Flux Factory museum to lose home

The founders of Flux Factory recently learned that their avant-garde art museum in Long Island City is being derailed.
Flux Factory, located at 38-38 43rd Street, is situated within one of eight properties taken over to make room for the Metropolitan Transit Association (MTA)’s East Side Access Plan, which will connect the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) with the east side of Manhattan.
“At a certain point, we realized that that we wouldn’t be able to stay in this building if the MTA was going to tear down all of the buildings on this block,” said Flux Factory’s Executive Director Stefany Anne Golberg, who has been with the museum since its founding in 1994 in Brooklyn. In 2002, organizers had picked up and replanted Flux Factory in Queens - on the border of Sunnyside.
Since moving to the borough, the 3,000-square-foot gallery has held interactive events like a Caribbean-style Carnivale in 2002, an ice playground for kids later the same year and a paintball mural-making party in 2005.
With about four scheduled shows per year, Flux Factory “get[s] artists together to produce new and collaborative work,” Golberg said.
The most recent exhibit, which opened in December, featured works by more than 130 artists on the theme “New York, New York, New York,” jokingly referred to on the web site as “so nice they named it thrice.”
Golberg said it was a take on the Queens Museum of Art’s (QMA) panorama exhibit, which is a to-scale replica of New York City. Whereas at Flux Factory, artists were given free reign to create their ideal city and the exhibit is scheduled to wrap up later this month.
The next show will open up in March, Golberg said.
“We will really invite the public to share our experiences of being in this space for the last six years along with their experiences and give it a fond farewell,” Golberg said.
However, neither she nor other gallery organizers know when specifically they have to leave the Long Island City location.
Although the entire East Access project is scheduled to be finished in 2013, a spokesperson from the MTA said he could not release a more specific timeline of when work would begin in Queens. So far, two tunnel-boring machines are already underground on the Manhattan side of the project - the first of which has created a passageway from 63rd Street and 2nd Avenue to 59th Street and Park Avenue en route to Grand Central Terminal and the second machine is being set up for boring.
The tunnels will later be linked to the pre-existing one, which was built 30 years ago, connecting western Queens and Manhattan which is currently used by the F train, so that the LIRR stops at 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue.
“It will bring trains from Sunnyside Yards, near the location of these building, into the tunnel to Grand Central in Manhattan,” MTA spokesperson Donovan said, calling the Queens piece “critical” to the plan.
As of Wednesday, January 3, negotiations for how much the displaced property owners would receive were still in negotiations, Donovan said.
“We had a public hearing on February 22, 2007, and we sent letters to all of the affected property owners and affected tenants of the buildings,” said Aaron Donovan from the MTA, adding, “In addition to the hearing and the outreach about the hearing, we have in general made ourselves available to those who want assistance or information about the project or the process.”
For Flux Factory, Golberg fears the end is near.
“In terms of what the next Flux Factory will be, I think it’s going to be continued,” Golberg said. “We certainly aren’t going anywhere, but in the grand scheme of things I don’t know what form Flux Factory will take next.”