For the past 15 years, NOoSPHERE Arts has been transforming Greenpoint’s industrial rooftops into venues for environmental art and community collaboration. The nonprofit cultural center — founded by Norwegian artist Sol Kjøk and powered by an international team of creatives and scientists — produces year-round programming that blends performance, visual art, film, and poetry with eco-awareness and public engagement.
Included in their programming is the annual open-air arts series, WE ARE NATURE, hosted in partnership with Kingsland Wildflowers, a 25,000 square foot native pollinator rooftop garden. This year marked the festival’s sixth iteration in this somewhat surreal nature sanctuary on top of a former ExxonMobil industrial plant in the shadow of the Wastewater Treatment Plant on the banks of the Newtown Creek Superfund site.
There are few locations that so uniquely capture the living dichotomy of Greenpoint.
For decades, Greenpoint has evolved at the nexus of post-industrialization and artistic community where converted warehouses host art exhibitions and creatives could find the space they need to experiment and thrive. And while 2025’s Greenpoint looks vastly different compared to 2010’s Greenpoint, this neighborhood is very much still an ecologically and artistically fertile landscape, maintained and championed by organizations like NOoSPHERE and Kingsland Wildflowers.
Now, a new player enters the arena: the Gateway to Greenpoint. As part of the long-term upgrades to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant, the NYC Department of Environmental Protection committed to creating new community amenities for Greenpoint residents, the Gateway to Greenpoint will transform a 12,000-square-foot city-owned lot at Greenpoint and Kingsland Avenues — neighboring both Kingsland Wildflowers, NOoSPHERE Arts — into a publicly accessible green space that provides both environmental and educational benefits.
The $1.9M project broke ground on October 31st, 2025. Once completed, the Gateway to Greenpoint will provide passive recreation space, large planting beds with native plant species, shade trees, benches, tables and chairs, and educational signage. The site is an important link from bus and bike routes on Greenpoint Avenue to DEP’s Nature Walk, the half-mile public waterfront esplanade along Whale Creek and Newtown Creek, as well as the Kingsland Wildflowers green roof.
Plus, the environmental infrastructure of the Gateway to Greenpoint will improve air quality, capture stormwater, protect open space, and help improve biodiversity along Newtown Creek, all of which aligns perfectly with the shared ethos and respective missions of Kingsland Wildflowers and NOoSPHERE Arts: environmental sustainability and community benefit, multidisciplinary experiences at the nexus of art and eco-awareness.
If Greenpoint has taught us anything, it’s that change is inevitable. But energy flows where attention goes and time and time again, spaces once written off as wasteland can bloom again. With NOoSPHERE and Kingsland Wildflowers leading the way — and the Gateway to Greenpoint opening its doors — this corner of our neighborhood stands as living proof that when art, science, and community share the same rooftop, the future looks a little greener.
Greenpointers recently sat down with Founding Artistic Director and ED, Sol Kjøk, and Deputy Director, Daniela Holban to learn a bit more about the last 15 years, the next 15 years, and beyond.
Greenpointers: Fifteen years is a remarkable milestone, congratulations! Tell us about the celebration?
NOoSPHERE: It was a lovely evening. We started out on our Sunset Stage on the roofs, where street dancers Shem, Stein and Blank from It’s Showtime New York (ISTNY) performed a site-specific act titled Skyline against the setting sun. As darkness fell, Italian artist duo Patera & Perego presented on our huge outdoor movie screen a live video set that included mediated footage from NOoSPHERE Arts events from prior years. Then we descended to the art studio downstairs for speeches and shoutouts to our many contributors over the years; a silent auction of paintings donated by artists we have exhibited, and a delicious dinner prepared with love on site, complete with a food altar honoring Earth.
