Art & Exhibitions
ICI Founder Susan Sollins’s Artful Mad Square Park Apt On the Market
A piece of history from an art world pioneer.
A piece of history from an art world pioneer.
Eileen Kinsella ShareShare This Article
The late Susan Sollins, founder of Independent Curators International and the acclaimed PBS series “Art 21,” was a tireless promoter of contemporary art. Now, a piece of her history—a sleek apartment in Manhattan’s fast-growing Madison Square Park neighborhood—is about to hit the market for a cool $5.3 million asking price.
According to a report in the New York Post, the 14th-floor apartment has two bedrooms, two-and-a-half bathrooms, a home office, and 11.5-foot-tall ceilings. It also boasts views of “the nearby green space,” presumably a reference to Madison Square Park?
Other attractive amenities include a spa-like bathroom, an open chef’s kitchen, dual-zone wine storage and Brazilian walnut floors.
Sollins thought of the nonprofit ICI as “a museum without walls,” as the Post noted, producing traveling art exhibits and bringing avant-garde work to small cities and college towns across the country and overseas.
Sollins passed away in 2014 at the age of 75. A New York Times obituary described the Art 21 series as being “aimed at demystifying and popularizing contemporary art.”
According to the Times, Art 21:
presents artists discussing themselves and their work in an unmediated way. Ms. Sollins conducted the interviews from behind the camera but was never heard in the finished documentaries… Each one-hour segment is thematically framed by a one-word title suggesting some aspect of the artist’s experience: The drive to make art (romance, protest, paradox); the processes by which it is created (memory, secrets, fictions); the potential power of the finished product to change how others see the world (fantasy, compassion, transformation).
Over 100 artists have already been profiled by the show, including art stars such as Ai Weiwei, Maya Lin, Sally Mann, Laurie Anderson, Richard Serra, Susan Rothenberg, and Fred Wilson.