William L. Hamilton

“The Orchid Show: Singapore,” the New York Botanical Garden’s 17th annual orchid extravaganza, running through April 28, features the natural species and hybridized sensations of Southeast Asia — upward of 70 percent of the display in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. Thousands of them, in hundreds of varieties and every conceivable — and inconceivable — shape, size and color.

The orchid, once an aristocratic rarity, now a ubiquity — you can buy them at Home Depot — is still the most unnatural-looking flower of the natural world, dizzying in its opulent, adamant oddity. And that’s just one on its own.

“It’s actually surpassed the poinsettia as the most horticulturally produced crop in the world,” said Marc Hachadourian, senior curator of orchids at the New York Botanical Garden. “They’re the pandas of the plant world — they’re charismatic, they’re colorful, they’re engaging.”

The botanical garden’s partners on the show are Singapore Botanic Gardens, whose National Orchid Garden has the largest collection in the world, and Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, a green-themed entertainment attraction where the wedding party finale in “Crazy Rich Asians” was filmed. Singapore, which at one time called itself a “garden city,” now calls itself a “city within a garden.” The orchid, mass-produced and energetically hybridized as a major export industry, is its national flower.

In a stroll through the conservatory recently, it was difficult not to think of Hachadourian as the Wizard of Oz, surveying his realm of perfect, unimaginable riches. “Vanda, Dendrobium, Cymbidium, Phalaenopsis and Paphiopedilum,” he said, Linnaeus’ botanical Latin rolling off his tongue as deftly as the daily specials, pointing to the jewel-like faces to the right and left of us. It was an oddly extraordinary experience, as if everything ordinary had been Photoshopped out of the picture: an emerald Instagramatic city, with a kind of plant-phantom Pokémon at play.

The ambassador of the orchid’s new ubiquity is the Phalaenopsis, in a Calvin Klein-underwear white. Known as the grocery store orchid, it is widely, inexpensively available, and the lifestyle star of everything from luxury-condo advertising to wellness spas and supermarkets. Toppled from the throne is the cattleya: the frilled grandmotherly orchid that forms the stuff of corsages. Proust is wearing one on his label in Jacques-Emile Blanche’s famous portrait of 1892.

Because of the Phalaenopsis’ clean, modern, broad-shouldered success, everyone is now trying their hands at orchids, losing their home-gardeners’ fears as orchids lose their stigma as tricky plants to cultivate.

“I own a lady’s slipper and a Phalaenopsis,” said Dr. Michelle Montenegro, who was visiting the conservatory with a colleague, Dr. Alec Petrie. Both are emergency room physicians at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. Montenegro got her orchids at last year’s show. “They’re actually alive,” she said, with a surprised laugh, when asked about their health. She built a special window shelf for them. “The shelf is definitely helping,” she added.

“I’ve killed a lot of plants,” said Petrie, whom Montenegro was trying to talk into an orchid. “I’m better with people —”

She smiled. “Today’s the day, I’m telling you,” Montenegro said. Their next stop was the garden’s book and gift shop.

The garden’s Singapore show has two major attractions. A pair of supertrees — 18-foot-tall steel armatures in the trunk-like and canopied shape of actual trees — are versions of the artificial Supertrees in a vast grove at Gardens by the Bay, which is the setting for the scene in “Crazy Rich Asians.”

Singapore’s Supertrees are over 160 feet tall, and skyways traverse the tops. They are also embedded with photovoltaic cells, which collect energy — like living trees — that is used to power nighttime light displays choreographed to music. And they’re swathed, head to toe, in extra-terrestrial-looking foliage.

“It’s sort of a Disneyland for plant lovers,” said Karen Daubmann, associate vice president for exhibitions, who visited Gardens by the Bay, and worked to replicate the supertrees in the Bronx. “The orchids that we’re showcasing inside, at the conservatory, are things they grow outside. It’s pretty wild.”

Like the ones in Singapore, the garden’s supertrees were designed to demonstrate a particularly spectacular class of specimens, even for the tropics: epiphytes, or plants that grow without soil, on trees.

“They’re a strange community that evolved to essentially climb the trees to get the best available light, water and moisture,” Hachadourian said. Orchid alpha types; the acrobats of the plant kingdom.

George Poinar Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, was the lead author of a 2017 study that established the orchid’s age at 45 million to 55 million years old, 25 million years older than previously believed. He told a science journal, “We probably shouldn’t say this about a plant, but orchids are very smart.”

The show’s other major attraction, inspired by Singapore’s National Orchid Garden, is a promenade of arches, dripping with orchids, that leads to the conservatory’s main dome. The colors move through a spectrum from yellow — Oncidium “Goldiana,” or the “dancing lady” orchid — to pink to darker, hotter shades. It is like walking under a rainbow.

