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Franklin Furnace

About
Franklin Furnace is a renowned New York–based arts organisation Franklin Furnace was designed to document, present and preserve works of Avant-Garde art by new up and coming artists. It particularly focuses on pieces of vulnerable work, pieces containing unpopular political content or institutional neglect. Franklin Furnace Over the last thirty years  has shown and exhibited  hundreds of pieces of work from well known Avant-Garde artists, such as —Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Jenny Holzer, and The Blue Man Group, and that’s just to name a few. Most of which are now established names within the contemporary art scene. Franklin Furnace began when its creator Martha Wilson Realised that major institutions where not keeping a history/track of works of art being published by lesser known Artists. In 1976 Martha made the decision to bring together exhibits to both preserve and sell on behalf of the Artists themselves as for their work this became known as “Artists Books” The Name Franklin Furnace originated when Martha Wilson opened the Franklin Furnace Archive Inc. within her living loft, which was and is still made of wood. This space also happened to be a storefront which is situated on Franklin Street, thus the name Franklin Furnace came to be. Printed Matter Inc  soon began to distribute and publish artists books,  So Franklin Furnace began taking the not-for-profit activities of  preserving, cataloguing,  and exhibiting pieces of Art work and other related activities such as readings which was the start of the performance art program. Printed Matter then began to sell and publish artists' books as a for-profit corporation, (they later sought after and received not-for-profit status too). Right from the start Franklin Furnace set out to present temporary/ contemporary pieces of work which came to be known as performance art. The artists who considered the text to be a visual art medium were the same artists who were publishing the Artists’ Books. Artists Such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Martine Aballea, was the first to appear at Franklin Furnace her book was in their collection and was invited to read in their storefront in June 1976. When she showed up in costume, with her own lamp and stool, the performance art program was born..

Aim
Franklin Furnace's mission is to protect, understand and convert people’s opinion and show on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that could be classed as vulnerable due to institutional neglect, their ephemeral nature, or unpopular political content. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving artists by providing both virtual and physical venues for the presentation of time-based visual art, Including the artists books, periodicals, installation art, performance art, "variable media art"; and to undertake other activities related to these purposes. Franklin Furnace is very committed to helping up and coming artists and assuming an aggressive academic stance with regard to the sheer value of avant-garde art to life; and to fostering artists' passion to broadcast their/ any ideas.

Timeline
This Timeline spans over a much longer period of time, and has many more things happening between 1976-2011 these are just a few of the ones i thought most significant for the full timeline Of Franklin Furnace visit one of the two main sources i used. April 1976 Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is founded to serve artists who choose publishing as a democratic artistic medium and who were not being supported by existing artistic organizations.

September 1976 Franklin Furnace gets funding of its programs from both the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

June 1979 Exhibition of In the Shadow of Duchamp: The Photomechanical Revolution and the Artist's Book at the Grolier Club, New York City. Works selected by Weston J. Naef and Martha Wilson.

February 1981 Eric Bogosian’s first performance in New York, “Men Inside,” is presented by Franklin Furnace.

August 1983 Franklin Furnace wins an Advancement Grant from the NEA to promote institutional stability through development and publicity plans.

February 1984 Franklin Furnace is reprimanded by the NEA and dropped by several corporate sources for presenting Carnival Knowledge, an exhibition and performance extravaganza that questioned if there can be such a thing as "feminist pornography." Annie Sprinkle makes her debut as an artist during the performance of “Deep Inside Porn Stars.”

May 1985 Franklin Furnace creates its Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, which allows emerging artists to produce major work in New York

September 1995 Challenge Grant awarded by the NEA. Martha Wilson, Founding Director, realizes Franklin Furnace will never be remembered for its renovated real estate, but for the importance of its program, and that the Capital campaign is raising money for the wrong reasons.

October 1996 In the Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies, the twentieth anniversary, and final, exhibition in the Franklin Street loft space, brings together a selection of work that treats content as flowing information rather than property.

January to December 2000 The Future of the Present 2000 is redesigned as a residency program in collaboration with Parsons School of Design in order to give artists access to the full range of digital tools. Franklin Furnace's website receives 79,000 hits per month.

May 2005 Franklin Furnace Holds an Alumni Art Sale at the Marian Goodman Gallery, new York, raising over $60,000 for it's programs by selling works of art by artists who started out at Franklin Furnace..

July 2008 Franklin Furnace receives new and welcomed support from the Starry Night Fund of Tides Foundation, matching increased and longstanding funding from Jerome Foundation, and enabling Franklin Furnace's peer review panel to award $70,000 to eleven deserving artists selected from among 465 proposals to the Franklin Furnace Fund.

August 2009 The online version of the Franklin Furnace Database is launched. This database, which contains information about every performance art work, temporary installation, exhibition or benefit presented by Franklin Furnace also contains, thanks to major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Booth Ferris Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts' Digitization Initiative, images of events presented during Franklin Furnace’s first ten years, 1976 to 1985.

Martha Wilsons Influence
A respected librarian and cultural historian Marvin Taylor, once wrote, “Martha Wilson IS Franklin Furnace!”. For twenty years, from 1976 to 1996, Franklin Furnace was based in a storefront space in the Tribeca area in Lower Manhattan, presenting modern and historical exhibitions of artists’ books as well as contemporary, temporary installation and performance art to the public. Franklin Furnace has served all types of Different Communities the local, national and international community of activist artists, artists who have took it upon themselves to address urgent subjects within those communities such as conflict, poverty, disease, racial discrimination, prejudice, and homophobia. During the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s, Franklin Furnace started being identified with artists’ free will and rights of expression as a result of its presentation and support of the four artists who came to be known as the “NEA 4,” artists, Their grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were revoked due to the topic matter of their art. Franklin Furnace then managed to go virtual on its 20th anniversary, providing all types of artists with not just a physical platform but also a digital platform for freedom of expression.

Franklin Furnace Fund
The Franklin Furnace Fund is supported by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; Jerome Foundation; and the SHS Foundation, during 2011-2012. Every year Franklin Furnace award grants to up and coming artists of all different varieties, this then allows these artists to produce and perform major works of art in New York. These Grants range from $2,000 to $10,000. Artists from all over the world are encouraged to apply however, the projects funded by Franklin Furnace must be presented with in New York City. It also states that Full time students are ineligible for grants. For several months throughout 2008, Franklin Furnace combined the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and The Future of the Present programs into one, entitled the Franklin Furnace Fund. . Franklin Furnace came to the decision to join these two programs together as over the last 10 years, artists have created and produced works on varied points of the spectrum,  from the body of the artist and the circulatory network of the Internet in the creation of temporal work. . Franklin Furnace has no Official Curator, every year a panel of artists (new artists every year) review all of the proposals. Franklin Furnace believes that this panel system allows people from all over the world an equal chance at presenting their work. They also make it clear that every year the panel changes, as do the definitions of "emerging artist", "performance art" and "variable media art". And they finish of by stating that “if at first you don't succeed, please try again.”. Since 1985 The Franklin Furnace Fund has rapidly increased the lives and careers of emerging artists. such as, Tanya Barfield, Patty Chang, Papo Colo, Brody Condon, Karen Finley, John Fleck, Kate Gilmore, Murray Hill, Holly Hughes, Mouchette, William Pope.L, Pamela Sneed, Jack Waters, Cathy Weis, and Ricardo Miranda Zuniga.