ABOUT NOO ARTS
Noosphere Arts Inc, DBA Noo Arts, is a 501c3 organization and cultural center led by a team of international creatives whose backgrounds blend the arts and sciences. Its freewheeling, multidisciplinary approach engages a varied audience and builds community through a range of donation-based public events in its unique indoor-outdoor home in New York City's Greenpoint, Brooklyn: a former industrial plant turned rooftop nature sanctuary.
Who We Are
Mission
Noo Arts produces and presents experimental collaborations at the nexus of art and eco-awareness. It is a welcoming platform where diverse artists have access to the resources and opportunities they need to thrive and create positive community impact. Uniting music, dance, visual arts, theater, film, poetry & prose, Noo Arts’ collaborative productions harness the power of art to drive action towards green living, fair play, and oneness.
Vision
Noo Arts encourages dialogue, openness to experimentation, and radical inclusivity. We aim to elevate the voices of historically marginalized populations. Inspired by systems thinking, we are driven by the desire to ignite a shift in perspective from the parts to the whole. We see life as a cooperative dance energized by creativity and the constant emergence of novelty. Our goal is to instill belief in personal agency and hope through collective action: with shared efforts towards sustainability, diversity, and equity, we can create a more united and joyful world.
History
NOoSPHERE Arts (DBA Noo Arts) was founded on a lark in 2010, when Sol Kjøk, a visual artist born in Norway, was offered access to a storefront on the Lower East Side to exhibit her paintings. Seizing the opportunity to create a showcase in NYC for international artist peers, she turned the space into a multidisciplinary gallery that operated in Manhattan for five years.
In 2014, Sol started using a raw factory loft in a former ExxonMobil complex in Greenpoint as her painting studio. Located in NYC’s most polluted neighborhood on the bank of Superfund site Newtown Creek next to the iconic Digester Eggs of the city’s largest wastewater treatment facility, the place is an epicenter of multiple ecological disasters.
And yet, this once inhospitable part of industrial Brooklyn has now become a nature sanctuary: Two years after Sol’s arrival, the Kingsland Wildflowers community project came about on the roofs above her painting studio with a simple but powerful idea: to transform an empty rooftop into a green space filled with plants, insects, and wildlife to help support biodiversity in an urban context.
This one-of-a-kind setting serves as a potent reminder of humankind’s simultaneous capacity for destruction and regeneration and makes for extraordinary performance arenas. And so, Sol decided to move the nonprofit to Brooklyn and reorient its focus towards art that addresses humans’ place on Earth.
Year-round indoor programming has been taking place in Sol’s studio, aka Last Frontier NYC, since 2015. As the cultural partner in the coalition behind Kingsland Wildflowers as of 2018, Noo Arts activates the rooftops and creekbank with live arts throughout the summer months. Over this past decade, the organization has evolved into a dynamic neighborhood cultural center presenting multidisciplinary experiences at the nexus of art and eco-awareness.
Earth Acknowledgement
“A land acknowledgement means that we are acknowledging the people who originally lived here on this land. And of course, we want to do that. We don't want to forget the people who originally lived here where we are today. But I always say it goes a little further than that: It's not just land acknowledgement, it's Earth acknowledgement. One of the things that we forget about so often is to really think about and acknowledge the Earth that we live on because all the things that we have and all the things that we need for our survival come from the Earth. And we often forget that. What I would like to have happen someday, perhaps in the schools, when the boys and girls do the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, they should include at the end of that: thank you, Earth.” (Elder Louis Mofsie, Founder of Thunderbird American-Indian Dancers)
