SoHo, New York City Momenta cofounder, Eric Heist, relocated to
New York City, where he attended
Hunter College graduate school. He met
video artist Laura Parnes and together they began to organize exhibitions in New York City.
Chelsea In 1992, the gallery community was moved from
SoHo to
Chelsea, leaving many large loft spaces empty in the downtown district, and available for temporary rentals. Artist Kenny Schachter was already organizing temporary exhibitions in SoHo at that time, inspiring Heist and Parnes, who found a 5,000-square-foot second floor space available in the area for $2,000. In order to raise funds for an exhibition they created hand-screened
manila envelopes containing multiple artworks by artists John Hatfield,
Lucky De Bellevue, John Groh (Jed Brain),
Marlene McCarty,
Janine Antoni,
Sue Williams,
Jude Tallichet, Chuck Agro, David Carrino, Jody Culkin,
Tony Feher,
Paula Hayes,
Janet Henry,
Jim Hodges, Barry Hylton,
Pat Lasch, Julie Melton, Serge Pinkus, Barbara Pollack,
Lily Van Der Stokker, Heist, and
Parnes. They went door-to-door selling these multiple packets to SoHo galleries, including gallerists
David Zwirner,
Sandra Gering, and others, for $30 each. This secured the funding to pay for the space and the exhibition “The Art of Self-Defense and Revenge... It’s Really Hard,” which presented the artists included in the multiples collection. The exhibition inverted stereotypes of power and passivity by separating the work of male and female artists. The exhibition was visited by critics
Michael Kimmelman and
Jerry Saltz who wrote an encouraging review of the exhibition for
Art in America magazine.
Brooklyn In March 1995, Momenta Art opened in a permanent exhibition space in the
Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn, signing a 10-year lease for a 4,000-square-foot space at 72 Berry Street close to other emerging galleries. Working as co-directors, Parnes and Heist became known for their group exhibition fundraisers at
White Columns and other venues in which donated works by artists of note were raffled off to ticket holders.
Michael Waugh joined the team managing Momenta Art in 2000 and under his guidance a publicly accessible
video library was established. When Parnes stepped down as co-director in 2004 to focus on her own work, Waugh took on the role of assistant director and Parnes became the chair of the board. Other artists whose work was exhibited at this location include
Huma Bhabha,
Derrick Adams,
Wangechi Mutu,
Akiko Ichikawa,
Simone Leigh, Yasser Aggour, and
Roe Ethridge. A group exhibition regarding created identities organized by artist Deb Kass titled “Enough About Me” included work by
Adrian Piper,
Cindy Sherman,
Michael Smith,
John Kelly, Delia Brown,
Guy Richards Smit,
John Waters, Hiroshi Sunairi, and
Nikki S. Lee. “No Return”, organized by Eric Heist, examined circular systems of economy and waste linking art and commerce included works by Jed Ela, Lan Tuazon, Peggy Diggs,
Rainer Ganahl, and Pawel Wojtasik. "Still Ill", organized by John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone, presented a series of performances that included
Rita Ackermann, Jonathan Schipper, Adrien Cowen, and Agathe Snow.
Bedford Avenue In 2006, Momenta Art relocated to a larger space at 359
Bedford Avenue. During this period, Momenta Art garnered considerable art world attention for the shows such as Air Kissing (2007), addressed alienation and inequalities in the art world, and Project Rendition (2007), which examined the Bush administrations clandestine kidnapping and extradition of suspected terrorists. Momenta Art's time at 359 Bedford was relatively short-lived, however, as a changing demographic and real estate market in Williamsburg encouraged Heist and Waugh to move again, this time to
Bushwick, Brooklyn, and a location that offered more space (over 4,000 square feet) and facilities for artists and exhibits than what was negotiable in Williamburg.
Bogart Street The first show for Momenta Art's Bushwick location at 56 Bogart Street, an exhibit of the photography of J. Pasila and Peter Scott, took place in the raw, partially-renovated space newly opened gallery. In a curatorial decision that reflected on the provisional nature of their current circumstances and the cyclical nature of neighborhood development, Momenta "simply stuck push pins directly through the print and attached them, frameless, on the wall." With funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the
New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) plans for the new space included an expansion of the video library project, which housed hundreds of artworks from dozens of artists, and making them permanently available to the public on a searchable database on a touch-screen monitor at the gallery. Plans also included events hosted in the library, including panel discussions with past video artists, and an ongoing curated selection of video work on view in the gallery. The exhibition of Occupy Museums (2012) raised a series of questions regarding the
political economy within which art institutions are embedded. Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen's solo exhibition Space Fiction & the Archives (2014) critiqued what she perceived to be disguised racism and planned economic exploitation that lurk under
multiculturalism.
Closing With a reduced funding base during the
2008 financial crisis, Momenta Art slowly became financially unsustainable. A final, 30-year survey exhibition was organized and Momenta concluded programming with the exhibition "Recap: Thirty Years of Momenta Art", on October 30, 2016. == References ==