About Art State
Art State operates at the intersection of culture, urban development, and long-term stewardship. Founded by Anne-Brigitte Sirois, the organization advises public, private, and nonprofit partners on how to imagine, structure, and sustain creative ecosystems within evolving urban landscapes.
Its work is rooted in decades of engagement with the dynamics of cultural districts: the emergence of gallery and artist communities, the spatial conditions that allow them to thrive, and the governance models that safeguard their continuity. Cities are understood not as static entities but as living cultural organisms—shaped by memory, movement, and the presence of artists whose practices define the identity of place.
Art State develops spatial and institutional strategies that support cultural life, drawing on the principles of culture-led regeneration, where artistic activity is recognized as a catalyst for urban vitality and an essential component of the public realm. This approach informs collaborations with gallery owners, building owners, foundations, civic actors, and cultural organizations committed to sustaining the conditions under which creative work can endure.
About Anne-Brigitte Sirois
Anne-Brigitte Sirois is an artist, writer, cultural strategist, and curator whose work for more than three decades has focused on the creation and preservation of artistic ecosystems—cultural infrastructures that connect spaces, communities, and territories. Her practice is guided by the conviction that cultural life must increasingly integrate the living world, human and more-than-human, and that the future of art depends on forms of stewardship attentive to both ecological and social continuity.
Her work brings together spatial thinking, narrative practice, curatorial inquiry, and long-term cultural planning. Across these domains runs a consistent concern: how creative communities take shape, how they are displaced, and what kinds of frameworks allow them to endure. This approach has informed decades of engagement with the evolution of the West Chelsea art district and with the long-term conditions that sustain cultural life within changing urban environments, including close attention to artist neighborhoods, cultural districts, and emerging governance models designed to support cultural presence beyond the volatility of real estate cycles.
Rooted in fine arts and shaped by ecological and urban inquiry, Sirois develops methodologies that bridge intuitive, symbolic, and structural modes of understanding. Her research in cultural infrastructure and Creative Land Trust frameworks extends this perspective toward new forms of collective ownership, shared governance, and sustainable cultural futures.
Her artistic and writing practice—rooted in observation, memory, and interspecies relations—forms a parallel inquiry into the same questions of place, displacement, and belonging. The trilogy Animal State, currently in development, reflects this convergence: an exploration of ecological precarity, urban transformation, and the relations that bind human and non-human lives within shared environments.
Through this integrated practice, Sirois contributes to a broader rethinking of how culture inhabits cities, how creative ecosystems are sustained, and how artistic life can remain part of the public realm across generations.