 As the art market becomes more selective and artists look for new ways to reach collectors, Tom Christopher is opening a different kind of door. After more than four decades painting New York City, Christopher has opened Lift Trucks Art, a studio-direct showroom and working art space inside a former forklift factory in Croton Falls, New York. The space gives American collectors, curators, writers, and visitors direct access to Christopher’s work in the United States — not through his long-standing gallery relationships in Europe, Japan, or Beverly Hills, but through an artist-built environment shaped around the work itself.  The result is not a standard gallery exhibition. It is a direct-to-collector showroom, studio environment, and installation space where finished works are shown beside the materials, tools, and industrial objects that help explain how they came into being. At a moment when galleries are reassessing scale, staffing, rosters, overhead, and collector relationships, Lift Trucks Art offers a smaller and more personal model: a place where the artist controls the context, the visitor encounters the process, and the collector sees the work closer to its source. “Galleries have always played an important role in bringing artists and collectors together,” Christopher said. “But this gives people a different kind of encounter. They can see the paintings in a working environment, surrounded by the objects, materials, and processes that shaped them.” Inside the former factory, Christopher’s expressionistic city scenes are installed among foundry sculptures, iron crucibles, molds, and industrial artifacts. Their worn surfaces carry evidence of heat, labor, casting, use, and time. For Christopher, those traces are not decorative. They are part of the story. The installation asks visitors to look beyond the finished image and consider the physical culture around it: the mold, the vessel, the tool, the surface, the room, and the residue of production. Christopher traces that fascination with making back to his childhood in Southern California. “One memory that stuck was when the sixth-grade class went by bus down to the Ford factory in Pico Rivera,” Christopher said. “It demystified how all those beautiful 1960s cars were actually built. This backfired, of course, as we all wanted to quit school, pick up a wrench and go to work there.” That memory runs through Lift Trucks Art. The space is about seeing how things are made — and about restoring some of that physical context to the experience of looking at art. Christopher has painted New York City for more than forty years, building a body of work defined by movement, speed, color, density, and street-level observation. His paintings capture the city as a lived environment of workers, taxis, storefronts, scaffolding, signage, crowds, and constant motion. Tom’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in museum, institutional, and private collections. His public projects include a monumental mural at the former Roseland Ballroom in Times Square, a live painting residency at the Brill Building, and installations at the NYU Langone Medical Center. While Christopher’s paintings continue to travel through long-standing relationships abroad and in select U.S. markets, Lift Trucks Art creates a new American access point on his own terms. “Rooms, Not Walls” is more than one artist opening a new style of showroom. Artists are responding to a slower, more cautious market by bringing collectors closer to the work, the process, and the place where meaning – and money – is made. The Croton Falls building has served as an arts space since 2009. Its concrete floors, I-beams, open rooms, and preserved industrial details give the installation a physical character that is inseparable from the work on view. Lift Trucks Art 3 East Cross Street Croton Falls, NY 10519 Open Fridays and Saturdays, 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and by appointment.For additional information, visit lifttrucksart.com  |
The Art World Is in Turmoil. Here’s How A Croton Falls Artist Is Building a Different Way Forward
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