Making Love: Times Square Arts installation

Making Love, an installation presented by Powerhouse Arts and Times Square Arts, celebrates love, craft, and the makers of New York City.

The installation foregrounds the artistry of fabricators, often working behind the scenes to bring our city’s creative endeavors to life. Inspired by paper peep shows and theatrical set design, Making Love takes the form of a larger-than-life carousel book—a three-dimensional pop-up that opens into an immersive, multidimensional story with a circular narrative. Visitors are invited to step inside and move through a sequence of four distinct scenes that represent a crossroads of experiences and cityscapes, where one might encounter love—at a botanical garden, a canal, or even a corner bodega. Visitors are encouraged to move through the structure, linger within each vignette, and, in one scene, take away an artist-designed love note.

Each quadrant of Making Love highlights a distinct fabrication process, illustrating how artists’ concepts are translated into immersive, physical environments. Hand-painted murals, Dürer-inspired drawings reproduced at large scale, and customized bodega merchandise were produced in the Digital Print Lab at Powerhouse Arts using UV printing on Dibond panels. Within the bodega scene, many of the items on display were individually designed and fabricated by hand, including sewn food items that replicate familiar products through careful construction and detail. These hand-crafted elements are presented alongside sculptural components across all four quadrants—including trellises, hedges, proscenium frames, canoes, and a bodega counter—to create layered spaces that visitors can experience from within. Together, these techniques emphasize the collaboration between artists and fabricators, highlighting the care, skill, and processes that bring each scene to life.

Featuring the work of artists and Powerhouse fabricators Lisa D. Archigian, Kelsey Breen, Nellie Davis, Cythali Sapuis, and Jacqueline Veliz, Making Love celebrates not only romance, but love as labor, craft, and collective creation.

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Artist Bios:

Cythali Sapuis is a multidisciplinary artist and spatial designer based in New York. Her practice exists at the intersection of digital media, installation, and narrative environments, with a focus on how space functions as both a physical and emotional structure. Her work has been featured in recent publications including Vogue and Office Magazine, and she has contributed spatial design work to projects at the Times Center and the Brooklyn Museum. Through immersive and experiential design, Cythali continues to explore new ways of engaging audiences across digital and physical spaces.

‍Jacqueline Veliz (she/her) is a Mexican and Guatemalan multidisciplinary artist and NYC native working with ceramics, textiles, puppetry, and repurposed materials. Her practice explores play, grief, and the fantastical as liberatory strategies, drawing from cultural memory, Catholic ritual, and the visual and cultural density of New York City. Veliz has exhibited work throughout New York City and Atlanta, and serves Brooklyn and NYC as the Public Programs Manager at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Her go-to deli order is a philly cheesesteak on a roll with NY kettle jalapeño chips.

‍Kelsey Breenis a Brooklyn-based ceramics and graphics artist whose work explores memory, material, and the influence of environment on inner experience. Working across clay, painting, and graphic forms, her practice emphasizes tactility and visual fragmentation. Alongside her studio practice, Breen works as a Public Art Production Coordinator at Powerhouse Arts and has previously supported public art and cultural projects for institutions including Creative Time, Brooklyn Museum, and the MTA.

‍Lisa D. Archigian is an artist, educator, and librarian from the Bronx. As a teaching artist, Lisa is trained in best practices for working with students with disabilities, using art as a pathway to critical thinking and social emotional learning (SEL), and is certified to provide mental health first aid to youth. She earned an MLS from Queens College, CUNY, specializing in Children’s and Young Adult Services in the Public Library. Often dealing with narratives of physical and mental space, her paintings and prints have appeared in exhibitions in New York;  Los Angeles; and Kyoto, Japan, where several of her woodcut prints are held in the collection of the Kyoto International Woodprint Association. Her work as an illustrator has been praised by Publisher’s Weekly and Rain Taxi Review. Lisa serves as MGC Community Print Studio Director at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Her favorite deli order is a buttered roll, ginger ale, and any chip that turns her fingers orange.

‍Nellie Davis has a B.A. from Grinnell College in Russian. She has been working in NYC as a costumer, puppet builder, printmaker, seamstress, baker, and arts fabricator since 1999. Her artwork is drawn, fabric sculpture, paper sculpture, and acrylic paintings focusing on nature, colonization, and destruction. Nellie is currently working as a printmaker and fabricator at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where she collaborates to create work with artists from all over the world.