2 minute read
THE NEW BUILDING
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After more than a decade of visioning, development, and planning, the New Irish Arts Center opens its doors to begin the next chapter in our history.
This landmark collaboration between the people of Ireland and New York signifies a new era in the cultural life of the global Irish diaspora, and provides an important new canvas for the development and presentation of the performing arts in New York City.
The New Irish Arts Center will reflect Ireland’s emerging position as a modern European country, and build on its legacy as a land of poets. It will provide a home for innovation, collaboration and development in the world’s cultural capital, and a place for people of all backgrounds to come together to celebrate our common humanity in the environment of Irish hospitality for which Ireland—and Irish Arts Center—is renowned.
The Opening Season of the New Irish Arts Center will be both a culmination and a new beginning. It will be a statement of promise and possibility as a new cultural institution is reborn in New York.
We invite you to join us at this transformative moment.
The centerpiece of the new building is a state-of-the-art flexible theatre with a telescopic seating system, wire tension grid, plywood walls with unistrut, and masonite floors. It is intended to serve as a space for theatre, dance, music, visual arts, interdisciplinary work, residencies, and special events.
With a resilient floor, full-size mirror, PA system, and drop-down screen and projector, our ground floor studio will be a wonderful setting for music and dance classes, rehearsals, residencies, community meetings, and small gatherings.
Our top floor library is an intimate, warmly appointed space for classes, meetings, and special events. It offers generous city views (with a glimpse of the Hudson!) through three large, floor-to-ceiling windows on the west wall. With a small kitchenette and adjacent private bathrooms, the library will also be used as a lounge for our Claddagh Circle supporters.
Our ground floor welcomes you to come early and stay late. Simple and elegant food and beverage service by Ardesia, our neighborhood partner, and contemporary Irish craft furniture by Orior— provide a wonderful setting for Irish hospitality. Our south gallery wall will present rotating exhibitions as part of our expanding visual arts program.
At the theatre entrance level and above, a generous atrium space, bordered by the historic original brick façade from Cybert Tire (built in 1916) and a dynamic load-bearing ceiling for hanging visual art, provides the perfect setting for audiences and artists to experience the wonderful blend of “the old and the new” that is so essential to the identity of our new home.
