PS122’s Mobile Walking Tour Debuts Tomorrow

Vallejo Gantner, PS122’s artistic director, worries that young artists don’t know that the organization is part of the East Village, and neither will some of its neighbors when it reopens, which it expects to do next year. He doesn’t want it to seem, he said, as if “we parachuted in.” … The challenge is to talk about the artistic exploration that has happened there, but “in a way that is not just about nostalgia.” He would like to see PS122 remain the “hub of an innovative, generative culture,” even if East Village rents mean fewer of its artists live around the corner. “That ethos doesn’t have to die just because the neighborhood’s changed,” he said. “Because that’s the thing that made it interesting, and will make it interesting in the future.”