Join us for this advance screening of new documentary film by Alice Arnold and Sharon Zukin.
Through intimate conversations in artists’ lofts and on the streets, this documentary film explores the lives and practices that made the SoHo community a hotbed of New York’s cultural reinvention but put artists on the front lines of gentrification. Artists explain the utopian ideals behind SoHo’s “golden age” in the 1970s, while art dealers describe the explosion of wealth that drove the art market, raised property values and deepened inequality. As they look toward the city’s future after a contentious 2021 rezoning, urban planners, activists and a real estate developer debate the likely outcome of new development. Tracing SoHo’s history from New York’s fiscal crisis to today’s Gilded Age, SOHO IN FLUX asks who really benefits from rezoning and renewal, revealing the tension between art and real estate that puts a vibrant city at risk.
Cosponsored by the James Gallery, the PhD Program in Sociology, and the PhD Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences, at The Graduate Center, CUNY
Location: Martin E. Segal Theater, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue
The production of this film was sponsored by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts and the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program.
Alice Arnold is a documentary media maker and adjunct associate professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her films “To Be Seen: Street Art,” “Teeth” and “Electric Signs” have screened at MoMA and film festivals and are distributed by Icarus Films and Ovid.tv. Her photographs of nightlife and hiphop culture and her portraits have been widely exhibited and published.
Sharon Zukin is a professor emerita in the PhD programs in sociology and in earth and environmental sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. Beginning with her classic study “Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change” (1982), her books “The Cultures of Cities” (1995), “Naked City” (2010) and “The Innovation Complex” (2020) profile New York across the past half-century.