Future Fund, Phase One:

As PARTICIPANT celebrates our 20th Anniversary, we are pleased to share our plans and invite our community to join us as we begin our next phase in support of cultural life in downtown New York City.

After fifteen years on East Houston Street, PARTICIPANT has relocated to 116 Elizabeth Street to launch a multi-year project aimed at strengthening our program and envisioning a sustainable future. This pivotal phase will offer artists, collaborators, and our communities invaluable opportunities to learn, unlearn, and collectively shape PARTICIPANT’s horizon. Building this foundation for PARTICIPANT’s evolving program, all in support of the artists and communities we have served for two decades, necessarily entails risk. We are counting on your support to make this essential phase possible...

Now and always, our most significant individual support has come from artists, a commitment that, beyond just Board governance, has shaped the very identity of PARTICIPANT. Artist and former Board President Jacqueline Humphries has generously made a foundational gift to launch PARTICIPANT’s Future Fund, which begins with a period of Radical Intention Setting. She is joined by Josh Smith, who has also generously supported the Future Fund with a leading gift.

Both Jacqueline and Josh’s history with PARTICIPANT run deep – Jacqueline was President from 2010 to 2020, guiding PARTICIPANT in the aftermath of our first relocation. Prior to her role at PARTICIPANT, she was a Board Member of Thread Waxing Space (1991–2001) and instrumental in establishing their first curatorial position, bringing Lia Gangitano to New York. Within Lia’s first season of programming at Thread Waxing Space, she exhibited Josh’s work. Both have remained friends and advisors ever since....

Throughout this experimental period, Phase One: Radical Intention Setting, PARTICIPANT will remain unwavering in our mission, and endeavor to expand it. We will unite our exhibitions and estates programs under one roof, offering a picture of the promise our future holds: a more permanent space, a space that encourages cultural transformation, while providing research and care for prior experimental artistic practices, a repository of intergenerational memory, speaking to the future.

We view our new home as a model or test-site in which to experiment and envision our future in collaboration with the artists who’ve long shown us the way forward, and to highlight our work with estates, integrating archival projects alongside the groundbreaking exhibitions and performances for which we’re more widely known.

Our collaborations with Alvin Baltrop Trust, Dash Snow Archive, and Greer Lankton Archives Museum have contributed to PARTICIPANT’s long-standing involvement with the Estates of Ellen Cantor, Chloe Dzubilo, Luther Price, and Lovett/Codagnone. Our new home will further manifest these commitments toward enhanced estate management and activation through dedicated storage, staging, and viewing areas.

Our aim is not only to facilitate the archiving and conservation of estates managed and housed by PARTICIPANT, but also to propose a self-sustaining model that enhances access to curators, scholars, and the public. Embedded in downtown New York City among the communities we serve, PARTICIPANT exemplifies what archivist Lisa Darms recently articulated as “a new paradigm [that] has been gaining ascendancy in the archives profession, inspired by decades of work by BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and other minoritized communities. This approach focuses on supporting, serving, and learning from communities that preserve and activate their own legacies.”

This phase is dedicated to the deep planning needed to strengthen as an organization, grow our modest team, and galvanize the generosity we will need to ultimately secure a more permanent home.

PARTICIPANT needs tools to invest in digitization and archiving under-supported artists’ work, re-envisioning our workspace, upgrading an accessible exhibition venue, and so much yet unknown. Although 116 Elizabeth Street is partially built-out, support is needed to increase accessibility.

This is a pivotal moment for PARTICIPANT. There is no greater work we can do for artists than to make space and time to envision a future that builds upon what we do best — amend history, construct alternative worlds, and reanimate legacies.

We’re enormously thankful for the meaningful support of artists, and hope you’ll join them in playing a leading role in PARTICIPANT's Future Fund.