“The ‘Vandaceous Alliance’ is a signature group of orchids highly specific to Singapore,” Hachadourian said, of their particularly large presence in the show. Singapore’s national flower is the Vanda “Miss Joaquim,” named for the woman who bred it in the 19th century: one of the earliest of artificially produced hybrids still in cultivation today.

In the tradition of honoring people with their own cultivars (there exist, for example, first lady orchids from “Mrs. Herbert Hoover” to the fuchsia-hued Rhyncholaeliocattleya “Melania Trump”) — the New York Botanical Garden has unveiled the Vanda “Awkwafina,” celebrating the actress who starred in “Crazy Rich Asians.” Awkwafina grew up in Queens, and recalled being taken to the garden for her fourth birthday, Daubmann said.

The orchid — its connoisseurship and collecting — is no longer the exclusive domain of the retired, the academic or the moneyed fanatic that you might have expected it to be.

“Half of my room is dedicated to my plants,” said Sebastian Trujillo, 18, a visitor services attendant at the garden. “Around 415 plants. It’s a jungle in there.” Trujillo is a high school senior who lives with his parents in Queens. “Now, they’re helping me build a greenhouse in the back of the house.”

With popularity, does the orchid — one of history’s most enduring embodiments of the idea of rarity — run the risk, like any celebrity, of overexposure? If we see too many, will we lose the point?

“I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them,” Susan Orlean, writing in her 1998 best-selling book, “The Orchid Thief,” asks a park ranger in Florida.

“Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose,’ he said shrugging.”

With an estimated 30,000 wild species worldwide, and hundreds of thousands — and rapidly counting — of breeders’ hybrids, the bloom’s not off the orchid yet.

“The Orchid Show: Singapore”

Through April 28 at the New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Blvd., Bronx; 718-817-8700, nybg.org. The garden is also hosting Orchid Evenings each weekend of the run.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/arts/design/orchids-new-york-botanical-garden.html" id="91342331-b891-3bb0-af15-52fbaa6d9d3f">The New York Times</a>.

Seduced by Singapore's Charismatic Orchids

NEW YORK — It’s like being hit with a ton of ... blossoms.

“We even have photographs of the first space we got kicked out of, 13 years ago, in Harlem,” Dickinson said, with a measure of pride. Handelman is thinking of making the book an art project.

Now they each have new studios at the Brooklyn Army Terminal in Sunset Park, within the largest nonprofit artist-space project to appear in the city in 20 years. At 50,000 square feet, ArtBuilt Brooklyn, where Dickinson, Handelman and roughly 100 other artists now work, was constructed with a creative combination of private investment and civic support from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, specifically the Affordable Real Estate for Artists program of the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York City Economic Development Corp.

Its intention is to provide physical stability to redress the economic volatility of being an artist working in New York. ArtBuilt offers below-market rents — from $13 to $24 a rentable square foot, compared with approximately $28-36 a square foot for commercial space in Brooklyn last year, according to CoStar, a real estate research company. Dickinson pays $1,092 for 827 square feet; Handelman pays $1,146 for 868 square feet.

More important to many of the artists, the project has a 10-year lease with the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which it, in turn, has offered to its tenants. They include small arts-based businesses like Purgatory Pie Press, a letterpress, and musical instrument-makers like Matt Rubendall, who handcrafts guitars. There will be annual increases of 3.5 percent.

It is the first realized studio build-out for the project’s parent, ArtBuilt, which sees it as a model for creating affordable space rentals in collaboration with local governmental agencies to keep a flagship creative population from flight. Studio artists are rapidly being muscled out of gentrifying neighborhoods across the city by commercial real estate pressures. And it is tough being a New York artist in Providence, Rhode Island.

“Fraught, fraught, fraught,” said Tomashi Jackson, a multimedia artist, recalling her previous studio in the South Bronx. As she spoke, Jackson was at work on “Hometown Buffet-Two Blues (Limited Value Exercise),” which was headed to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. But being shown and collected by major museums did not make Jackson immune from the studio turbulences of New York artists.

“We were bailing water,” she said. “Melted snow was coming through the ceiling.” Jackson finally decided to leave the Bronx because of the threat of a stiff rent increase — and news of ArtBuilt Brooklyn.

Nearly fully rented, the work-only spaces are private and up to code, a relative luxury for many artists battling development in ex-industrial zones that they have, paradoxically, helped pioneer.

When a Whole Foods appeared across from his studio in Gowanus, Paul Ramirez Jonas, a sculptor, recalled thinking: “Well, that’s it. Our days are numbered.” His leases got progressively shorter: five years, then three. Then two, and one. Jonas’ rent at ArtBuilt Brooklyn is $2,174 monthly for three spaces that total 1,809 square feet.

