FRANKLIN FURNACE IN TIME

April 1976
 Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is founded to serve artists who choose publishing as a democratic artistic medium and who were not being supported by existing artistic organizations.

September 1976
Franklin Furnace gets funding of its programs from both the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

June 1979
Exhibition of In the Shadow of Duchamp: The Photomechanical Revolution and the Artist's Book at the Grolier Club, New York City. Works selected by Weston J. Naef and Martha Wilson.

September 1979 - June 1980
 Exhibition of Page as Alternative Space (1909-1980) with curators Clive Phillpot, Charles Henri Ford, Jon Hendricks and Barbara Moore, and Ingrid Sischy. This exhibition inaugurated Franklin Furnace's commitment to presenting the historical antecedents of the contemporary artists' book publishing movement.

February 1981
Eric Bogosian’s first performance in New York, “Men Inside,” is presented by Franklin Furnace.

August 1983
 Franklin Furnace wins an Advancement Grant from the NEA to promote institutional stability through development and publicity plans.

October 1983
Exhibition of Cubist Prints/Cubist Books begins national tour at Franklin Furnace, making stops at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Center for the Fine Arts, Miami; The Marian Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; and Galerie Berggruen, Paris, France.

February 1984
Franklin Furnace is reprimanded by the NEA and dropped by several corporate sources for presenting Carnival Knowledge, an exhibition and performance extravaganza that questioned if there can be such a thing as "feminist pornography." Annie Sprinkle makes her debut as an artist during the performance of “Deep Inside Porn Stars.”

May 1985
Franklin Furnace creates its Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, which allows emerging artists to produce major work in New York. The panel selects three of the "NEA Four" artists before they were so identified (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck) along with many others who have gone on to change the world: Papo Colo, Kaylynn Two Trees Sullivan, William Pope.L, Jennifer Miller, Andrea Fraser, Peggy Pettitt, Kim Irwin, Keith Antar Mason, Murray Hill, Pamela Sneed, Tanya Barfield, Deborah Edmeades, Patty Chang, and Stanya Kahn, and others. The Fund has been supported by Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation.

September 1985
Franklin Furnace initiates its Sequential Art for Kids education program, which places professional artist bookmakers, performers, photographers, filmmakers, animators and videographers in New York City public schools.

June 1986
With Lily Tomlin presiding, Franklin Furnace celebrates its 10th birthday with the Arties Awards to avant-garde achievers: Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Richard Foreman, Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, Allan Kaprow, The Kipper Kids, Lydia Lunch, Lisa Lyon, The Mastfor II Co, Leo Lionni, F. T. Marinetti, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, Pat Oleszko, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Michael Smith, Redy Story, William Wegman and Man Ray, Paul Zaloom.

February 1987
Andy Warhol dies after serving on Franklin Furnace's Board of Directors for 21 days.

October 1987
Celebration of Marcel Duchamp's 100th birthday with a performance art extravaganza, The Avant-Garde Breaks Into Midtown, inaugurating the Equitable Center's new state-of-the-art auditorium.

February 1988
Franklin Furnace and Thought Music produce Teenytown, a multimedia performance by Jessica Hagedorn, Laurie Carlos and Robbie McCauley with film by John Woo and choreography by Jawole Willa Jo Zolar, which examines how racism is embedded in popular culture and entertainment.

February 1989
Exhibition of The Avant-Garde Book: 1900-1945 opens, containing seldom seen Eastern European examples of avant-garde works. John Wilson's troupe reenacts Dada performance for a benefit evening.

April 1990
Governor Mario Cuomo halves the budget of NYSCA. Franklin Furnace's NYSCA funding drops from $144,000 to $40,000 in one year.

May 1990
The New York City Fire Department closes Franklin Furnace's performance space in response to a call claiming Franklin Furnace is an "illegal social club."

June 1990
Franklin Furnace is demonized for presenting Karen Finley's installation, A Woman's Life Isn't Worth Much. During the Summer of 1990, inquiries and audits are conducted by the Internal Revenue Service, the State Comptroller of New York and at the request of Senator Jesse Helms, the General Accounting Office.

