Siren Arts
Asbury Park, NJ
Siren Arts is an innovative summer residency & exhibition program based in Asbury Park, NJ that supports emerging visual artists throughout the northeast corridor of Washington, DC to NYC. Launched in the summer of 2017, Siren Arts is an expansion of Transformer and our mission to connect and promote emerging visual artists, build audiences for their work, and advance them in their artistic careers.
Siren Arts is a direct result of the success of Promised Land - Transformer’s 2014 pilot residency and exhibition in Asbury Park, NJ, which brought together twelve east coast based emerging visual artists to pursue creative research related to the city’s history and culture. Located in the middle of the northeast corridor of Washington, DC to NYC, Asbury Park is an iconic beach town that hosts thousands of visitors each summer. It is known for its arts & music present and history, as well as for its unique Beaux-Art boardwalk architecture.
Supported by a special curatorial grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, as well as Asbury Park Boardwalk Developer Madison Marquette, the Promised Land exhibition, presented in the 5th Avenue Pavilion of the Asbury Park boardwalk, included a diverse variety of visual mediums including painting, video, installation, sculpture, performance art, sound art, and photography. The exhibition was visited by more than 5,000 audiences members over the course of is six-week presentation. In addition to building a substantial audience and collector exposure for the artists, the residency and exhibition provided incredible peer-networking among the artists, who received increased exhibition opportunities, commissions of new work, and have formed collaborations among themselves as a result of their experience.
In its inaugural year, Siren Arts, once again supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, presented Summer of Radical Love, bringing together a diverse mix of more than 30 participating artists throughout the summer of 2017 to develop and create works as part of a progressively developing exhibition that explored cultural, racial, sexual, and gender equality. Centered within The Collective Art Tank, a storefront exhibition space at 529 Bangs Avenue, in Asbury Park’s historic business district located three blocks from the iconic Asbury Park Boardwalk and Atlantic Ocean, the Summer of Radical Love works were presented via a multi-layered exhibition highlighting a variety of innovative mediums.
In its 2nd year, Siren Arts presented Turning the Tide, a social practice-oriented residency program consisting of a series of consecutive micro-residencies for seven northeast corridor based emerging visual artists and artist collectives. These resulted in Thursday evening performance art events on Asbury Park’s 2nd Avenue beach July 12 – August 23, 2018. Informed and inspired by the work of the Plastic Pollution Coalition and their Asbury Park area affiliate Clean Water Action, each performance art event focused on themes of ocean conservation. Turning the Tide was substantially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Creativity Connects program.
Siren Arts 3rd and current summer 2019 program Into the Mystic once again highlights and supports seven emerging artists based within the northeast corridor of DC to NYC who are pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance art practices. Advancing our successful micro-residency and performance art series model, Into the Mystic seeks to empower the participating artists and engage audiences in both reflection and positive action around ocean conservation and its implications in all other social activism, while introducing and advancing innovative contemporary art practices. Informed and inspired by the sea, and how it moves us physically, spiritually, and emotionally, the artists and performance art events in Into the Mystic explore ocean myths, migration, unity, the collective unconscious, ancestry, and more through music, dance, ritual, sound, and visual art components. Into the Mystic is generously supported by Salt Hotels.
