Frank Shifreen
Shifreen played a significant part in the art movement of New York City in the early 1980s, organizing massive artist-run shows that brought thousands of people to Gowanus, Brooklyn.
[6][9] His early inspiration included the work of the great abstract expressionists, such as Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning.
[10][11] Starting after he graduated in 1976, Shifreen began designing sets and props for various theater and dance companies in the United States and Europe.
Six months before the show, Shifreen began putting out posters to call for entries, and with a $1500 grant from the Brooklyn Council on the Arts and help from Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation and Carroll Gardens Association,[19] he and the organizers selected 150 artists out of the thousand proposals they received.
The artists were each given a 20 by 20 foot space to create their art, which as "monumental" consisted of paintings, sculptures, mixed media, and anything one-and-a-half times normal size.
[9] Thousands of artists again submitted entrees, and the co-curators selected 400 proposals, including works by well-known artists such as Carl Andre, Christo, Vito Acconci, Nancy Holt, the controversial Chris Burden, Dennis Oppenheim, Nancy Spero, Leon Golub, and Boaz Vaadia.
[20] Some of Shifreen's co-jurors were Marcia Tucker, the director of the New Museum, Henry Geldzahler, the New York City Cultural Commissioner, and Mary Boone, the gallery owner.
[14] The 22 Wooster Gallery gave him the paid position of Program Director for the Artists Talk on Art series, where he organized well-attended panels on diverse topics from 1986 to 1988.
[13] Shifreen found himself upset after the 2000 election of George W. Bush as President of the United States, and he put out a call to artists to hold the exhibit Counting Coup in response.
[14] The Museum of New Art (MONA) in Detroit, Michigan had recently opened and was holding a beginning fundraiser, to which Shifreen donated some of his paintings.
[6][14] The show, which included artists Leon Golub and Barbara Kruger, traveled also to the Theater for a New City and the Center for Social Change in Northampton Massachusetts.
[21] Shifreen, who lived less than a mile from the World Trade Center[22] and saw the second plane go down, hurried to the site to volunteer, but was not allowed to help due to union rules about insurance.
[3] Shifreen then contacted Patricia Nicholson, a local activist and dancer, about using the CUANDO building gallery in Manhattan, which had been unoccupied but had non-profit status.
[23] From June to August in 2003[9] he curated the exhibition Art Against War: Posters and Multimedia, which was displayed originally on the internet[4] and also at nine galleries and museums in different places around the world.
[6][7] It was partly sponsored by the Drinkink Collective, a group of artists and scholars at Teachers College, and the New York Arts Magazine.
[13][26] The show contained work from international and national artists, including a live-action "painting battle" between Shifreen and Dr. Barnaby Ruhe.
[5][27] Shifreen was in a show in 2008 at Harvard University called Speech Acts: Art Responding Language, Rhetoric and Politics.
[8][13] Shifreen and Gila Paris,[28] organized a series of exhibitions in June 2009 along with Luxembroug group "cultureinside.com", the first one entitled ROOTED - the premiere.
[7][29] In September and October 2009, Shifreen co-produced the A Bailout for the Rest of Us: Recession Art Sale in Manhattan with Elanit Kayne.
[30] In December 2009, he participated in the Orchard Street Shul Cultural Heritage Artists Project at the John Slade Ely House Center for Contemporary Art[1] in New Haven.
70 pieces of diverse media, including painting, photography, sculpture, digital, video, and performance, were then chosen by a curatorial committee.
