01/02/2024
NYC dreams do come true! What a story.
Posted • “How a kid from Nashville, Tennessee, lucked out,” Michael Shane Neal told of his double-height art studio behind the National Arts Club that he was granted possession of during the pandemic.
The club, founded in 1898, occupies two former mansions overlooking Gramercy Park: No. 14 and No. 15, both built in the 1840s and merged into one for Samuel Tilden in the 1880s (Calvert Vaux, one of the architects of Central Park, created a new façade). In 1906, George B. Post designed the Arts Club Studio Building in Tilden’s former rear garden. There some members of the club rent apartments in which they can live and work. The final step in the tenant selection process is having their name picked out of a hat.
Neal’s name was picked in 2020, when many of the building’s residents had fled the city. He landed the space of his mentor, the artist Everett Raymond Kinstler, who had lived and worked there for 66 years until shortly before his death in 2019. A phone call let him know he had won the prize: “Mr. Neal, you were the only member who came for the viewing, and so therefore you were awarded the studio. Your name was the only name in the hat.”
Head to the link in our bio for more on Neal’s life at the National Arts Club.
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