Conceived as a site for showing the then-nascent medium of video, this small, mutable space was capable of shifting between production, presentation, and performance for those who knew it was there, or who trickled in from one of the Center’s five other theaters. What became “The Kitchen” arose here as a collective of artists and directors, intentionally unstructured and nonhierarchical, “donating their time” to a medium based in that very material.(8) This experiment in giving time freely, and offering space for it to be spent, stood out against the still relatively limited access to video technology and paucity of time in an art world conditioned by capitalism.

Coming out of the 1960s, where similar downtown experimental arts spaces, like the East Village’s Electric Circus, were “short-lived,” (9) the opening of The Kitchen in June 1971 (10) regathered artists with experimental intentions, encouraging the developing field to survive the unsteady fiscal climate. Centered on providing access to the increasingly public medium of video, The Kitchen operated on charitable donations (11) and an admissions split with presenting artists (12), holding weekly music performances and a Wednesday “Open House” where anyone in attendance could screen their videotapes. In its early years, The Kitchen was housed as a project under the fiscal sponsorship of Howard Wise’s nonprofit Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), enabling the collective to receive New York State Council on the Arts funding while remaining unincorporated as a nonprofit institution. In this way, with a lack of formalization and growing support from artists and art workers across experimental disciplines, The Kitchen diverged from both the city’s commercial gallery scene and established institutions, aiding Mercer Arts Center in becoming what the New York Times dubbed “a kind of downtown Lincoln Center seen through the wrong end of a telescope.” (13)

A reputation for inverting norms would follow The Kitchen’s evolution as the Vasulkas departed in 1973, leaving both New York and the collective, and Robert Stearns became the space’s first Executive Director. With an expanding calendar of screenings and the incorporation of live music programming, The Kitchen’s audience was widening beyond the 150-person capacity at the Mercer Arts Center. Two years after the beginnings of the experiment, The Kitchen faced a rising budget and impending rent increase at the Center, cementing the decision not only to leave Mercer’s kitchen in June 1973, but to separate from EAI and become an independently incorporated nonprofit organization.

Working with volunteer lawyers, The Kitchen incorporated as Haleakala Inc.—taking on a name that means “house of the sun”—as Stearns formalized the organizational structure, integrating a board of directors and advisors, including art dealer Paula Cooper and artists such as Caroline Stone and Philip Glass. That fall, an agreement with the landlord of 484 Broome Street on the corner of Wooster Street), the former LoGuidice Gallery Building, allowed the organization to lease the second floor for $10,000/year, providing space for performances, a gallery, and a video viewing room. (14)

Moving further downtown into the still burgeoning SoHo district, The Kitchen continued to situate itself both physically and artistically “on the fringes” of “the dominant art-world centers.”(15) In the 1975 Kitchen Yearbook publication, Stearns named the institution’s intentions:

Confronting the relationality inherent in being designated (or not designated) “alternative,” Stearns seems to ask if it is possible for the now-institution to assert itself still as an experiment, independent and “uncollectable,” rather than an alternative option to the mainstream. These questions resonated for others at the time, such as critic John Rockwell, who likewise wondered at The Kitchen’s transformations, writing in 1977, “The Kitchen epitomizes what is best about the extraordinary artistic community that thrives in the midst of our biggest city. Yet at the same time, it is itself an ‘edifice,’ in that it’s larger and more firmly established than the alternative loft spaces that otherwise house this sort of work. If that’s a paradox, it’s a productive one.” (16) Such comments represent the trajectory of The Kitchen’s first half-decade of existence, during which engagement from the artistic community and increasing attention to new media art pushed the original collective towards what Steina Vasulka called “the dilemma of success,” (17) where the need for a larger space and the opportunity for governmental funding could outweigh the spirit and opportunities of alterity that inspired the institution’s formation. We might consider what it means for the institution to have shifted from the intimacy and multimodality of a bygone kitchen in a former hotel to the enshrinement of the experiment in a more visible, long-term site; from the self-governance of artists working with a medium still considered radical and illegitimate towards the legal conditions of nonprofit status and proximity to, or intimacy with, the mainstream.

Scene 2: In Support; Building As Site

November 18, 2021. Early on that Thursday night, I slipped into the opening of In Support— a six-floor exhibition marking the end of The Kitchen’s fall season at its home on West 19th St.

