Author: artassets

21 ’til 21: Real Estate Innovation

Everyone at Art Assets is very excited for the fourth program in our 21 ’til 21 Salon Series. On Wednesday, April 17th, we will host a panel discussion with three real estate innovators who are creating new ways to think about development and the built environment.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

Riggs Kubiak Co-Founder, CEO of Honest Buildings

Riggs’s vision is for the Honest Buildings platform to accelerate the adoption of high performance buildings all over the world. He believes that data, transparency and engaged users will bring previously disconnected people together and speed innovation. Riggs has over 10 years of real estate experience including the most recent five years with commercial real estate titan Tishman Speyer. As Global Head of Sustainability, Riggs found the disaggregation of information and understanding across the industry was hurting the pace of adoption. In this problem, he saw a clear opportunity to harness the global reach of the internet to connect the ecosystem of users within the built environment. He’s most excited about having an impact and streamlining the real estate industry.

Honest Building‘s mission is to connect and empower the real estate industry to make better decisions, more efficiently. Honest Buildings is a centralized network to showcase and discover the best building solutions and providers. They call it “building meritocracy,” enabling a new era of idea exchange and transparency in the real estate industry.

Website: www.honestbuildings.com
Twitter: @honestbuildings

Ben Miller, Founder, Fundrise and Co-Founder, Popularise

Benjamin Miller is a founder of Fundrise and also co-founder of Popularise, a real estate crowdsourcing website. With 15 years of experience in real estate and finance, Ben has acquired, developed, and financed more than $500,000,000 of property in his time as Managing Partner of WestMill Capital Partners and President of Western Development Corporation. Ben also started US Nordic Ventures, a cross-Atlantic private equity and operating company. Ben has worked as an analyst for Lubert-Adler, a private equity real estate fund. Ben was part of the founding staff of Democracy Alliance, a progressive investment collaborative. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Fundrise is the leading investment platform for commercial real estate. Operating in the top major metropolitan markets, Fundrise gives individuals the ability to invest directly in local properties without the unnecessary fees and middlemen of conventional real estate equity finance. With Fundrise, people now have the power to earn financial returns while building the city they want to live in.

Website: Fundrise
Twitter: @fundrise

Popularise is the online platform that shares the power to build new places in your neighborhood with local residents like you. How often have you thought, “Why doesn’t someone turn that vacant building down the street into a bakery, bar, or restaurant?” Now you have the ability to be directly involved in transforming your neighborhood, rather than waiting for someone else to do it. By joining other people in your area on Popularise, you can create the kind of cool, authentic places you want in your neighborhood. Submit your own ideas, and vote for what to build on projects posted by real estate developers and local business operators.

Website: Popularise
Twitter: @popularise

Dave Eisenberg Co-Founder, CEO Founder, Floored

Dave entered the corporate world at Bain and soon joined the startup world as Bonobos’s first hire. Years later, he flew westward to build the next great retail data platform at TellApart. In 2012, Dave founded Floored while an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. He has a BA from Harvard, which he uses to handle business stuff and fetch things for Floored engineers.

Floored is new, 3D, real estate visualization platform for mobile & web. From Pando Daily, “Floored’s software also collects data, such as dimensions or window space and begins to draw insights based on that. It answers questions such as, ‘How much additional foot traffic do retail stores with five additional square feet of window space have?’ Perhaps most importantly, the models are viewable to real estate professionals and clients in an iPad app.”

Website: www.floored.com
Twitter: @floored3D

For more information, please email Pauline.

April 11, 2013
Art in the First Person: A Weekend in the Berkshires

In our Art in the First Person series, we invite others to share their experiences in and around the art world. This week, we hear from Ilter Ibrahimof, Founder and Director of Sunny Artist Management, after a weekend in the Berkshires with Art Assets’ President Barbara Paley.

While we joined the rest of the world to celebrate Easter and Passover, we continued to celebrate our biggest passion – art – in the Berkshires over a weekend of delicious food, conversations and visits to numerous museums and galleries. The weather added polish and gleam with it’s constant sunny breeze.

I drove from Montreal on Saturday morning to join our gang as I watched hills trying shave off the winter chills and slowly turn green, and arrived in Lee at the luckiest hour to have breakfast with Barbara Paley, Matti Kolver, David Michael, and choreographer John Heginbotham, who the previous day had shown a work-in-process as a result of a two-week creative residency at the Doris Duke theater of Jacob’s Pillow, one of the staple jewels of the Berkshires. After getting our energy from eggs with fresh arugula a selection of local cheeses (spread on Matzo of course!), olives and fruit, we set out for a visit to Mass MoCA in North Adams. And what a visit!

From the excellent lunch to absolutely fascinating exhibits from Mark Dion, Xu Bing, and Sol LeWitt the museum once again surpassed all expectations.

The Phoenix by Xu Bing was especially impressive, not only the sheer size and industrial beauty of the piece itself, but the story of how it was commissioned and finally completed after much Chinese bureaucratic drama, unveiled on pages of a brilliant illustrated book which were on display in the same giant room where the two massive birds hung. I look forward to seeing it again when it travels to New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral next month.

Mass MoCA was followed by a visit to MCLA’s Gallery 51 in downtown North Adams run by Barbara’s friend performance artist Ryder Cooley (who was promptly invited to lunch the next day), and to the campus of Clark Institute in Williamstown, where we had Thai food for dinner and SoBe ice cream. The perfect finish to the evening was stopping by the Hevreh synagogue in Great Barrington, where we caught a concert by Matti’s friend Yaeko Miranda Elmaleh and her band. Watching the crowd sway, dance and cry over Yiddish, Sephardic, and Arabic melodies was heart warming. I think we all went to bed very happy that night.

