The Brooklyn Rail

Where there is want there is property. What many artists in New York wanted, from the 1950s on, was affordable live/work space, and such space was not to be had in apartments of more conventional proportions. Industrial lofts and other commercial spaces had the cheaper rent and the room, but often few, or no, facilities for living. A commonplace experience in those days, for artists in lower Manhattan, was finding sufficient cubic feet and then putting in, at one’s own expense, walls, electricity, toilets, lighting, kitchens, and places to sleep. There’s a substantial history of books and articles documenting the several phases in the campaign by artists for the right to live and work in loft spaces. A more intimate history is brought forth in photographer and filmmaker Joshua Charow’s documentation of the lives of artists in live/work spaces protected, since 1982, by Article 7-C of the New York Multiple Dwelling Law, better known as the “Loft Law.”

The Westwood Gallery installation of Charow’s Loft Law photographs juxtaposes them with artworks by eleven of their artist subjects. Two wall-mounted video monitors play short films by Charow about his project. Visitors to the gallery first see Marsha Pels’s ceiling mounted rotating sculpture, Madonna della Misericordia (2020–23), a nineteenth century wedding dress suspended above a mirror-topped circular base. Female dolls in fancy gowns hang beneath the twirling petticoats of this mother, and the whole ensemble spins to the artist’s original industrial drone music. A pair of Charow’s archival pigment prints of the artist, both titled Marsha Pels in her Greenpoint loft (both 2024), are much quieter in attitude. In one view, Pels is photographed from the courtyard behind her building, silhouetted in a dark doorway. The other view is an interior with Pels leaning against her studio’s white painted wall. Nearby, a single photo of painter Betsy Kaufman hangs next to a trio of her untitled, acrylic on paper, askew geometries. In the photograph, Kaufman leans on a stool between two very large acrylic on canvas paintings (Infinities [2019], to the right in the image, measures 90 × 192 inches). Charow’s photograph of Kaufman is larger than any of her three works on paper. This is the case for many of the visual artists represented by their own productions as well as their likenesses in Charow’s photographs. While the selected practitioners in the gallery installation aren’t represented by signature works, what is on view allows viewers a further point of entry into their working methods and materials.

Charow’s fascination with the lives of his subjects is apparent in the tender composure they share in these portraits. Artists of vastly different temperaments and practices are posed in mellow raking light, or in views showing something of the space reclamation that each has undertaken to improve the “live” part of their live/work space. The videos sketch the history of the struggle of artist tenants for protection under safety codes and eligibility for rent-stabilization leases. Over the past forty years, as many as ten-thousand loft tenants, in hundreds of buildings, benefitted from their standing under the auspices of the Loft Law, but Charow’s project is focused on the few remaining artist tenants still protected under Article 7-C. The quick cut style of the videos also shows Charow’s already considerable experience—he’s twenty-six years old—as an online documentarian, with his ongoing series of “LimeLight” videos offering brief glimpses into the lives of New Yorkers from a range of occupations and social statuses.

The stillness of the archival pigment prints allows for continuing scrutiny, as distinct from the frequent one-second cuts Charow uses in his videos. This is a shrinking community of artists, all of whom have occupied their loft spaces for as long as sixty years. The law that undergirds the lives they live will expire once the last of them have passed away. Charow’s choices of pose, expression, and setting do not shy away from letting his subjects’ seniority be seen. There is no question of “good side” here, nor does anyone appear enfeebled, including the composer/film artist Phill Niblock in his wheelchair (Niblock died in January of this year). Charow could have focused even more directly on the attributes of portraiture, but he brings forth another aspect of his attentiveness in the ways he documents the stuff in these spaces. Steve Silver’s paint-spattered apron and disheveled white hair are moments of human interest in one photograph, but another view of Silver standing between a floor arrangement of painted scaffolding pins and a lineup of work tables covered with plastic containers of paint clarifies that he is an instrument of converting material to form. Only a few of the photographs on view do not include their occupants, but with or without the physical presence of the artists, Charow’s eye for the meaningful detritus in these spaces draws us into the scenes.