New Ideas CityHello Museum

ArtBuilt Mobile Studios

Part of the Street Program

New York City’s steamroller economy makes artists, cultural producers, and small organizations invisible—by pricing them out of existence and driving them out of town. Our Mobile Workspace initiative envisions a bold effort to reverse this process by surfacing and supporting our disappearing cultural sector and making small-scale enterprise visible and mobile. ArtBuilt Mobile Studios are RV-size, towable, wheeled workspaces. They’re moveable homes for artists, nimble social service agencies, and quirky vendors, and they can be placed wherever they’re needed. They can be affordably built and owned, and deployed at a scale to suit any endeavor. Let’s make the programmed prototype visible at IDEAS CITY!

The People’s Paper Co-Op (PPC), a project of the Village of Arts and Humanities in Philadelphia, brings together artists, civil rights lawyers, and citizens returning from the criminal justice system for free community legal clinics. Participants work with lawyers to clear their criminal records, removing barriers to employment, housing, healthcare, education, and other services. Printed records are shredded, pulped, and made into blank sheets of handmade paper, then transformed into artworks using participants’ images and words. At the IDEAS CITY Festival, PPC will host hands-on papermaking sessions for the public from the ArtBuilt Mobile Studio; visitors can learn more about their work through the accompanying exhibition. PPC makes their constituents’ invisible challenges visible, helping community members advocate for themselves and others through the arts.