Talk

Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms 60% of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer.

Art in NYC is right in the middle of these changes. Architects are pushed aside by developers, as standardized buildings whose destiny is to sit empty crowd the skyline; artists in a desperate search for the cheap rents that once made bohemia possible become the front-runners of gentrification; designers and planners are kept far away from urgent questions about habitability and climate change and are employed to make a profit for the few. This all while it seems barely possible to afford one’s rent and there are an estimated 69,000 homeless people in the city, as winter sets in.  

Why is New York full of empty towers? Who has the power to shape the city? How does power in the urban space affect what gets made—and even imagined—by artists and architects today? Does bohemia stand a chance? What kind of organizing and political action is underway to change the situation?  

Sam Stein, author of Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, joins SVA faculty member, alumnus and activist Shellyne Rodriguez and architect Georg Windeck for this roundtable on power, property, gentrification, art, architecture and fighting back. RSVP here. Presented by BFA Visual and Critical Studies.Samuel Stein studies geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His writing on planning politics has been published by Jacobin, The Journal of Urban Affairs, Metropolitics, and many other magazines and journals. 

Shellyne Rodriguez is a visual artist who works in multiple mediums to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against subjugation. Shellyne graduated with a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Fine Art from CUNY Hunter College. She has had her work and projects exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum and New Museum, and her work has recently been commissioned by the city of New York for a permanent public sculpture, which will serve as a monument to the people of the Bronx. Shellyne teaches at SVA and is also a community organizer and an active member of radical grassroots collective Take Back the Bronx.

Georg Windeck received his Diplom-Ingenieur in Architecture with distinction at the Technische Universitaet Berlin. He also studied sculpture at the Hochschule der Kuenste in Berlin. His training included a wide range of architectural work in several professional offices. His research focuses on new literary and imaginative approaches to architecture. Windeck's work has recently been shown in the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, and in the Center for Architecture in New York. His writing has been published in newspapers and magazines such as Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Deutsche Bauzeitung. He has won awards for competition entries for the reconstruction of the Bauakademie in Berlin, for the Nam June Paik Museum in Korea and for the Tadeusz Kantor Museum in Poland.