Q'orianka Kilcher - german world magazine

Photos: Karin Kohlberg
"To The Elements!", the video art exhibition currently on display at the Goethe-Institut Wyoming Building in New York.
One is Now
Three
The Goethe Institut New York
officially opened their three
new locations
By MIKE WEISS
W
hile their famous uptown beaux-arts mansion across the street
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art undergoes a 3-5 year
renovation, the Goethe Institut New York will exist as three satellite
locations in the center of the city’s art world in lower Manhattan.
“We were forced to reinvent the Goethe-Institut,” Gabriele Becker,
regional North American director said at the official opening party on
April 15, speaking from the institute’s newly designed temporary main
office on Spring Street in Soho. The office has glass on all four sides
of its loft space which makes you feel almost like you’re flying.
Together with a lending library able to mail books and DVDs across
North America and numerous language and cultural programs,
Becker feels even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself would be
impressed. “He’d love it,” she said.
An event space in the East Village called the Wyoming Building and
a small storefront gallery on the Lower East Side, Ludlow 38, complete
the trio. “New York is a place where you have to have original ideas,”
explains Stephan Wackwitz, director of cultural programs for the
Goethe-Institut New York. “With so much going on, so many cultural
institutions, you have to do something a little bit extra.”
Photo: Karin Kohlberg
Goethe-Institut New York on Spring Street
CURRENTS • NEW YORK
Goethe-Institut New York, Wyoming Building
Gabriele Becker Stephan Wackwitz
Summer 2010 www.german-world.com 13