Franklin Furnace, New York's venerable alternative art gallery, announced Friday that its current show, In the Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies, would be its last as a physical exhibition space. The nonprofit will become an "artist-driven" Web site in February.
"The purpose of changing the organization is to adapt to a completely different aesthetic, social, political, and economic climate (than the 1970s and '80s)," executive director Martha Wilson said. In other words, government funds are running dry, but Wilson finds that, while politicians in charge of funding have cooled to avant garde art, it has gained wider acceptance in mainstream culture.
Known for 20 years of exhibitions and performances by experimental and sometimes outrageous artists such as Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle, Franklin Furnace is creating a site that will include a digital catalog of 50,000 slides and 300 videotapes. It will also exhibit digital works created for this medium.
Franklin Furnace joins hundreds of other Web-based galleries and literary journals that have chosen digital real estate and a global audience over scraping together grant money to cover rising costs.
