1977 - 2019
Martin Roth
martinroth.org
In the early winter of 2002, a few short months after our world had been turned upside down by 9/11, HiArt! took over a studio in the still rather run down Starrett Lehigh building. The studio was the former home of White Box's Annex, and Juan Puntes still had a lot of art stored in the back room.
One day, a very short time after we moved in, White Box’s intern, a thin, rather fragile looking, young man, came into our studio to move some of art out for Juan. We were in the middle of teaching, so we didn’t pay much attention.
An hour later the “mover” returned to ask if he could intern for us as well, and so it happened that a 24 year-old Martin Roth, became HiArt!’s first intern.
Martin understood and loved children in such a profound way. Overlooking the Hudson, our HiArt! land was one of of infinite possibilities. There were extraordinary young artists, beautiful operas, the newly burgeoning Chelsea and a feeling of unmitigated hopefulness.
Christine Frerichs and I would often fret that Martin looked run-down, that he wasn’t feeling well - we did at some point find out that he had been in a serious accident as a teenager - we worried about this girlfriend or that, and that he was bartering art to pay his doctor because he didn’t have enough money, but whatever the worries and mysteries of life with Martin were, he was always present and his “real" life never interfered with his devotion to children.
As HiArt! grew - and Martin grew up - he began teaching his own classes: workshops that rocked the minds of his students forever.
There is a beautiful picture that I have yet to rediscover - but it’s somewhere - of Martin and Joanna Penna dressed as Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo teaching a Holiday Camp at the Guggenheim Museum.
I seem to remember that Martin had a pillow under his shirt to look more Diegoish. I also remember Adam Caplan as a young Martin Roth acolyte printing up his own fake dollars, and Zoë Greenbaum working on wild installations in Martin’s sculpture and installations workshop.
These were simply unspeakably beautiful and creative days that changed the lives of so many children, and, frankly, of all of us.
ZOË GREENBAUM as a student in Martin Roth’s Installation class at HiArt! & TimeIn’s studio in the Starrett Lehigh Building, 2005.
Throughout everything, Martin was making art…
…wonderful, price-sticker obsessed, politically-conscious art that called out a late-capitalist consumerist economy with tongue-in-cheek humor, inspiring all of us to keep on keeping on.
With the blessing of Sharon Dunn at the DOE, 30 PK and K students from PS 241 in Harlem began a new life at the center of the art world.
On October 3, 2006 Time In began. If there were ever a project made to order for someone, Time In was it for Martin. It combined his love of children, his inordinate generosity of spirt, his incredible willingness to work selflessly, and his commitment to kindness and generosity as the antidotes to prejudice, racism and classism.
The kids were bused out of school every week to HiArt! In the middle of their school day every week. They came either to the studio or they would meet us at galleries or museums. They had no clue that every NYC public school student wasn’t doing exactly the same thing.
Time In’s tireless little band was made up of Martin, Christine Frerichs, Sydney Chastain-Chapman (Navarro), Danielle Garcia, Jazzminh Moore and a few friends and workers who had not the least doubt that we really could change the world.
Everything that we had cut our teeth on in HiArt! was now poured into making this extraordinary, interdisciplinary arts-immersive experience into a normal part of the school day for some of the city’s most vulnerable children.
Martin and Becky Brown preparing for Time In’s residency at Chashama on East 43rd Street
Time In gave meaning to all of our lives, not just kids’ lives.
Martin believed in all of our abilities to nurture, to transform, to make things grow and to quietly tear away the boundaries that bind our imagination - Yes, of course you can plant seeds in a Persian rug. Because when our imaginations assume their rightful power, gardens will grow.
Martin’s ducklings at Hunter, learning how to comport themselves in the world,
are a very short step away from the nurturing that was at the core of Time In.
“And as I reflect on how Martin’s work became involved with growth, nurturing, performance and transformation, I realize just how much his many years at HiArt! and Time In were an integral part of that shift.”
This website and the work of Time In, our continued struggle to create a world,
as the beautiful Alice Coote so rightly said, of love and imagination,
is dedicated to the memory of Martin Roth.
Working together with Linda Norden, Penny Aaron and Josie Nash, we look forward to to creating a fund in memory of Martin to ensure that there will always be a way to support those artists who, like Martin, choose to make a special home for themselves in the garden of Time In.
Special thanks to our designer and developer, Náyade Bermúdez Brito of Studio La Playa, whose extraordinary generosity brought this beautiful website to life, and to Catchafire and The New York Community Trust without whom we would never have had Náyade in our corner.
