Welcome to the East Village Series at Performance Space New York. Between February and June you are invited to join us in contemplating the past, present and future of our art organization and its immediate neighborhood, the East Village.

Performance Space New York was born in the East Village in 1980 as Performance Space 122 when a group of local artists occupied the empty building that had been home to Public School 122 and started making performance work as a passionate rejection of corporate mainstream culture.

Today, almost 40 years later, Performance Space New York is faced with a radically transformed neighborhood unaffordable for young artists and a national political climate that feeds off social inequity more than ever. Moving back into our newly renovated spaces, the inaugural East Village Series asks what kind of art organization we need to become in light of this ever-more exclusionary social and political context.