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New York City

At the World Trade Center, Artists Create as Tenants Await

Silverstein Properties keeps aeries open for creative types as it tries to fill vacant office space

By September 20, 2024 10:00 am
reprints
Kerry Irvine stands in front of an oversized canvas wearing a blue apron.
On a Friday morning in late summer, artist Kerry Irvine paints on the 80th floor of 3 WTC, her temporary home until Silverstein Properties finds a tenant for the space. Then she’ll pack up and head to another floor. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Several rows of half empty tubes of oil paint lie on a table.
Irvine paints sprawling abstract canvases with splashes of fuchsia that seem to evoke Monet’s “Water Lilies.” People have noticed her work changing since she’s been camped out up here in the heavens, she said. “They’re seeing architecture in my work now.” PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Anastasiya Tarasenko sits on a chair in front of a large canvas in front of a row of windows looking out onto Manhattan's Financial District.
Silver Art resident Anastasiya Tarasenko stoops over an easel in her studio, completely held under the sway of the surreal world she’s created on a large canvas propped there. Her work tells convoluted human stories, she said. “I’m observing people, like little, tiny ants on an anthill.” PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Works by Anastasiya Tarasenko.
Anastasiya Tarasenko spent the first six years of her life in Ukraine, then her family moved to Brooklyn. The 9/11 attacks changed her world and some of those memories resurfaced during her World Trade Center residency. “I think it’s why I started being obsessed with why people do the things that they do,” she said. “I’m grappling with that history.” PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Anastasiya Tarasenko in her stuido.
Anastasiya Tarasenko paints in her studio at 4 World Trade Center. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Malaika Temba holds a paintbrush to one of her unfinished textile pieces.
Malaika Temba, an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects, was back at work on the 28th floor of 4 WTC on Sep. 13 after a whirlwind week showing several of her jacquard woven fabric tapestries at The Armory Show. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Malaika Temba stands in from of two of her textile pieces wearing a black hoodie.
The Silver Art residency has sharpened Malaika Temba’s focus. “Now I have some normalcy in my practice, instead of rushing between different studio spaces and places to work,” she said. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Gwen Hollingsworth stands in front of one of her oil paintings in a red T-shirt.
Gwen Hollingsworth grew up in Los Angeles but plotted a path to New York that’s now panning out well, thanks to her residency at Silver Art Projects. Hollingsworth described her childhood as “casually Buddhist,” and that seems to have been a formative factor in her artistic development. Her abstract works have the texture of cotton-candy but contain darker themes, like a “spatial equivalent of the void,” she said. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Todd Stone sits in a folding chair in front of a row of windows looking out onto the New York City skyline.
Todd Stone was overcome with a need to document as he watched the 9/11 attacks unfold from a Tribeca rooftop. The feeling never really left him. Stone continued to observe as Silverstein redeveloped Ground Zero, and now works there himself in a makeshift studio on the 71st floor of 3 WTC. “You'll see the cranes are a steady theme in my work,” Stone said. “When the cranes first appeared and filled the sky, they were good luck symbols to me.” PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Paintings hang on the window sill of an office building.
The Silver Arts Project offers free studio space inside 4 World Trade Center to 28 artists for one year. Photo: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer
Paintings hanging in an office building.
Silverstein Properties has been informally offering free studio space to artists in empty offices during the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. PHOTO: Sasha Maslov/for Commercial Observer

The top floor of 3 World Trade Center currently sits vacant with landlord Silverstein Properties hoping it will soon fetch triple-digit office rents per square foot. 

For now, Kerry Irvine — an Abstract Expressionist painter who lost her sister when terrorists destroyed the Twin Towers on this very site in 2001 — has taken up residence there free of charge.

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“The beauty of being up here is I can work on five pieces at once,” Irvine said. 

Developer Larry Silverstein first welcomed Irvine and a handful of other local artists to work on empty floors at WTC about seven years ago. His grandson, Cory Silverstein, ran with the idea, and four years ago he co-founded the nonprofit Silver Art Projects, a highly competitive residency program that provides a year of free studio space to 28 artists selected from a pool of 1,200 applications. 

“A lot of artists in New York will never be able to afford studio space of any kind, even a tiny little cracker box,” said Gregory Thornbury, the executive director of Silver Art. “But, if you get in here, you’ve been anointed.”

It’s all possible thanks to Silverstein’s gift of 43,019 square feet across the entire 28th floor of 4 WTC, which is divided into a maze of studios. Meanwhile, Irvine and a handful of other artists continue their nomadic existence on other empty floors throughout different towers, part of the studio program that has been going off without a hitch for years as Silverstein rebuilt the World Trade Center.

That includes artist Todd Stone — currently perched on the 71st floor of 3 WTC — who has been documenting the fall and rise of the WTC in watercolor.

Irvine’s 30,130-square-foot studio sits nine floors above and it takes about 90 seconds to ascend all 80 floors to it, but once you get there, how about that view? You can see everything happening in the city and New York Harbor in miniature. 

Of course, it won’t last forever. The goal is to rent out the valuable space, not give it away for free.

“Every time they lease, they scramble and find me a new space,” Irvine said, but she’s OK with that. She’s moved her studio within the WTC five times over the past seven years. 

Commercial Observer visited Silver Art on Sep. 13 and talked to a few of the current artists-in-residence about what they’re working on.

3 World Trade Center, 4 World Trade Center, Cory Silverstein, Larry Silverstein, slideshow, Silverstein Properties
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