“There need to be places for artists to thrive in place, and that is extremely important to this entire enterprise,” said Tom Finkelpearl, the commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs, which oversees the Affordable Real Estate for Artists program. “Three years ago, the mayor said that we really have to look at ways to keep artists in the city. There’s an affordability problem that’s absolutely a looming problem for artists in the city.”

Esther B. Robinson and Guy Buckles, the founders of ArtBuilt, said they worked backward from what artists said they needed — a process akin to the oft-cited story of Sony’s executives presenting its engineers with a 5-inch square block of wood that became the Walkman.

“I went backward from the math — until the math worked,” said Robinson, a former filmmaker who has a kind of unstoppable enthusiasm, even when jet-lagged. Ultimately, that meant scaling the project to 50,000 square feet, from 10,000, to bring down the rents. With that, they were no longer competing with companies like WeWork and Google that were looking for white-box desk-space and able to pay top dollar to private landlords. After working with commercial brokers, Buckles and Robinson realized that New York City itself might hold the key.

“The city is the largest landowner of industrial space,” she said. The Brooklyn Army Terminal, designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1919, has 4 million square feet of space, and the New York City Economic Development Corp., which administers the city’s real estate portfolio, was interested in adding creative sectors to the building, said Julie Stein, the corporation’s executive director of Sunset Park. ArtBuilt’s founders paid a development cost of $1.3 million to create infrastructure and studios, with a security deposit of $75,000 on the lease.

Robinson and Buckles quickly realized they needn’t have worried about filling the space.

“At any given time there are literally hundreds of established reputable artists who are losing their spaces or recognize that they’re about to lose their spaces,” said Buckles, previously a founding director of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, a New York nonprofit that offers one- to two-year subsidized studio space, granted by application and a juried decision. (Other programs in the city, such as Spaceworks, ChaShaMa and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, whose new Arts Center on Governors Island will open in September, provide more temporary opportunities for working artists.)

ArtBuilt Brooklyn was rented mostly by word-of-mouth, with references based on professional reputations or personal relationships. Critics might argue that it was filled without the democratic opportunity of an open call, or the elective oversight of an application process and peer review. But some of the earliest artists to join, which included Dickinson and Handelman, were part of a group evicted from a building in Gowanus, close to where Robinson lived.

“At that time, our focus was helping these artists stay in New York by building a solution as quickly as possible,” Robinson said. ArtBuilt is in talks to create a second space in New York. Robinson said the organization would refine its recruitment process going forward.

Its tenants, like Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe, fall within the art world’s spectrum between “emerging” and “art star” — successful artists with gallery representation, inclusion in institutional collections, teaching positions and often families.

“We kind of had a real estate tsunami last year,” said Moyer, a painter represented by DC Moore Gallery. Her partner, Pepe, whose installations the artist has called “improvisational crochet,” leases a space across the hall. Both lost their studios, and coincidentally, their residence, “in the middle of organizing big shows,” Moyer said. She pays $1,467 monthly to rent 1,116 square feet; Pepe, whose studio has no windows, pays $1,231.

On a recent visit, ArtBuilt Brooklyn had the tentative feel of a freshman dorm, where students have just arrived and are still figuring it all out.

Eric Pitra, who makes experimental electronic instruments, with clients including Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, said that he thought ArtBuilt Brooklyn already had a fledgling community aspect. Rubendall, the guitar-maker, has lent him an oil can he admired, to contemplate — a studio version of a neighborly cup of sugar.

“Good vibes, good energy,” Pitra said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="aeeccb93-cb3e-379e-aa67-0b6eaef497bd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/arts/design/artbuilt-brooklyn-army-terminal.html">The New York Times</a>.

Displaced Artists Open a New Front at the Brooklyn Army Terminal

NEW YORK — Jessica Dickinson and her husband, Marc Handelman, both New York artists, sat in Dickinson’s newest studio in Brooklyn with a big loose-leaf album that might have been a baby book. It was a record — photographs, floor plans, drawings — of all the unaffordable spaces they had looked at, or had been turned down for, after they were evicted from their studios in Gowanus after 11 years.

Displaced artists open a new front at the Brooklyn Army Terminal

This article originally appeared in <a id="f680063b-dd66-4f19-98bd-3ee6c9fa77a4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/arts/design/orchids-new-york-botanical-garden.html">The New York Times</a>.

Seduced by Singapore's charismatic orchids

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William L. Hamilton

Articles written by the author

Seduced by Singapore's Charismatic Orchids

Displaced artists open a new front at the Brooklyn Army Terminal

Seduced by Singapore's charismatic orchids