Photo Gabriela Herman for NY Times

After Kate Walter, a memoirist and essayist, was accepted onto Westbeth’s wait list in 1987, she tried to put it out of her mind. “You can’t think about it too much,” Ms. Walter said, explaining that, even back then, when Manhattan still had a relative abundance of inexpensive apartments where artists could live and work, spots at Westbeth, a well-known artists’ housing complex in the West Village, were highly coveted.

“It was secure; you knew you wouldn’t have to leave,” Ms. Walter said. But affordable rent wasn’t the only, or even the primary, draw. Moving into Westbeth — which opened in 1970, after a young Richard Meier oversaw the conversion of the former Bell Laboratories into 383 live-work spaces — also meant joining an artistic community.

“It’s a legendary place, living among all these artists. I liked the idea of that,” said Ms. Walter, 69, who was ecstatic when she finally made it to the top of the list after a decade. “I remember calling up all my friends and my parents, screaming.”

Read full article by Kim Velsey at NY Times HERE

JOAN HALL

Born in New York City to art professionals, I began training in my teen years with the Martha Graham Dance Studio. Following a course of study at the Juilliard School, a company membership with The American Mime Theater provided the opportunity for me to teach American Mime at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York.
With early experience in the dramatic arts as a guide, I designed sets and costumes for the ballet Yequana for The Nederlands Dans Theater, Den Haag.
Out of a diverse background, a lifelong devotion to the genres of collage and assemblage began to take shape with parallel careers in commercial illustration and the fine arts. With an invitation from Milton Glaser to conduct classes in Collage for Illustration, my teaching career at the School of Visual Arts was launched.
International fine art venues have been concurrent with commercial application. The Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico, are among the institutions where my art has been on view. At home in New York, Pavel Zoubok and the South Street Seaport Museum have hosted two of my one-person exhibitions. Publication credits include editions of my collage for Warner Books and Book of the Month Club.
I have also lectured to many organizations on Collage: Past & Present
illustrated by a Power Point presentation. The American Cultural Centers have commissioned these lectures in France, India, Brazil and Mexico. I was honored to receive a CEDADESU Mexican/American Cultural Specialists Grant from the US State Dept. to present my lecture on Collage, Assemblage and the Environment and to conduct 10 workshops to train educators to teach recycling through the art of collage.
Today as previously, world travel is a great inspiration. My itinerary includes numerous locations in Europe, China, Tibet, India, Africa, Cambodia, Brazil, and Central America. Locally, I live and work in my studio at Westbeth in Greenwich Village .

Further info at joanhallcollage.com