studioELL ANTI-STATEMENT
studioELL does not have a mission or vision statement. We are not here to justify our existence to institutions. We are a shifting commons where art, pedagogy and community entangle — a space for critical discourse, collective care and ongoing refusal.
Since 2015 studioELL has been a gathering ground — part critique, part studio visit, part commons. We create hybrid spaces, online and in person, where artists meet to make, question and reimagine.
We operate under Fractured Atlas only as a tactic of survival in a system that demands legitimacy — a necessary compromise we refuse to let define us.
What we value cannot be measured. Years of courses and residencies have not produced numbers but constellations — a web of artists sustained by care, solidarity and shared knowledge.
We are artists and citizens. We believe art belongs to all, not a select few. We insist that democracy is lived, not managed. We blur the line between fine art and the noise of everyday life. We remain free from corporate sponsorship and funding restraints.
WHAT WE DO
We radicalize learning by refusing hierarchies. We adapt and subvert frameworks to create spaces for critique, development and solidarity. Our work is artistic — cultivating new ideas. It is communal — connecting people through dialogue. It is civic and social — carrying pedagogy beyond institutions into libraries, community centers and streets.
Our reach is both local and global, always grounded in the communities where artists live and work. Our classrooms are porous, our residencies blur into daily life.
In the face of rising tuition, shrinking arts funding and collapsing institutions, studioELL insists on another way: education as commons, art as care, learning as collective endeavor, community as refusal and revolutionary love as practice.
HISTORY
studioELL began in the summer of 2015 in London as an extension of galleryELL — a transient gallery founded in 2008 in Brooklyn by artist and curator john ros. galleryELL was created as a space for artists who were pushed to the margins of New York’s art world, working inside its culture while challenging its conventions. When galleryELL closed in 2016, the focus shifted toward education, carrying forward the same refusal of dominance and opening new possibilities for community-based studio learning.
In 2024 studioELL relocated its base to Eastern Connecticut. That same year, the name was registered as a trademark — not to claim ownership but as an art project in itself, a critique of the systems that demand legitimacy through bureaucracy. The trademark became a way to expose how language, identity and collective practice are captured by state and market logics, and at the same time a way to shield a commons from those very forces.
The name “ell” carries layered meaning. In architecture, an ell is an extension built at a right angle — connected but distinct, a hinge for reimagining space. Historically, an ell was also a measure of length taken from the breadth of one’s arms — a reminder that bodies, not institutions, have always been the first measure. These meanings echo through studioELL — a continual building from what exists, an insistence on autonomy and adaptability. They live in practice and in collective care that refuses capture.