The evening’s centerpiece was a stunning acrobatic act by hair-hanger contortionist Shipra ‘Shipwreck’ Saraogi suspended from the sky-high ceiling with live musical accompaniment by Ellena Philllips (Harp & Vocals); Jonathon Keeling (Sound Mixing); and veteran NOoSPHERE Arts musician Katy Gunn on her magic violin. The night concluded with everybody getting down under the disco ball to festive tunes by DJ Till Later.
Our 15th Anniversary soirée also marked the reveal of our new nickname and logo: Like the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), NOoSPHERE Arts also has a short form: Noo Arts.
What does this milestone mean for you?
On this special occasion, it felt meaningful to feature a range of artists who have been with us throughout this past decade and a half: from Norwegian painters who first exhibited with us in NOoSPHERE Arts’ original storefront gallery on the LES fifteen years ago, to quintessential New Yorker dancers from our longtime collaboration partner ISTNY, and international artists of many stripes coming our way through the Mothership NYC collective. All of these talented folks are now part of a vibrant and growing circle uniting people from multiple backgrounds, cultures, and ethnic origins.
For me personally, it was moving to reflect on the fact that what I started with zero forethought as a temporary initiative meant to last only a couple of months has grown into a viable entity that so many fine folks invest their time and talent in because they find our community a source of meaning and joy.
When you look back, what are some of the moments (or decisions? or partnerships?) that you think have come to best define NOoSPHERE’s unique identity?
The first key moment was my being offered access to a storefront on the Lower East Side to exhibit my paintings back in 2010. Taking a spontaneous leap, I seized this opportunity to create a showcase in New York City for international artist peers: I turned the space into a multidisciplinary gallery for art from elsewhere that operated in Manhattan for five years.
The second key turning point came in 2014, when I started using a raw factory loft in a former ExxonMobil complex in Greenpoint as my painting studio. Located in NYC’s most polluted neighborhood on the bank of Superfund site Newtown Creek next to the iconic Digester Eggs of the city’s largest wastewater treatment facility, the place is an epicenter of multiple ecological disasters. And yet, this once inhospitable part of industrial Brooklyn has now become a nature sanctuary: Two years after my arrival, the Kingsland Wildflowers community project came about on the roofs above my painting studio with a simple but powerful idea: to transform an empty rooftop into a green space filled with plants, insects, and wildlife to help support biodiversity in an urban context.
This one-of-a-kind setting serves as a potent reminder of humankind’s simultaneous capacity for destruction and regeneration. With its sweeping views of the city skyline, it also makes for extraordinary performance arenas. And so, I decided to bring the nonprofit back to Greenpoint, my home turf for more than 25 years. Ours is a neighborhood of many artists, but we have few venues for experimental, cross-field collaborations, so NOoSPHERE Arts fills a need as a multidisciplinary cultural center. Second, given our unique location, it made sense to reorient the nonprofit’s main focus towards art addressing humans’ place on Earth: I believe the emotional spark and visceral alchemy that only art brings about is more effective than lectures. And so, NOoSPHERE Arts officially joined the coalition of community organizations jointly running the Kingsland Wildflowers eco-initiative as its Arts Partner in 2018.
A third key moment was my encounter with Daniela Holban in 2019, when she was head curator at an arts venture that represented my paintings. Impressed with her can-do attitude and skills, I invited her onboard to curate an ambitious visual arts exhibition for our Kingsland Wildflowers Festival in September of 2019. With shared ideas about art, spirituality, eco-awareness, and community building, we both saw potential in expanding our collaboration. Over the next five years, Daniela became increasingly involved in the organization, officially earning the title of Deputy Director two years ago. At this point, she and I are running the organization together, with invaluable assistance from a team of professionals whose backgrounds span the arts and science, as well as multiple community helpers generously volunteering their time.
A fourth important factor was the pandemic. With access to vast and unique outdoor spaces, NOoSPHERE Arts was one of the first and few NYC arts organizations able to offer live performance during that fraught summer of 2020. Thanks to the extraordinary burst of public arts funding post-pandemic, we obtained our first substantial NYSCA grant, which finally enabled me to hire paid help and direct our organization onto a more sustainable course.
