incorporate a similar audio piece into this year’s live Communal Spaces festival. Artistic Director Lillian Meredith created Listen While You Walk for audiences to listen to as they travel from garden to garden. Please feel free to check out the incredible work our artists were able to create under these extraordinary circumstances.

Listen While You Walk

Created as part of the 2022 Communal Spaces festival to link the three gardens.