times Opens in Lower Manhattan with Ice Cream Cones and a Three-Year Plan

Stepping into the dimly lit art space with creaking wooden floors, the first thing you noticed was the grid of ice cream cones scattered across the floor. Hundreds of them - Cornetto-style cones made with preservatives so they never fully melt - spread across the entire gallery space. For a moment, you wondered: Is this it? “This” quickly became a game of Minesweeper - making sure you don’t step on a cone (as others had already done). “This” was the exact reaction the new experimental non-profit times wanted guests to feel for opening night, on February 21, with the inaugural show Nina Beier: Old Friends.

I came in just a few minutes before the opening performance started. The score by Latvian performance artist Jana Jacuka unfolded slowly, performed by a longtime collaborator, Bob Kil, the room growing still as she moved her hips in a circular motion and released bursts of laughter, and grunts, that penetrated throughout the space - visceral yet restrained. Amongst the crowd were artists and curators, drifting between the cones and the performance. I approached the founders, Summer Guthery and Francesca Sonara, to ask: so what is times?

“We really wanted to create a kind of lo-fi space for artists,” Guthery explained. “Something reminiscent of the artist-run spaces many of us grew up around in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’re not trying to build a permanent institution - we’re interested in supporting artists during this particular moment.” This idea is central to the project. Located in a 3,000-square-foot space at 151 Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan, times is an experimental nonprofit designed with a built-in expiration date: three years.

The founders are intentionally resisting the conventional art-world model. The goal is not permanence but responsiveness, creating a space that can remain nimble and attentive to artists’ ideas outside of commercial pressures. The inaugural exhibition that happens to also be Beier's first solo show within the max of 12 years, Old Friends is both a sculpture and slow performance - enticing the feelings of stagnation in a way that feels eerily reflective of the current cultural moment.

Beier, a Danish artist whose practice moves between sculpture and performance, often works with materials that carry layered cultural meaning - objects that hover between commodity and symbol. In Old Friends, the cones function as playful on the surface, but unsettling the longer you spend with them.

Times’ program will continue to develop over the next year with projects by Nadia Belerique - whose first collaborative public artworks with partner Tony Romano debut at Lassonde Art Trail this summer, Asad Raza, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Liv Schulman, and Gernot Wieland.

It’s rare to see a model like this emerge at a moment when long-standing galleries are closing and more artists are exhibiting work through informal channels - apartments, temporary spaces, or self-organized exhibitions. The founders themselves met while studying at Bard College, and what began as a casual idea has quickly become a fully functioning nonprofit platform for artists.

What’s most impressive about the space though, is that instead of a five- or ten-year plan, the organization embraces a form of intentional temporariness - an acknowledgment that art spaces do not necessarily need to exist indefinitely to have impact.

“What matters isn’t scale or longevity,” Sonara noted. “It's a meaningful engagement right now.”

It left me thinking - what might happen if an art space was designed not to last forever, but to respond precisely to the present moment? And perhaps more importantly - what might come after? I’d say it’s definitely a space to watch!