PEOPLE
Alison Ward Heinemeier
Founding Director
As an artist, Alison’s practice combines traditional art making with performance projects that reach a diverse range of audiences. Her performances blend elaborate baroque costuming with physical performances that are inspired by wrestling and boxing. In 1997 she created Tex and Trixie’s Vaudeville Show, paving the way for New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scene. In 2001 she helped found The Glamazons, a burlesque troupe challenging the norms of feminine beauty. In 2009 she helped build The Waterpod, a floating ecohabitat that she and two other artists inhabited for five months. From 2008 to 2011 she performed in and around New York City with her punk band The Ruffian Arms, whose genderbending punk aesthetic delights and challenges audiences on all levels.
Exhibitions include the Queens Museum, The Dumbo Arts Center, the Bronx Museum, the CCCB Museum in Spain, RAW Space Gallery in Australia and Castlefield Gallery in England. She has done residencies at Raw Space in Australia, The Artist in the Marketplace Program, and the LMCC studio program, The Waterpod Project in New York City, LMCC’s Swing Space Program, Flux Factory in NewYork City and the Islington Mill in Manchester. She has received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Lewisham Arts council in London as well as the Texas Commission on the Arts and the Idea Fund in Houston.
Shane Heinemeier
Founding Director
Shane is a painter from San Antonio, Texas, whose work is an abstraction of the idea of landscape, and the method of landscape painting. He uses handmade tools to create works that while mechanical, still preserves the artist’s hand and an idea of intimacy. The idea of landscape as literal and as illusion is illustrated by the play between actual texture of the surface of the painting and simulated atmospheric depth. Heinemeier has recently added sculpture and installation to his repertoire with collaborative works done with Flux Factory and Alison Ward.
He received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2007. He has shown at Joan Grona Gallery and Blue Star gallery in San Antonio, and the Dumbo Arts Center, English Kills Gallery, Flux Factory gallery and Studio 111 in New York. He is a member of the artist collective The Flux Factory in Long Island City, Queens, New York. He has done residencies at The Islington Mill in Manchester, England and Flux Factory in New York City.