Ann Mirjam Vaikla in NEW YORK
Ann Mirjam Vaikla received Baltic-American Freedom Foundation’s scholarship to participate at the Professional Internship Program in New York City. Since June 2016 she has been doing her curatorial and gallery management internship at the gallery Storefront for Art and Architecture in Soho, Manhattan. The program has a duration of one year.
About Storefront for Art and Architecture:
Storefront for Art and Architecture advances innovative and critical ideas that contribute to the design of cities, territories, and public life. Storefront’s exhibitions, events, competitions, publications, and projects provide alternative platforms for dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary, geographic, and ideological boundaries. Since its founding in 1982, Storefront has presented the work of over one thousand architects and artists.
Storefront was founded in 1982 by Kyong Park as an experimental forum and exhibition space for activating and engaging emerging voices and promoting public discourse around issues effecting, influencing and challenging the built environment. The organization presented its first program, Performance A-Z, on September 18,1982. The inaugural exhibition included a series of 26 consecutive nights of performances by 26 artists.
Since the launch of inaugural Performance A-Z, Storefront has continued to shape itself as a platform for emerging ideas that lie at the intersection of art and architecture, and for open dialogue and innovative exchange beyond and across borders, backgrounds and ideologies, addressing issues from new technology to the social and political forces that shape the built environment. Throughout its history, the organization has investigated critical social issues such as homelessness(1985), gender identity (1994), public housing (1984), and has responded to geopolitical and economical conflicts and movements such as the Gulf War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Occupy Wall Street movement (2011) from a design perspective, while offering emerging artists and architects the opportunity to present new ideas and exhibit innovative work. Over one thousand internationally recognized artists and architects have shown at Storefront, includingPeter Cook, Diller+Scofidio, Tony Feher, Dan Graham, Coop Himmelblau, Alfredo Jaar, Kiki Smith, Lebbeus Woods, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, Eyal Weizman, Bjarke Ingels, Didier Fiuza Faustino among many others.
Storefront is committed to spatial experimentation and innovation, and remains one of the only platforms focusing primarily on the intersection of architecture, art, and design.