Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation to Launch May 2024
Programming with NADA and Open Studio hours in Gowanus to begin during New York’s Art Week
Open Studios appointments available here
April 25, 2024 (Brooklyn, NY): Today, the family of contemporary artist Bobby Anspach announced that they have created a foundation to honor his memory. Inspired by Anspach’s sculptures – immersive sound, light, and motion machines created with the aim of healing the world by expanding human awareness – the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation (BASFoundation) was founded to foster a global dialogue on how meditation, psychology, and creativity can be drivers of connectivity, compassion, and well-being. The BASFoundation will provide opportunities for both emerging and influential creatives and researchers to build on this dialogue, and create moments for the public to experience Anspach’s machines in the context of this larger interdisciplinary conversation.
In May 2024, the BASFoundation will officially launch with public programming across New York City. The BASFoundation will reopen Bobby Anspach’s studio in Gowanus on Saturdays and Sundays through May and June for Open Studios. During this period, the public can both book appointments to experience Anspach’s machines, and attend conversations and performances that explore the intersection of art and interpersonal wellness. Public programming will take place both at the studio and in coordination with NADA’s New York fair, with a talk on the art of mental health moderated by journalist Jesse Dorris on Saturday May 4 at 1pm.
“Our son, Bobby Anspach, was a brilliant, loving, inspiring person, and a tremendous artist dedicated to translating the sense of love, connection, and enlightenment that he brought to his life and practice to the wider world. His passing was an incredible loss, but he left us all with the legacy of his work, ideas, and dedication to engaging with the world in ways that would inspire compassion and empathy. It has been a privilege to build a foundation to honor his legacy with a board of directors that includes leaders across the art, wellness, and mental health worlds to ensure that we continue Bobby’s mission of working to heal the world, promote creativity, and build connections. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response to this project, and are excited to continue to build, grow, and engage,” noted Robert Anspach, Board President of the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation.
This past fall, prior to the foundation’s establishment, the artist’s estate supported two months of open studios and programming in a special memorial exhibition that took place in Anspach’s Gowanus studio in Brooklyn. Titled Place for Continuous Eye Contact, the exhibition featured four of Anspach’s machines that viewers enter into for a fully immersive experience of consciousness and connectedness, akin to the journey of meditation. The machines blend common objects with high craft, ranging from pom-poms to hand-blown glass to medical beds in an experience that at first appears scrappy and chaotic, and quickly blends into a seamless, all-encompassing, and otherworldly space.
The exhibition welcomed over 700 visitors with consistently sold out appointments and events, along with incredible feedback from visitors on their personal experiences of the work. In conjunction with the exhibition, there was a series of programs exploring and inspired by Anspach’s work. Comprising panel discussions, performances, and poetry readings, the program series involved creatives across disciplines, including writer Nina St. Pierre, musician Cameron Mesirow, artist Ben Ross Davis, and psychotherapist/cultural ecologist Ash North Compton.
As curator Elizabeth Ferrer describes Anspach’s machines, which are the inspiration for the foundation, they are: “intricate but chaotic-looking structures suspended from metal scaffolds and covered with thousands of glowing LED lights. These structures actually involve a wild mashup of high and low, technology and DIY craftiness. Bobby had covered their interiors with thousands of colorful pom-poms that he purchased in mass quantities. On the ground, was an air mattress covered with a kitschy fleece blanket, often, emblazoned with the image of a tiger. The participant was to enter the dome, recline on the mattress, and is then to be fitted with headphones and an eye patch. A guide instructs the participant to gaze continuously at a mirror ringed with pom-poms and positioned a few inches above their eye. Within moments, the spatial planes one normally perceives dissolve into a cohesive field, giving way to a sense of disembodiment, and to an otherworldly calm.”
The Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation is led by a board of directors from across the art, wellness, and mental health spheres, including Adam Adelson, Executive Director of Adelson Galleries, Paula Baldoni, Director of River House Arts, Jimmy Avari, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, as well as members of the Anspach family.
Psychiatrist Jimmy Avari noted of the work, ”The users of Anspach’s machines have described experiencing a sense of calm and clarity, while being fully present in the moment and aware of their surroundings. In essence, they describe reaching a state of mindfulness that is accessed and promoted by his artistic methods. This raises the question of whether these machines could offer therapeutic value in addressing psychological health, wellbeing, and/or helping those suffering with mental illness.”
In 2025, BASFoundation plans to engage in year round public programming to extend this feeling of calm and peace. Opportunities for collaborations and partnerships will be announced along with plans for a permanent exhibition and event space, which are currently in development.
About Bobby Anspach
Bobby Anspach was an American artist whose work centered around the creations of machines designed to deliver transcendent experiences to viewers, all part of a series titled Place for Continuous Eye Contact. As much a sculptor as an inventor, these devices are currently undergoing a patenting process. Employing a DIY-technique through all of his work, Anspach was focused on creating brilliant, unexpected, and sublime experiences that blend common objects with high craft, ranging from pom-poms to hand-blown glass to medical beds, aiming to inspire viewers to look within and discover everyday beauty and the natural world. The machines create an experience that at first appears scrappy and chaotic, and quickly blends into a seamless, all-encompassing, and otherworldly space. His work was informed by a deep respect for the environment and meditation, and founded on a belief of the interconnectedness of all things that was aimed to create a cared experience between all viewers of his work.
During his lifetime, Anspach’s work was celebrated and exhibited across the United States, most notably at the Spring/Break Art Show, New York, 2018 and 2020, the 2019 BRIC Biennial: Volume III. Brooklyn, NY, and the 2019 Governor’s Island Art Fair, as well as in numerous gallery exhibitions across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and California. In the public sphere, he presented his machines and made them available for visitor experiences at a pop-up space in Beacon, NY in 2021; in a Walmart parking lot in Newburgh, NY in 2022; and on Fifth Avenue outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 2022.
Bobby Anspach was born in 1987 in Toledo, OH, and died in 2022 in Beacon, NY. He received his BA from Boston College in 2011, studied at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and received an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. There, he produced the earliest versions of the Place for Continuous Eye Contact series of machines.
About the Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation
The Bobby Anspach Studios Foundation (BASFoundation) is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to preserving and providing access to the work of Bobby Anspach, who built sound and light sculptures with, on the one hand, the ambitious aim of preventing the world from destroying itself and, on the other hand, the more modest aim of providing individuals with singular aesthetic experiences. Continuing Bobby’s mission, the foundation grounds itself in the same principle that fueled Bobby’s work: a conviction regarding the power of meditation and art. Alongside continuing to preserve and share Bobby’s work, the foundation engages and supports artistic and mindfulness programming, as well as artists, educators, and meditation practitioners, all with the aim of offering people the opportunity to encounter and express something singular in their human experience.
Media contact
Sara Griffin
+1-917-656-6348