BENEFIT AUCTION

BENEFIT AUCTION Supporting Noo Arts'
WE ARE NATURE: Transformation Stories (2026)

Noosphere Arts, aka Noo Arts, is a 501c3 nonprofit run by a team of international creatives whose backgrounds blend the arts and science. The organization began as a spark of spontaneity:  In 2010, Norwegian painter Sol Kjøk was offered a storefront on Manhattan's Lower East Side to exhibit her work. She turned this opportunity into a gallery showcasing international peers, many from the Nordic countries. For its first five years in this original location, Noo Arts introduced New York audiences to a vital constellation of voices from across the northern world.

Those artists are still with us. And now, a handful of works from that founding chapter are up for auction — each one a meditation on humanity's place on Earth, each carrying the DNA of an organization that has undergone its own transformation story.

Because Noo Arts has evolved radically since that spur-of-the-moment start almost 16 years ago. Drawn to a former ExxonMobil complex on the banks of the Newtown Creek Superfund site in Greenpoint, Brooklyn—an ecological wound now crowned with surreally beautiful wildflower meadows—Sol moved the nonprofit across the river and reoriented its focus. Today, Noo Arts produces experimental, multidisciplinary programming at the nexus of art and eco-awareness, activating industrial warehouses, rooftop meadows, and creekbanks with performances, film, music, dance, and poetry that remind us that nature is not something separate from us: we are nature, too.

This is the heartbeat of Noo Arts annual summer series WE ARE NATURE, which is anchored in systems thinking. Our current seasonal theme is Transformation Stories, reflected in multidisciplinary productions presented across  two resonant sites: our Greenpoint headquarters, an industrial plant turned nature sanctuary, and our Noo Arts House on Governors Island, a former military base now public parkland. Together they embody how landscapes and communities are continually renewed—and how collective imagination shapes what comes next.

The selection of work appearing below, made by some of the original artists who helped us find our footing, will remain on view throughout our 2026 WE ARE NATURE season closing at the end of October.