HISTORY
NOoSPHERE Arts was founded on a lark in 2010, when Sol Kjøk, a visual artist born in Norway, was offered access to a storefront on the Lower East Side to exhibit her paintings. Seizing the opportunity to create a showcase in NYC for international artist peers, she turned the space into a multidisciplinary gallery that operated in Manhattan for five years.
In 2014, Sol started using a raw factory loft in a former ExxonMobil complex in Greenpoint as her painting studio. Located in NYC’s most polluted neighborhood on the bank of Superfund site Newtown Creek next to the iconic Digester Eggs of the city’s largest wastewater treatment facility, this is an epicenter of multiple ecological disasters.
And yet, this once inhospitable part of industrial Brooklyn has now become a nature sanctuary: Two years after Sol’s arrival, the Kingsland Wildflowers community project came about on the roofs above her painting studio with a simple but powerful idea: to transform an empty rooftop into a green space filled with plants, insects, and wildlife to help support biodiversity in an urban context.
This one-of-a-kind setting serves as a potent reminder of humankind’s simultaneous capacity for destruction and regeneration and makes for extraordinary performance arenas. And so, Sol decided to move the nonprofit to Brooklyn and reorient its focus towards art that addresses humans’ place on Earth.
Year-round indoor programming has been taking place in Sol’s studio, aka Last Frontier NYC, since 2015. As the cultural partner in the coalition behind Kingsland Wildflowers as of 2018, NOoSPHERE Arts activates the rooftops and creekbank with live arts throughout the summer months. Over this past decade, the organization has evolved into a dynamic neighborhood cultural center presenting multidisciplinary experiences at the nexus of art and eco-awareness.
Earth Acknowledgement
“A land acknowledgement means that we are acknowledging the people who originally lived here on this land. And of course, we want to do that. We don't want to forget the people who originally lived here where we are today. But I always say it goes a little further than that: It's not just land acknowledgement, it's Earth acknowledgement. One of the things that we forget about so often is to really think about and acknowledge the Earth that we live on because all the things that we have and all the things that we need for our survival come from the Earth. And we often forget that. What I would like to have happen someday, perhaps in the schools, when the boys and girls do the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, they should include at the end of that: thank you, Earth.” (Elder Louis Mofsie, Founder of Thunderbird American-Indian Dancers)
