Orchard47

Orchard is a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side. The gallery is run by twelve partners of a for-profit limited liability corporation founded for the project. The partners include artists, filmmakers, critics, art historians, and curators, with several combining these activities in their practices. The partners of Orchard have been associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America. The partners do not have a univocal position in terms of their working methods or views on art. Instead, Orchard's cooperative framework is intended to put the diversity of its members' practices into discursive motion. The resulting exhibition program reflects these dialogs and the social, geographical and artistic conditions and contradictions of the positions taken within them. Orchard's program eschews solo exhibitions in favor of thematically, conceptually and politically driven group exhibitions and projects. It also represents a commitment to historically-based artistic criteria, as opposed to market criteria. This commitment is reflected in Orchard's trans-generational mixing of established artists with lesser known artists, and its re-examination of marginalized historical works in the context of contemporary issues and practices. Since opening in May 2005, Orchard has restaged or produced unrealized projects by Michael Asher, Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum, Dan Graham, and Lawrence Weiner. Orchard has also presented historical works by Daniel Buren, Luis Camnitzer, Juan Downey, Hans Haacke, Roberto Jacoby, Adrian Piper, and Martha Rosler, as well as new works by Merlin Carpenter, Nicolás Guagnini, Jutta Koether, Lucy McKenzie, Blake Rayne, Stephan Pascher, Jeff Preiss, R.H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider, and Jason Simon, among others. Orchard is a three-year project and is scheduled to close in April 2008.