Celebrating the Arts | Sol Kjøk

Our monthly blog series, Celebrating the Arts, highlights talented artists and art organizations whose work reflects the diverse and rich cultures, ideas, and lives that make up our community. Broadway Stages is committed to promoting these individuals, their talents and work so that a wider audience can enjoy, learn, and benefit from their creativity and passion.

This month, we feature someone who has been part of the Broadway Stages family for 20 years, Sol Kjøk, a native of Norway who now calls Brooklyn home. After studies in Paris, Athens (GA), Vienna, Medellín and Cincinnati that earned her three graduate degrees in humanities, Kjøk landed in New York to obtain a master’s in fine arts (MFA) in painting at Parsons School of Design. Here she joined forces with other artists, leased a workspace in an old warehouse and began to build-out a live/workspace for painters and venue for live performances. This is also where our relationship began, in 2001 as landlord and tenant. Since then, our relationship and the arts community in Brooklyn have blossomed, and we have Kjøk to thank!

Today, Kjøk is Broadway Stages’ Artist-in-Residence working out of a painting studio at our facility at 520 Kingsland Avenue, the same location as Kingsland Wildflowers. Her space is known in the arts community as Last Frontier NYC, a private workspace that occasionally serves as a presentation platform for international artists across multiple disciplines. But this is just the tip of the iceberg; a little background on Kjøk is in order.

An avid drawer all her life, Kjøk’s work has been featured in 100+ shows worldwide. She has held artist residencies in several countries, taught at universities and art schools and lectured at museums and art centers throughout the US. Her work, which originates as performance, is featured in Drawing Essentials (Oxford University Press), a textbook widely used in fine arts programs in the US. A recipient of more than 50 awards and artist’s grants, Kjøk is represented in public collections such as the Cincinnati Art Museum, Teckningsmuseet [the Nordic Museum of Drawing], and the Osten Museum of Drawing, as well as numerous private and corporate collections throughout the world.

With this type of talent, dedication, and commitment you can understand how our relationship with and support of Kjøk has grown over two decades. After our initial tenant landlord engagement, Broadway Stages offered Kjøk another location in Greenpoint where, in 2005, she founded Mothership NYC, an arts collective that brings interdisciplinary arts from elsewhere to New York. And in 2011, Kjøk established NOoSPHERE Arts, a 501c3 organization that was originally run out of a BWS-owned storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since 2016, her nonprofit has been headquartered at 520 Kingsland Avenue, where it puts on multidisciplinary arts programming across several indoor and outdoor arenas, including Last Frontier NYC and Kingsland Wildflowers. Our very own Tony Argento, founder of Broadway Stages, serves on the board of NOoSPHERE Arts. The organization is the official Arts Producer & Presenter for events at 520 Kingsland, where its programming harnesses the power of art to drive action around the environment, migration, and diversity.

Kjøk has dedicated her life to the arts, and we are honored to play a role in her story and her projects that bring arts from around the world to Brooklyn and empower artists and our community to build a more sustainable, diverse, and joyful world. We leave you with one of Kjøk’s favorite quotes by Pierre Tielhard de Chardin, and one that we believe expresses the essence of her work and the energy a.k.a. love, that she brings to all she does.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

We can’t wait to see what comes next. Stay tuned.