About Art State
Art State brings together artistic practice, culture, urban development, and long-term stewardship. Founded by Anne-Brigitte Sirois, its work engages public, private, and nonprofit partners in shaping the conditions through which cultural habitats emerge, take form, and endure within evolving urban landscapes.
One sustained area of Art State’s work has been the formation and transformation of West Chelsea as a center for contemporary art. This engagement has encompassed the establishment of galleries, the continuity of artist communities, and the spatial and institutional conditions that allow cultural life to take hold over time. In this context, the city is understood not as a static entity but as a living cultural organism, shaped by memory, movement, and the presence of artists whose practices define the identity of place.
Art State develops spatial, cultural, and institutional forms through which artistic thinking enters the structures that shape cultural life. Its work unfolds through collaborations with artists, galleries, property owners, foundations, civic actors, and cultural organizations, and through projects that regard artistic activity not as an accessory to urban life, but as one of its formative forces.
About Anne-Brigitte Sirois
Anne-Brigitte Sirois is an artist and writer whose practice has developed across painting, drawing, writing, moving image, curatorial work, and interventions in the cultural life of the city. Her work moves between intuitive and structural forms of inquiry, with recurring concerns around freedom, place, memory, displacement, the living world, and the conditions through which cultural life takes form.
Her early studio work explored the tension between the imagined and the material—between an image or sensation apprehended intuitively and its imperfect realization through physical form. In the mid-1990s, this inquiry expanded beyond the studio as Sirois began to work directly within the emerging cultural landscape of West Chelsea, approaching galleries, buildings, and the city itself as possible materials of artistic practice.
Carl Jung and Joseph Beuys remain important points of departure within this trajectory: Jung in the autonomy of inner image, symbolic life, and the movement toward wholeness; Beuys in the expansion of artistic practice into the social world. Between these poles, Sirois’s work moves from psychic image to civic form, examining how inner, social, and ecological realities become perceptible through image, place, relation, and action.
Her current work includes Montmartre / SoHo / Chelsea, an evolving project bringing together image, text, sound, research, and writing to reveal the mechanisms through which cultural districts emerge, consolidate, and dissolve, and Animal State, a trilogy in progress that extends questions of place and belonging into fiction, drawing, ecological thought, and the relations between human and non-human lives.
Across these different bodies of work runs a persistent search for coherence between inner and outer worlds—for the points at which image, experience, place, and collective life take on meaning, and the individual comes into relation with something larger than the self.