HISTORY—A critical time for the arts
2007 was a critical time for the arts in New York. It was the height of the economic boom, and the gradual gentrification of the city had caused rents to rise, driving artists deep into the outer boroughs, or out of the city altogether. At the same time, there was a growing cultural movement towards participatory art—art that is fully immersive, where the experience of the viewer or visitor is enhanced by directly interacting and engaging.
Community parades like the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and the Coney Island Mermaid Parade were open to anyone to join in, dress up, and be a part of the creativity. And, through the efforts of not-for-profit arts organizations like Creative Time, the Public Art Fund, chashama, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, more conventional visual and performing arts were increasingly moving out of the galleries and theaters and into site-specific venues. Rachel Ward’s Terminal 5 exhibition in October 2004 reopened the breathtaking Saarinen Terminal at JFK airport and filled it with cutting edge site-specific artwork. The show was closed by the Port Authority the day after it opened.
In 2005, Christo and Jean-Claude installed The Gates along 23 miles of pathways in Central Park, energizing millions of volunteers, New Yorkers and visitors from around the world. The same year, Gregory Colbert’s photography exhibit Ashes and Snow began its tour around the world with an installation in the Nomadic Museum, a custom-built, sustainable traveling museum made from shipping containers and cardboard at Pier 54 with audio, video and a cathedral-like atmosphere. These works and others showed New Yorkers that art could be immersive, and that the experience of the viewer or visitor could be enhanced by the experience of interacting and engaging directly with art.
In this environment, a group of volunteers came together to create FIGMENT as a new kind of event for New York City. Inspired and influenced by the current arts environment in New York, as well as by Burning Man (an annual arts event in Nevada), the founders of FIGMENT sought to create a forum in New York in which everyone is welcome to participate and make art—regardless of training, credentials, funding, or even the medium in which they choose to work. The founders of FIGMENT were united in the belief that as people create collaborative artwork, express themselves, and work together to give a form to their dreams, a community would grow around the event and around Governors Island as it was developed.
While FIGMENT has quickly grown into a large-scale collaborative project involving the contributions of thousands of artists, organizers, volunteers, and enthusiastic participants, the first FIGMENT event was developed and planned by a core leadership group of six: David Koren, Jim Glaser, Ryan Fix, Wylie Stecklow, Kevin Balktick, and Johan Kritzinger. FIGMENT has grown, in just a few short years, from this group of six sitting around a table into a volunteer organization of several hundred people on the planning team for events in multiple cities, with hundreds more volunteers helping at the events. More than just an event or an exhibition, FIGMENT has become a community of artists and organizers.