Many artist-run spaces come and go in much fewer than 15 years. How have you managed to keep people engaged and invested over time? What advice would you have for someone aspiring to build something similar either as a 501c3 or artist community?
Personally, I have started and directed both types of entities: Mothership NYC, which I founded in 2005, is a fully artist-run peer community. NOoSPHERE Arts was initiated by an artist, but at this point, we also have hands from other fields on deck: Our Deputy Director has over 17 years of professional experience in art institutions, museums, and nonprofits. Whether fully artist-led or co-run with pros with complementary skill sets, managing an arts organization takes grit, persistence, and a willingness to sacrifice personal time: Daniela and I are both dogged workers who won’t rest until all tasks are done. So, a word of warning if you want to start a nonprofit: the amount of paperwork required to operate a 501c3 is staggering!
But most importantly, both enterprises are fueled by passion: a Norwegian-born painter, I came to NYC many years ago with a dream to live and create among other artists drawn to the bright lights of this city from all over the world. This is now my everyday reality. I believe what keeps other people invested in our family firm is a similar sense of marvel, purpose, and community: We are doing this for the joy of creating magic together. Plus, in our extraordinary location in an urban nature sanctuary that brings life back to an environmentally challenged neighborhood, we are uniquely poised to help raise eco-awareness. In this time of widespread climate doom, we want people to walk away with the knowledge that we already have solutions that work — there is still time to right our wayward Spaceship Earth!
Of course, Greenpoint has changed tremendously over the last 15 years. How are you feeling about the changes of the neighborhood? How have the changes affected you?
I view life as a playful, collaborative dance energized by creativity and the constant emergence of novelty. And so, resisting or rueing change is a losing battle. I am grateful that I landed in Greenpoint back in the late nineties, when it was still possible for artists to find warehouses to convert into live-work spaces. Thanks to our generous patron Broadway Stages, who owns the building where NOoSPHERE Arts is headquartered, we are blessed with access to a precious resource most NYC artists fight very hard for: space to create. We see it as our responsibility to share this bounty by inviting in fellow creatives and offering stages for talent to shine. At a time where the barrier to entry keeps rising, this is our contribution to keeping our beloved New York a city for artists.
What do you hope the next fifteen years look like…for NOoSPHERE, for Greenpoint, for the planet, and for collaborating artists?
Like our neighborhood, NOoSPHERE Arts has gone through many transformations: when I spontaneously leapt at the opportunity to create a series of exhibits in Manhattan back in 2010, I had no idea I’d still be running a nonprofit fifteen years later. The organization in its current form is quite different from how it all started; NOoSPHERE Arts has organically grown and evolved as new opportunities and partnering organizations presented themselves along the way. Some past and current collaborators that have helped make NOoSPHERE Arts what we are today include our in-house partners in the Kingsland Wildflowers @ Broadway Stages initiative, i.e. Newtown Creek Alliance and landscape designer Alive Structures; along with my Greenpoint arts collective Mothership NYC; the artist-run dance platform CreateART; Semillas Collective; international eco-scholar Fritjof Capra; It’s Showtime New York; Ankhlave Arts Alliance; Hivewild; New Inc; Indelible Dance; Art Switch Foundation, and many more.
I am foreseeing that our network of partnering organizations will keep expanding. This will allow us to amplify NOoSPHERE Arts’ year-round programming and provide more residency opportunities for artists, scientists and other creatives, along with even larger-scale interdisciplinary co-productions. Knowing that new relationships come with emergent properties, I can’t fully predict what and where we may be fifteen years from now. But I trust that NOoSPHERE Arts will keep growing stronger and more resourceful, offering opportunities to more artists and a welcoming Third Place for Greenpointers of all stripes to come together. Collaboration is key: when artists, staff, partners, patrons, and the local community work together, we have the power to be the change we want to see in the world.