Next day as we continued to digest the richness of the previous day, Ryder arrived for our lunch. Matti’s yam & pumpkin soup, Barbara’s gefilte fish and marinated blue fish, along with more local cheeses and fresh salad was simply perfect. Afterwards we relaxed as Ryder played the CD she recorded for her project XMALIA, which is about a girl who helps distinct animals sing and rediscover themselves before she discovers herself to be a distinct animal. Arrival of calm afternoon light meant saying goodbye, until next time we get together for another adventure filled with art and discoveries.

March 31, 2013
21 ’til 21: Street Art in Afghanistan

Proving that where there is a will, there can be art, Mountain2Mountain founder Shannon Galpin delighted an audience of over forty people with a presentation on The Streets of Afghanistan for the second program in our year long series celebrating our 21st birthday. The Streets of Afghanistan is a group exhibition of life-size photographs from Afghan and American artists that was staged in five public locations in Afghanistan, including Darulamon Palace, Barbur Gardens in Kabul, Massoud’s Tomb in Panjshir and the Kabul Zoo.

As Shannon writes,

Photography transcends language and challenges stereotypes and bringing showing this exhibition publicly in Afghanistan challenges what we think is capable in a country like this. Art has the power to inspire, to spark conversation, and to bring joy – showcasing these images in public areas where Afghans can enjoy art for art’s sake, and be proud of the beauty and spirit of their country.

Giving people the opportunity to use their voices is at the core of Shannon’s work with The Streets of Afghanistan, Combat Apathy and other initiatives. To show our support, Art Assets created our own wishing tree in honor of Penny For Your Voice. Learn more about the project here and see photos from the evening below.

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March 25, 2013
Shannon Galpin: Art in the Street

Art Assets is thrilled to host Shannon Galpin, founder of Mountain2Mountain, for the second salon in our 21 ’til 21 series. In addition to being the first woman to mountain bike across Afghanistan and one of National Geographic’s 2013 Adventurers of the Year, Shannon is working tirelessly to empower women and girls in conflict zones around the world. One of her tools for cultural transformation is art. Here she talks about one of her most recent projects, “Streets of Afghanistan.”

Art in the Street by Shannon Galpin

Originally published in Afghan Scene in February 2013.

“The very creation of art is in itself an act of optimism.” – Lana Wachowski

Photography is a powerful connector between cultures, but in Afghanistan often that photography is one sided. Mountain2Mountain believes that photography and art can bridge communities and cultures, so we created a collaboration between Afghan and Western photographers to challenge the perceptions of Afghanistan in the West – showing an exhibition that highlights the beauty and the spirit of the country and its people.

But, rather than a traditional gallery show, we produced these images larger than life to surround the viewer in the rolling green hills of Badakhshan and Bamyan and the faces of Afghans in a way that humanizes a country narrowly portrayed as a war zone in a the Western mainstream media.

This October we brought the exhibition to Afghanistan and set them up as a series of public art installations for Afghans in an effort to bring art to the streets and instill pride in the beauty of their own communities.

Public art isn’t just for New York, London, and Paris – if anything, public art is even more important in countries like Afghanistan, because the ongoing war is not the only story in Afghanistan; poverty, oppression, and lack of infrastructure are the canvas on which life occurs, and THAT story needs to be told as well. Photography can tell that story better than any other medium because there are no limits to its interpretation.

So why spend the money, and take the time and risks to do a public show without security and restrictions in public spaces and villages throughout Afghanistan? Because this is where art is most needed.

This country deserves to be exposed to beauty and art for the same reasons as everyone else. The world needs to see that a space for art is emerging in Afghanistan and to be reminded over and over and over that this is a country filled with amazing people living their lives against an incredibly difficult backdrop.

Learn more about Mountain2Mountain.

(Photo credit: Tony Di Zinno)

March 19, 2013
Susan Weinthaler’s MIX!

What is colorful, wooden and magnetic all over? The newest piece of art in our office collection!

MIX! is a beautiful example of Susan Weinthaler’s BITS series. Susan is an incredibly talented New York artist whose work we have placed with multiple clients, including Moelis & Company and Related Companies.

So what are BITS? According to Susan: “A single Bit is a unique object that I create within very simple parameters. Each one is 2”x2”, either square or round in format, and is outfitted with a magnet on the back… The idea is that it’s a flexible system for manipulating artistic information in a very concrete and physical way. Magnets offer the perfect mounting system for infinite possible configurations when placed en masse on a steel canvas.”

Bits are not meant to be static, they are meant to be perpetually deconstructed and reconstructed. It’s the whole point.

Hmmm, so she wants us to play with the art?

If you feel the need to deconstruct and reconstruct, too, you can see her work at The Invisible Dog Open Studios on Saturday, March 9 and Sunday, March 10.

February 26, 2013
Announcing 21 ’til 21

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Art Assets is turning 21.

In honor of our 21st year, we are holding 21 events that celebrate, investigate and debate the role of art in real estate and in the built environment.

We will be hosting events with leaders in commercial real estate, creative placemaking, cultural economic development, the sharing economy and other industries for a series of salons, teas and good old-fashioned parties.

To find out more information, drop us an email here.

February 14, 2013