The institution relocated to Chelsea from 484 Broome Street in 1986, renting an ice storage facility turned artist studio from Dia Art Foundation and then purchasing the building the following year. With this move, the decade-old institution found itself at the helm of experimental arts in a neighborhood removed from the now-established arts center of SoHo, and it began laying the groundwork for the area to become “the gallery hub [Chelsea] is today.” (18)

Scanning the room, I listened through the murmuring visitors into the walls of the former warehouse, hearing echoing footsteps, the chime of the elevator. Featuring Fia Backström, Francisca Benítez, Papo Colo, and Clynton Lowry, and organized by curator Alison Burstein, In Support investigated the relationship an institution has with its people, whether patrons, artists, or others:

My gaze fell to the ground in front of the lift, where QR codes were planted. Clynton Lowry’s series “Invisible Art Handler” included six such codes on the building’s floors, linked to videos depicting “the typically unseen labor of art handlers.” (20)

The videos show typical maintenance activities taking place, with the person themself rendered invisible through digital editing. Objects of labor seem to be moving on their own—a mop cleaning a floor, a ladder carrying itself between floors of the building, and a saw chopping wood. Calling attention to these often unseen activities, the videos reveal the time, support, and attention that anticipate and follow our visits to the space. As data is processed between the codes and the visitors’ devices, these portions of Lowry’s series sharpen the visitor’s attention to the energy that powers both the operation of the QR codes and their connection and the institution in which they’re housed. These codes resituate our visit to The Kitchen as part of a process rather than a moment, connecting our presence to that of others we may not encounter otherwise.

In February 2002, The Kitchen collaborated with Professor Linda Pollak and Harvard Graduate School of Design students to stage an exhibition conducting “an investigation of time and space that challenges preconceived ideas about theater, institution and the city.” (21) Building As Site: Performing The Kitchen read the institution’s location and physicality in a bodily grammar, characterizing the building as both a complex ecosystem and its own lifeform; similarly, the exhibition’s projects considered the interactions and support between “performers, audiences, and the neighborhood” of The Kitchen. (22) Designs by Tala Klinck, then-student and architect, proposed renovations to the edifice featuring a “mutable filter”— “a thickened sometimes porous wall… allow[ing] the thinning of the exterior façade, increasing porosity between the interior spaces and the street.” (23) Rather than “thresholds that divide one space from another,”(24) permeable layers of The Kitchen would “[draw] people into the building even as [they transform] the street.” (25)

Her models attend to the transfer of energy and attention that occurs through the facade of the building, and by increasing the walls’ porosity, she transforms the exchange between The Kitchen and its people from the accident of a leaking roof to an intentional design. As in “Invisible Art Handler,” Klink reveals both person and building as containers and conductors of energy that in their connection blur the notion of site between the physical structure and the network of those powering its operation. Whereas Lowry’s QR codes suggest the residue of human labor that remains in a space, available to be scanned and revived for those attentive to it, Klink’s work recognizes people as activators of The Kitchen before and after entering its site.

Scene 3: Where there’s love overflowing

May 2022. A series of rehearsals marks the rhythm of The Kitchen’s final exhibition in its Chelsea building, before closing for renovations. Organized by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator, and Sienna Fekete, Curatorial Fellow, E. Jane: Where there’s love overflowing ran from April 1 to May 14, 2022, culminating in a performance by the artist’s persona, MHYSA. In the weeks before, the exhibition invited audiences “to listen in on” rehearsals through the closed doors of the first-floor black box. The invitation to eavesdrop on MHYSA’s voice but not her body moderated the audience's access to the diva while emphasizing the labor of the performer and the anticipation for it. Likewise, the elements of the exhibition—digital drawings, gouache text on the walls, sculpture, video, and a diva’s stage—are characterized in the Exhibition Score as performers in units of quintets, trio, and soloist. The exhibition’s title cites a lyric from the song “Home,” a classic from The Wiz, written by Charlie Smalls and first sung by Stephanie Mills as Dorothy in the 1975 Broadway premiere. Performer “group two,” a quintet of gouache paintings hand-brushed onto the walls, chronicles the timeline of the song’s renditions, “start[ing] when Stephanie Mills first breathed life into it, and end[ing] with Jazmine Sullivan, the R&B queen of our contemporary time.” Assembling a history not only of the song’s performance but of Black popular music as a loving body, E. Jane positions the exhibition as “talking about the archive as a space to find love overflowing.”

Performer four, the stage, transforms with MHYSA’s presence into a site where energy flows between her body, the structure, and the floor. Reading the surface as an extension of Klinck’s “mutable filter", this to become stored in The Kitchen’s site, just as the performer summons up “the reverberations” (28) already archived in the grounds. “Where there’s love overflowing” then serves as a directive, summoning the most loving of “the residues of [The Kitchen’s] many histories” (29) to flow into audiences today. This intention to call upon love, shared histories, and presence concluded this era of the institution’s physical space, offering a throughline for its ongoing and future evolutions.

Since 2022, The Kitchen has taken up residence at Westbeth Artists Housing while the Chelsea building undergoes renovation, in a loft space that visually and affectively channels the spirit of the former Wooster Street loft. As “a version of a space that the Kitchen has grown beyond,” the temporary location represents what Executive Director Legacy Russell called “a chance to revel in our history, to champion those who brought us to this point and to bring in new voices and perspectives, too.” (30) In this setting, the organization holds a heightened proximity to the beginnings of its experiment and the questions of its originating collective, as this period “without walls” makes space for new considerations, energies, and love to overflow.