NEW YORK.- Over 200 artists from around the world are joining to create the first Free Biennial which will take place in New York during the month of April, 2002 (April 2-30). The Free Biennial is an open exhibition of nonmonetary (free) artwork which will take place throughout the public space of greater New York, as well as on the internet, by broadcast, mail and telephone.

Among more than 200 participating artists are Peter Coffin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Ellen Harvey, Simon Morris, Christopher Musgrave, and Will Pappenheimer, curator/artists Jonathan Van Dyke and Gavin Wade, sound artists Erik Belgum, Calum Stirling, and W. Mark Sutherland, internet artists Robert Cottet, Antoine Moreau, Stanza and Jaka Zeleznikar, poets Michael Coffey, Craig Dworkin, Richard Kostelanetz, Loudmouth Collective, and Aram Saroyan, novelist Michael Cunningham and critics Hannah Higgens and Marjorie Perloff.

Artworks, many created especially for the Free Biennial, will include public installations, performances, interactions and interventions, broadcasts, giveaways, studio and apartment shows, flash movies, downloads, net art, video screenings and listening salons.  Artists are participating from New York, across the United States, and from countries around the world including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

"The public space of the city offers an exciting context for making art," says organizer Sal Randolph. "Artists have responded with projects that infiltrate and enliven the visual environment of the streets, and which intervene in the power structures we take for granted in urban life."

The Free Biennial extends the idea of public space to include the broadcast airwaves, mail and telephone systems, and the internet. "It is not surprising," says Randolph, "that a third of the works in the Free Biennial make use of systems which enable communication.  Internet pioneers in particular have claimed the internet and the web as public space. Nonmonetary art forms thrive in that kind of intellectual and political environment."

"Nonmonetary, in this context, means that no money changes hands," explains Randolph, "but the 'free' in Free Biennial implies more than that. The art biennials we usually see are all about control -- about selecting and regulating what we experience.  And there's an anxiety that always underlies control:  the fear that we can't bear to be free.  The deepest democratic ideals of our country protect our civil liberties, our freedom of speech and expression. It is up to us as citizens to find ways to not only tolerate that freedom, but to celebrate it."