The morning after ISSUE Project Room board member Steve Buscemi won the Golden Globe Award for his role as Nucky on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, I spoke with Ed Patuto, the new Executive Director of the acclaimed art and performance space currently located in Park Slope.
“We have a great board which now includes a Golden Globe winner,” Patuto told me.
It was certainly a thrill to watch Buscemi receive the Golden Globe, but it was also a thrill to talk to Patuto, who has relocated to Brooklyn after 25 years in San Francisco to run ISSUE, which lost its founding director, Suzanne Fiol, to cancer in 2009.
Indeed, Fiol left big shoes (or rather gorgeous knee-high boots) for Patuto to fill. Issue Project Room was a labor of passion for Fiol, who was a noted photographer as well as a director at numerous art galleries. In 2003 she opened ISSUE in an East Village storefront.
But that was just the first stop in ISSUE’s early nomadic journey. In 2007 Fiol moved ISSUE to a picturesque silo along the banks of the Gowanus Canal. Later she moved it to its current home in the Old American Can Factory on Third Street and Third Avenue in Park Slope.
In its many incarnations, ISSUE has ceaselessly presented the adventurous and genre bending work of perhaps thousands of multi-disciplinary artists in music, sound, visual arts, film and literature, including Yoko Ono, Eliot Sharp, Charlotte Morman, Moby, Rick Moody and many more.
Thanks to Fiol’s tenacity ISSUE will soon have a permanent home (or at least a 20-year lease). In 2008, Two Trees Management Co. and the New York Economic Development Corporation awarded ISSUE a 20-year rent-free lease to the 4,800 square foot theater space at 110 Livingston Street (entrance at 22 Boerum Place), within the former Board of Education building at 110 Livingston.
This exquisite Beaux-Arts jewel box theater designed by McKim, Mead and White must be extensively renovated and production-ready before ISSUE, Fiol’s great contribution to the arts in Brooklyn (and New York City), can move in.
Enter Ed Patuto. Born in Youngstown, Ohio he moved to Cobble Hill when he was 17 and spent his twenties in Brooklyn working as a dancer with Alvin Ailey, Men Together, and Gay Men Together.
On the West Coast, Patuto accrued 20 years of experience fundraising and working in arts organizations. Most notably, he was the Co-Founder/Director of VOLUME, a California-based curatorial catalyst for interdisciplinary new media work concentrating on music and visual arts.
“It was a hard decision to leave San Francisco and at the same time I knew that I’d never have this opportunity in California,” Patuto told me.
“Taking over for Suzanne is a labor of love for me, as well. It’s what she built this community around that sets the tone for how I will lead ISSUE,” he said.
The first order of business for Patuto is to raise more money for the massive renovation of the new space, a space which will enable ISSUE to double its audience capacity to 200 and increase the scale of the performances they can present.
That’s why on March 4, Jo Andres and Buscemi, board members who live in Park Slope, will host a benefit at ISSUE’s future home. It will be a 60th birthday party for guitar virtuoso Elliott Sharp, who has been featured on hundreds of recordings and in live performances internationally. There will also be performances by Buscemi, Andres, Jack Womack and Tracy Morris. For more information about the benefit go here.