Want to Come Sail with Us for a While?

Mothership NYC is a combined live-work space and presentation arena for international artists across multiple disciplines in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, NYC. Our converted industrial loft currently has two berths for permanent crew members and three spaces for shorter-term visitors staying from 1-3 months:
1) Live-Work Space (aka Engine Room), available to rotating Artists-in-Residence (known onboard as our Sea Artists) | Spacious private room with separate studio area
2) Guestroom 1 (aka Stateroom), available to visiting artists (known onboard as our Sailors)| Comfortable room with sturdy worktable and painting nook w. easel.
3) Guestroom 2 (aka Cabin), available to visiting creatives (known onboard as our Sailors)| Tiny room with computer desk and bare-bones furniture.

Our residencies support contemporary visual art practices and trans-disciplinary projects (including performance and performing arts, music, writing and curatorial proposals) promoting exchange, debate, experimentation and collaborative work. We host different types of residencies: Production | Exploration | Micro-Residency | Presentation. Artists-in-residence work on a project and show results or do their research without a fixed outcome.

Residency Programming:
~  For our monthly salons, we invite fellow artists and other creatives/cultural workers for an open-air art party/intimate indoor gathering
   where residents present their work to a very receptive audience of local artist peers and other arts professionals and appreciators
~  We occasionally host artists' dinners for our international and NYC-based creative colleagues
~  During the warm months, we use our roof deck as a stage for creative productions across several disciplines
~  Collaborative productions can potentially also be hosted on our sister platform, Captain Sol’s studio Last Frontier NYC
~ You may host open studio events during your stay, including participation in the neighborhood-wide, Greenpoint Open Studios weekend

A peer community of hardworking artists, Mothership NYC has no outside funding, so everybody onboard must cover their own rent. However, knowing full well the brutal reality of the New York real estate market, we wish to make a sojourn with us feasible also for colleagues of limited means. Therefore, we occasionally scrounge together the money required to offer a more-or-less annual Residency Award Program: Most years, we are able to provide one free month-long residency to a talented international artist. PLEASE NOTE: Mothership NYC is currently in a somewhat unpredictable period of transition and expansion, so we are putting the Residency Award Program on hold for 2024. If everything goes according to plan, our next submission period will be January 2025. If you want to stay in the loop on future opportunities, we invite you to sign up for our mailing list!

The slide show below includes images of the 220 sq. ft. private live-work space available for our Artists-in-Residence:

"I have long believed that the arts have an important role to play in dealing with the interconnected and interdependent problems of our global crisis. All these problems — energy, environment, climate change, economic inequality, violence and war, and so on — are systemic problems that require corresponding systemic solutions; solutions that do not solve any problem in isolation but deal with it within the context of other related problems. To find systemic solutions, we need to learn how to think systemically, in terms of relationships, patterns, and context.

In my view, the arts can be of great help in this task for two reasons. One, because there is hardly anything more effective than the arts — whether it's the visual arts, music, or the performing arts — for developing the ability to recognize and express patterns; and thus, the arts can be a powerful tool for learning how to think systemically. Two, because the arts provide the emotional impact that is critical to get people engaged in communities and civic action.

I was therefore delighted when I heard of the Mothership, that unique multidisciplinary collective of artists, thinkers, and activists in Brooklyn, and honored to make a contribution to an exhibition project in July 2016. I stayed on board for several days and thoroughly enjoyed the packed public event featuring four brilliant musicians and performing artists from the collective. I gave a keynote on Leonardo da Vinci’s synthesis of art, science, and design, which sparked lively discussions in which several artists explained and demonstrated how their creative works across several fields (painting, philosophy, music, performance art, photography, and environmental architecture) echo Leonardo’s unique synthesis in a contemporary context.

With its friendly multinational crew, rotating visiting artists, and its considerable local following in NYC, the Mothership offers constant opportunities to exchange ideas and make new connections, whether over shared meals in the communal kitchen, far-ranging rooftop conversations under a vast Brooklyn night sky, or during their well-attended salons and open studio events.

This is fertile ground for new ideas and future collaborations, and indeed many of the creative practitioners who spend time on board end up returning for additional inspiring stints. As the Mothership’s Honorary Scholar-in-Residence, I, too, look forward to coming back for more." 

                                                                                                                                                                    Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., Scientist, Educator, Activist, & Author, Berkeley