Mixed Use
"Covering nearly two city blocks along Hamilton Street, the massive space, where untold New Haveners produced and assembled timepieces, became the perfect place for those who preferred to fly under the radar. Among them were the Papier Mache Video Institute (PMVI), founded in 1978 by Paul Rutkovsky, an artist and a fellow at Harvard’s Institute for the Study of the Avant-Garde, and later taken up by experimental artist Beverly Richey. She created a legendary one-day exhibition at the factory in 1983 titled 1984, which 700 visitors lined up to see. PMVI took on the issues of the day—issues not likely to be addressed by mainstream galleries and museums—including “feminism, war, capitalism, elitism, Urban Renewal and ‘TV mono-culture.’” Artifacts of the group’s life inside the factory are on view in Factory, including video footage of multimedia installations (made, in part, of papier mâché), a performance piece on “how to draw a sink” and artists at work and in video portrait closeups.
