Directing a "Collective of Collectives"

Two days before last Thanksgiving Steven Englander received a check in the mail. The brown UPS envelope contained a $1 million check made out to ABC No Rio, the center for arts and activism he runs on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The donor was anonymous.

Englander, 49, has devoted himself to the organization for nearly 20 years. Nothing prepared him for the shock of the gift that arrived a few months after No Rio jumpstarted long dreamt of plans for expansion of their 156 Rivington Street building. “To this day we still don’t know where it came from,” said Englander.

First came No Rio’s June approval for $1.65 million in city funding by Manhattan City Council representatives. Then came the anonymous million-dollar check. For Englander, it was hard to believe that a formerly abandoned building once purchased from the city for $1 was well on its way to fundraising a $4 million expansion project.

Through it all, Englander has kept No Rio connected to its earliest core as a collective, and it shows. In what Englander now calls an “intervention,” No Rio was born in 1980 by a group of artists who began squatting in the Delancey Street building as activists against the city’s strict land use policies. While the space was originally used as an art gallery and music venue, today it is proud to also offer a dark room, a silk-screen print room, and a ’zine library as part of its facilities. The organization continues to be collectively run by approximately 50 volunteers, with Englander acting as the only paid employee.

Sitting on a wooden stool in a stretched-out gray sweater, Steven Englander grins boyishly as he speaks about the overwhelming influx of funds. Englander’s conscientiousness and efficiency as director amidst an economic crisis has won the approval of many of his peers. Most importantly, Englander has stayed true to ABC No Rio’s roots. Englander has managed to push No Rio in a progressive direction, while maintaining its earliest purpose for the organization to represent “an activity that should be shared and passed along and not turned into an institution,” said Joseph Nechvatal, 59, a digital artist and one of the original founders of ABC No Rio, currently living in both Paris and New York.

Englander speaks casually as he pushes his long graying hair back with two hands. Despite the stress of No Rio’s construction project, he appears confident that the collective is happy. Crossing his legs he laughingly remarks, “It’s been a long time since there was a mutiny against me.”

ABC No Rio director, Steven Englander, 49, sits in the space where he formerly lived in the No Rio building.

The facade of ABC No Rio has changed little since the '80s despite immense gentrification of its home on the Lower East Side.

Sculptural art frames the door of one of the many work spaces in No Rio's four story building.

In the construction of a new building, No Rio will unfortunately lose many remnants of its past, as seen here in a warning written on the stairwell by a former activist.

Hardly an inch of wall space is left untouched by artwork in the halls of No Rio's soon to be demolished building.