July 1990
Franklin Furnace refuses to limit the expression of artists it presents and funds, holding Franklin Furnace Fights for First Amendment Rights at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, with an all-star cast including Eric Bogosian, Cee Scott Brown, Karen Finley, Allan Ginsburg, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, The Guerrilla Girls, Frank Maya, Pauline Oliveros and IONE, Nicky Paraiso and Jessica Hagedorn, RENO, Annie Sprinkle, Lynne Tillman, Diane Torr, and Jawole Willa Jo Zolar.

September 1990-June 1991
Franklin Furnace mounts its first performance season "in exile" at Judson Memorial Church, cradle of experimentation in the 70s.

October 1991
The Board of Directors makes the decision to transfer Franklin Furnace's collecting, cataloguing, and conservation responsibilities to another public institution in order to "do the right thing" for the care of the field it helped to create.

January 1992
Franklin Furnace's Visual Artists Organizations grant from the NEA is rescinded by the National Council because of the sexually explicit content of a 1991 performance by Scarlet O. The Peter Norton Family Foundation replaces this $25,000 grant. Eric Bogosian's benefit concert for Franklin Furnace fills every seat in Cooper Union's Great Hall.
May 1992
Franklin Furnace purchases its historic Italianate loft in TriBeCa with proceeds from a 15th Anniversary Art Sale mounted at Marian Goodman Gallery.
June 1992
Franklin Furnace presents "Too Shocking To Show" at The Brooklyn Museum with performances by Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Sapphire and Scarlet O, with introductory remarks by Robert T. Buck and Carole S. Vance.

October 1993
Fluxus: A Conceptual Country organized by curator Estera Milman begins international tour at Franklin Furnace.
November 1993
 The Museum of Modern Art acquires Franklin Furnace's collection of artists' books published internationally after 1960, the largest in the U.S., to form the Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace/Artist Book Collection.

September 1995
Challenge Grant awarded by the NEA. Martha Wilson, Founding Director, realizes Franklin Furnace will never be remembered for its renovated real estate, but for the importance of its program, and that the Capital campaign is raising money for the wrong reasons.

October 1996
In the Flow: Alternate Authoring Strategies, the twentieth anniversary, and final, exhibition in the Franklin Street loft space, brings together a selection of work that treats content as flowing information rather than property.

February 1997
Franklin Furnace launches its website, www.franklinfurnace.org, as the Board determines that access to freedom of expression and a broader audience for emerging artists through new media will be a prime program focus.
September 1997
Sale of Franklin Furnace's TriBeCa loft; Cash Reserve Account established with the proceeds, matching the NEA Challenge Grant.
January 1998
Franklin Furnace's first netcasting season of ten artists is mounted in collaboration with Pseudo.com and documented with the publication of Franklin Furnace's first CD-Rom published in collaboration with Parsons School of Design.

March 1998
Franklin Furnace moves to 45 John Street, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan.
August 1998
Franklin Furnace is invited to join the Conceptual and Intermedia Arts Online (CIAO) consortium to help develop electronic and vocabulary standards for the cataloguing and accessibility of contemporary avant-garde works. CIAO is a collaborative project designed to create networked access to educational and scholarly material on the broad theme of conceptual and intermedia art. Members include: Berkley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive @ The University of California; Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; National Gallery of Canada; University of Iowa Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts; and The Walker Art Center.
September 1998 - July 1999
 Franklin Furnace's second netcasting season with Pseudo.com, The Future of the Present, presents 22 artists.

August 1999
CIAO welcomes as new members: The Tate Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Electronic Café International, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Performance Art Festival Archives, and Rhizome.org.

January to December 2000
 The Future of the Present 2000 is redesigned as a residency program in collaboration with Parsons School of Design in order to give artists access to the full range of digital tools. Franklin Furnace's website receives 79,000 hits per month.

