Sculpture Garden: “Yurt City” installation by: Sheila Ross & Laura Ten Eyck

Special artwork by guests: Todd Knopke, Ted McGurn & Derrick Wilson

Hot summer nights under stars. Pitch your tent under the new condo construction. Dam Stuhltrager’s Sculpture Garden fills with various prefabricated tents and modified yurts. Sheila Ross and Ten Eyck create a unique “tent city” for fellow artists to inhabit and modify. Functional, fantastical and vagrantly political, Yurt City is both a metaphor and response to the changing landscape of Williamsburg.

In form, a yurt resembles the circular domed tents made of skins or felt stretched over a collapsible lattice framework and are reminiscent of the nomadic peoples of Central Asia. A far distance in structure from a New York condo, the yurts question the nature of sophisticated living in the shade of two towering live/work buildings (65 and 63 Hope Street) where dozens of artists were displaced within the last month. The residents and their artistically converted raw spaces are to be replaced by luxury lofts after a long battle that stemmed all the way to Albany. In Yurt City viewers enter to find an interior space transformed with elaborately designed panels and scrims- designs of which have been informed by a hybrid of 20th century abstraction and eastern art and architectural histories, including Ottoman miniature and architectural traditions. In the adjacent luxury condo buildings, decades of artists’ handywork converting raw space into homes, is gutted and removed.

Inspired by tent cites or Gecekondu, a the Turkish term for stealth overnight architectural squatter inventions, Yurt City also remarks on the collaborative spirit that is losing ground due to the highly competitive real estate market of NYC. Installation co-creator, Laura Ten Eyck, has invited guest artists to respond to this configuration of tents, altering or adding to the already existing structures.