A grassroots gallery grows in Chelsea

Volume One, Issue 17, January 19 - 25, 2007

Photo by Ed Hamilton

Artist-activist Ellen Levin in her community-oriented gallery, Protest Space (l) and Seth Tobocman's, “Enough” (r).

By Ed Hamilton

In a sea of big, white-box art emporiums, the storefront at 511 West 20th St. stands out as a tiny gallery with a powerful message in its window: Protest Space. Walking in the door, visitors are assaulted by bright, primary colors of détourned commercial ads hanging on the walls, carpeting the floors and towering in a huge skyscraper sculpture of cardboard product boxes. The exhibit, “America For Sale,” is messy, and the art is a mixed bag, ranging from very professional to amateur. Its curator, an intelligent, vibrant woman with an untamed mane of wavy brown hair comes out of the back room and tells visitors to grab a brush and add something to the mural space in the back. “Anyone can make art,” she says. “You don’t have to be an artist to make a statement.”

Protest Space is the brainchild of Ellen Levin, an artist, activist, psychotherapist and divorced mother of a teenage son. Born and raised in Chicago, and living in Chelsea since 1995, she received her M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago, and is most well known in the art world for her 1990s shows “Fallout” and “Gotcha,” provocative installations featuring coal-black babies and crows engaged in mortal combat. It was her interest in the mind and the unconscious that led her later in life to take up a second career in psychotherapy, which she considers an art form in itself. She is also involved in several activist organizations, such as Time’s Up, an environmental group, and Critical Mass, which stages a monthly mass bike ride to protest the automobile culture.

“The existence of this gallery itself is a protest,” Levin says. “A protest against the commercialization of art, and the commercialization of everything, actually — a protest against the present state of America, where everything seems to be for sale.”

Levin started her gallery in September of last year because she wanted to give the community a space where they could talk back to the powers-that-be through art. Though she has been an artist her whole life, it was, strangely enough, through playing the banjo in pick-up bands at the Baggot Inn in Greenwich Village that inspired Levin to create Protest Space.

“Musicians are much more collaborative than visual artists,” she says. “And they’re more socially conscious too. People like Bono and Neil Young give benefit concerts regularly. You just don’t see that so much in the art world, where the artists are isolated, and more or less in it for themselves. I wanted to try to foster that same sense of engagement and collaboration in the visual arts.”

The communal mural space in back of her gallery is an example of this open invitation to the community. Already, someone has installed a huge dollar sign in green Christmas lights on it, and on an adejacent wall there’s a child’s drawing of a Mexican wrestler. Levin invites everyone to come in and draw or mount something while there’s still room. She also plans to use the proceeds from the next exhibit to benefit Time’s Up.

The two most well-known artists in the current exhibit are Tom Otterness, familiar to New Yorkers for his whimsical bronze statues of little creatures rolling pennies around (in the 14th St. subway station, for instance), and Seth Tobocman, a tireless longtime activist and co-founder of the World War 3 Illustrated comic book. Otterness’s three neon stencils, “Rx America,” pulsate with a desperate call for change, though the prescription is not specified. Tobocman contributed a provocative poster depicting a casket containing an American soldier, beneath which is printed the simple message: Enough.

Sam Sebren’s work is the most impressive. His large flag collage, the stars and stripes composed entirely of ads in often jarring juxtaposition, reminded one less of the famous Jasper Johns flag than of the TV-flag installation by Nam June Paik in the Museum of American Art in D.C. On a much smaller scale, and budget, Sebren’s piece exemplifies the same sense of being overwhelmed by the vast range of choices inherent in the American way of life. While there are a million corporate products from which to choose, Sebren is conveying, they are all the same in their promotion of unreflective consumption to sustain our selfish lifestyle. Also noteworthy — and hilarious — is Sebren’s large stencil of a wacked-out bunny pushing a shopping cart, titled “Breeding Zombie Consumer.”

“Protest Space is refreshingly open and accepting, willing to take risks that most other galleries won’t,” Sebren says. “I find it similar in spirit and feeling to the early East Village galleries where there wasn’t so much competition and everyone was just trying to make the best art they could. That kind of camaraderie is pretty much unheard of in Chelsea, but hopefully more galleries will follow Ellen’s lead.”

Drawing on her background as an installation artist, Levin has designed the show’s presentation for maximal visual impact. To compliment Sebren’s flag and Peter Quinn’s huge “Building of Consumption” sculpture, she has carpeted the floor with colorful advertising posters. The effect is dazzling and disorienting, creating a sort of vertigo — a comment, within this microcosm, on the tendency of advertising to colonize and dominate our physical and mental landscape.

When asked if she encourages outsider artists, Levin directed this visitor’s gaze to the dozen or so dolls that lounge about the floor in the back room. “These were made by a woman from the Midwest named Debbie Foster,” she says. “I don’t know how many she sells back in the heartland, but people seem to really like them here in New York.” The dolls are both pitiful and adorable at the same time. Each one has its own personality, its own tiny hand-knitted sweaters and caps, and its own little cardboard sign, such as “Apples for sale, 25 cents” or “Lost my job, then my house, then my family.” Some carry props like fishing poles or trash bags, and manage to strike just exactly the right chord between humor and poignancy — no easy feat in the field of political art. Because Foster is extremely cash-strapped, only a step up from homelessness herself, Levin forgoes her usual percentage and sends the artist most of the money for the dolls (a bargain at $225 apiece).

Donna Kelsh, an outsider artist and longtime Chelsea resident who is showing her work for the first time in the mural room at Protest Space, says, “A space like this is essential. Artists need to have a sense that they are linked somehow to the larger community. At Protest Space, I felt like I was at home among people with a shared sensibility that things have to change.”

Levin says her day job as a psychotherapist helps pay the bills for the gallery space. “Luckily this place is cheap, because nobody else wants it,” she says. “It’s too small and odd-shaped, the bathroom is upstairs, and the heater is not too good.” She points out a tiny wall-mounted unit that looks like it was made in the ’50s, if not earlier.

Still, Levin does make some money as a gallerist. During one recent visit, a man walked in and bought a print by the graphic artist Christopher Cardinale, a relatively unknown, but extremely proficient young artist. “That’s rare,” Levin says, “Somebody walking in and buying a piece off the wall just because they like it. Usually they at least want to meet the artist.” She says half-jokingly that even her mother wouldn’t buy her art before it was reviewed in a New York paper.

But Levin does not run Protest Space primarily to make a buck. “Most galleries are totally money-driven,” Levin says. “You can feel that when you walk in the door. They’re so solemn, like… ‘Oh, there’s the great art up on the wall…, surrounded by all this white space.’ These places make you feel uncomfortable, because, for one thing, if you’re not super wealthy, you can’t afford any of the art.” Here at Protest Space a person can talk, hang out, make some art, even buy the art on the wall, which is all reasonably priced. Levin is even open to other suggestions on how to use the space, mentioning poetry readings as one possibility for the future. “I want people to feel comfortable here,” Levin says. “I want this to be a place where socially-minded artists can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas.”

“America For Sale runs through March 3 at Protest Space, 511 W 20th Street, 646-734-4771. Hours are Thursday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m. and by appointment.