Westbeth Boardmember
Esther Robinson featured in NYTimes article about her organization, ARTBUILT

ARTBUILT Studios photo: Celeste Sloman

At 50,000 square feet, ArtBuilt Brooklyn, where Ms. Dickinson, Mr. Handelman and roughly 100 other artists now work, was constructed with a creative combination of private investment and civic support from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, specifically the Affordable Real Estate for Artists program of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Economic Development Corporation.
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Its intention is to provide physical stability to redress the economic volatility of being an artist working in New York. ArtBuilt offers below-market rents — between $13 to $24 a rentable square foot, compared with approximately $28 to $36 a square foot for commercial space in Brooklyn last year, according to CoStar, a real estate research company. Ms. Dickinson pays $1,092 for 827 square feet; Mr. Handelman pays $1,146 for 868 square feet.

Esther B. Robinson and Guy Buckles, the founders of ArtBuilt, said they worked backward from what artists said they needed …“I went backward from the math — until the math worked,” said Ms. Robinson, a former filmmaker who has a kind of unstoppable enthusiasm, even when jet-lagged. Ultimately, that meant scaling the project to 50,000 square feet, from 10,000, to bring down the rents.

– William L Hamilton

Read the entire articlein the Art and Design Section of NY Times April 22 2019

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