January to November 2001
Franklin Furnace's 25th Anniversary Season is saluted by a MoMA library exhibition, The Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport site, a special issue of TDR, Artform magazine, and Rhizome Remix at Galapagos Celebrating Franklin Furnace's 25th Anniversary.

Franklin Furnace makes its $25,000, 25th anniversary McMartha award to artist/architect Kyong Park for his "Adamah" project in Detroit, a vision of a new society built upon the xeric urban space left as the affluent population moved out of downtown to the suburbs.

July 2004
On July 15, 2004, Franklin Furnace applies for the first time to the National Endowment for the Humanities to publish its first ten years of event records online in order to embed the value of ephemeral art practice in art and cultural history.

October 2004
On October 1, 2004 Franklin Furnace moves from the financial district to 80 Arts--The James E. Davis Arts Building in the BAM cultural district at 80 Hanson Place in Brooklyn. Collegial organizations in the building include Bomb magazine and Bang on a Can music festival.

November 2004
Franklin Furnace celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and announces its 2005 Fund for Performance Art Awards in Celebration of the Jerome Hill Centennial (founder of Jerome Foundation in St. Paul, MN) at SculptureCenter, Long Island City.  Performances by 2004-05 awardees Gary Corbin, Nicolas Dumit Estevez, and Melissa Madden Grey and Lance Horne are complemented by video of works by awardees Cave Dogs, Ex.Pgirl, Red Dive, and Alexander Komlosi. These artists were selected in June, 2004, by peer panel review of 300 proposals received from around the world.

November 2004 - January 2005
An exhibit of artists' books entitled "The C-Series, Artists' books & Collective Action," is mounted at The Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York.  Curated by Courtney J. Martin, these works were selected from among the third, or "C" copies of artists' books returned to Franklin Furnace after its collection of artists' books published internationally after 1960, the largest in the United States, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1993. A symposium on Day Without Art, December 1, 2004, includes presentations by artists Jon Hendricks, Conrad Gleber, Edmonia Lewis and Clarissa Sligh.

May 2005
 Franklin Furnace holds an Alumn Art Sale at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, raising over $60,000 for its programs by selling works of art by artists who got their start at Franklin Furnace.

June 2005
 The History of Disappearance, an exhibition drawn from the archives of Franklin Furnace, opens at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK.  This major exhibition includes a symposium on June 18 and concluded on September 3, 2005, with performances by Billy Curmano, Andrea Fraser, Teh-Ching Hsieh, and William Pope.L.

April 2006
The Future of the Present artists WOOLOO PRODUCTIONS: Martin Rosengaard & Sixten Kai Nielsen’s “AsylumNYC” is the centerpiece of Franklin Furnace’s 30 th anniversary celebration at White Box in Chelsea. “AsylumNYC” targets the challenge faced by artists interested in working in the United States . On Monday April 24, 2006, ten young artists from ten different countries arrive in New York to apply for “creative asylum” in White Box in Chelsea. The gallery is converted into a “detention center,” and the artists are not permitted to leave the premises for the rest of the week. One talented artist, Dusanka Komnenic, is selected to receive free help from an immigration lawyer to apply for an O-1 Visa for “extraordinary ability in the field of arts.” If successful, she will earn the privilege to remain legally in the United States for three years.

May 2006 Franklin Furnace receives notification of $124,030 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-year grant to digitize and publish on the Internet records of performances, installations, exhibits and other events produced by the organization during its first ten years. This project will create electronic access to what are now the only remaining artifacts of these singular works of social, political and cultural expression.

July 2006 ARTstor and Franklin Furnace announce a collaboration agreement, ARTstor’s first with an “alternative space.” Digital images are fast replacing slides and slide projectors in the teaching of art and art history. To respond to these changes, Franklin Furnace will work with ARTstor to digitize and distribute images and documentation of events presented and produced by Franklin Furnace, with the goal of embedding the value of ephemeral practice into art and cultural history.

February 2007
Franklin Furnace celebrates ten years as a virtual institution!