Occupying Intellectual Space & performing the COMMONS
under the U.S. Congress copyrighted transmedia script and PPAC Art License
I move in the liminal—where art meets resistance, where the white cube spills into the street, where cultural work becomes collective ritual. For over two decades, I’ve curated exhibitions, built institutions, and convened conversations that don’t merely showcase art—they shift perception, recalibrate systems, and make space for new ways of being.
Born in Bulgaria, shaped by America, my practice is a cartography of thresholds. The experience of migration—dislocation, reinvention, return—has etched itself into my methodology. Geography became poetics. Belonging, an ongoing composition.
My early formation unfolded inside the charged experimental corridors of PS1 and the Clocktower. There, I learned to read culture as code—curating not as arrangement but as translation, between artist and public, between institution and community. These were not neutral spaces, but sites of provocation, where the tremors of the avant-garde met the pulse of the political.
In 2001, I founded Flux Digital Arts Space in the Bronx, an intervention against the false binary of art and technology. There, young creators from Harlem and the Bronx co-authored new languages with global artists. We transformed after-school programs into studios of resistance, and digital tools into bridges across generations and geographies. Inequity was not simply critiqued—it was repurposed as raw material for emancipatory imagination.
Later, at Redhouse Arts Center in Syracuse, I wove an ecosystem that spanned theater, visual art, radio, education, and community engagement. A black box became a portal. Every residency, every youth-led initiative, every broadcast, was part of an integrated choreography—where nothing was peripheral, and everything could be a catalyst.
From 2013 to 2024, I led Pro Arts Gallery & Commons in Oakland through its most radical transformation. It became a site of experimentation and insurgency—twelve exhibitions each year as twelve open questions, twelve communal breaths. We replaced the fixed gaze of the gallery with a shifting commons. The city itself became both collaborator and canvas.
During Oakland’s uprisings, Pro Arts responded not with distance, but with deep presence. We launched a free poster press—activating our printers for the movement, offering images as tools for collective voice. A Town Fridge appeared in the gallery, a sculpture of mutual aid where nourishment met aesthetics. Our mission stretched beyond the institution’s walls, evolving into a cultural nerve center, a civic pulse point where art and resistance coalesced.
In The New Situationists (2017), I traced the living lineage of the French avant-garde through Bay Area bodies and voices. Part archival séance, part contemporary reckoning, the exhibition revealed radical art not as artifact but as afterlife—forever returning, forever unfinished.
With Pro Arts Press, publishing became a practice of embodiment, a means of making thought public. Grant writing transformed into poetic structure; development into narrative strategy. Sustainability was not an aspiration—it was the blueprint of our becoming.
As a producer, I move between the delicate and the monumental. I specialize in the logistics of the improbable: turning vision into scaffolding, ideas into infrastructures. With Art Agency Reframed, I mentor artists and institutions toward models that privilege resonance over reach, transformation over transaction.
I work where the questions are most urgent. What is the Value of our Labor? How do we build art economies of care? What is cultural labor worth in a system designed to forget its value? My work doesn’t just ask—it builds.
Pro Arts Commons remains my most radical experiment: an attempt to redesign the relationship between value, art, and labor. In partnership with Dadais Americanus, we authored Performing Pro Arts COMMONS, a living script and license for cultural co-creation. Bureaucracy became ritual. Contracts became spells.
In 2024, my project NO EXIT: Duality is Overrated, created during my residency at SCOPE Berlin, dissolved the boundaries between protest and performance, intuition and theory, academic text and divination. It was an invitation to collapse false binaries—and to find clarity inside the blur.
I’ve written across these ideas in Reframing the Value of Art and Art Labor in the Context of a Sharing Economy and The Commons: Of Friends and Lovers (with Marc Herbst). My texts are not just arguments—they are blueprints, vessels, invitations.
I’ve worked across Oakland, Sofia, Berlin, New York, San Francisco—forever in pursuit of the post-post-gallery: a space beyond extractive frameworks, where cultural work is shared, not sold; where art lives not on walls, but in worlds.
Sometimes you’ll find me in Sunnyside, cards in hand, casting readings for cities, for futures, for the soul of our shared entanglements. That, too, is part of the work: tending to what’s emerging, listening for the murmurs beneath collapse.
In a world built on scarcity, I cultivate abundance. In a culture trained on competition, I build commons. And in the tender interval between what has ended and what is still forming—I make space for transformation.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
- Executive Leadership & Organizational Strategy
- Community Engagement & Participatory Programming
- Curatorial Practice & Public Art Commissions
- Fundraising & Capital Campaigns
- Cultural Equity & Justice-Driven Leadership
- Interdisciplinary Exhibitions & Artist Residencies
- Public Pedagogy & Collaborative Platforms
- International Partnerships & Cultural Diplomacy
- Nonprofit Growth & Governance
ART AGENCY REFRAMED
Art Agency Reframed is a living project by Natalia Ivanova—a post-gallery, labor union, producing agency, and decentralized network rolled into one. Part consultancy, part creative engine, part radical support structure. With 20+ years in the field, I offer coaching, advising, and strategic direction to artists, spaces, and institutions ready to do things differently.
This is not just about art—it’s about infrastructure. About power, sustainability, and survival in the creative economy.
At the core is one question: How do we value artistic labor?
And what does fair exchange really look like in a so-called sharing economy?
I work to reframe sustainability—not as endurance, but as reciprocity.
Not as hustle, but as alignment.
Not as extraction, but as care.
This is art meets systems change.
FOCUS
Artist Empowerment & Representation
Advocating for fair labor practices and providing access to tools, networks, and platforms that support sustainable creative production.
Emerging Artist Integration
Bridging the gap between recent art school graduates and the professional art world by facilitating access to markets, employment, and mentorship.
Development & Resource Generation
Offering strategic support in fundraising, grant and proposal writing, and resource development for individual artists and cultural organizations.
Strategic & Market Positioning
Cultivating partnerships across emerging markets while providing expertise in branding, marketing, and public relations for artists and sites of production and distribution.
Financial & Legal Infrastructure
Delivering services in accounting, tax preparation, financial literacy, and advising on intellectual property, copyright, patent law, and smart contract applications.
Sales & Collections Management
Facilitating both primary and secondary market sales, while managing collections and art assets with integrity and market insight.
Web3 & Economic Alternatives
Exploring blockchain technologies, alternative currencies, and decentralized economic models to expand agency and access in the art world.
The Commons & Collective Futures
Supporting self-organizing practices, artist-led governance, and the development of autonomous decentralized organizations (DAOs) grounded in the principles of the cultural commons.