03.15.2012

Peacock Interventions

Baltimore, MD | by Rachel Sitkin

March 15, 2012

If you were one of the attendees at DC’s (e)merge Art Fair this past September 2011, you probably remember The Free Art Booth set up in the parking garage, and maybe you were lucky enough to walk away with a piece.  Maybe you also remember the two jovial guys running the booth, giving you information about each artist and assuring you that, yes, all the work really was FREE.
Sean Naftel (Queens, NY) and Chris Attenborough (Baltimore, MD) are those guys.  They met back in 2008 as graduate students at Burren College of Art in West Clare, Ireland.  Though Sean came in as a painter and Chris as a photographer, the existential crisis that so often plagues graduate students did not spare either of them, and they bonded over their mutual conceptual concerns of understanding space and place through cultural references and community.  Now, some four-plus years later, Sean and Chris have continued to collaborate under the name Peacock Interventions, organizing site specific happenings and interventions that often create a context for people to rethink their understanding of art and its inherent value, and to become personally invested in the experience of cultural exchange.
(E)merge was the third incarnation of The Free Art Booth, the first set-up occurring back in Ireland while Sean and Chris were still students.  At this early version, they realized that something transcendent occurred when people received an original work of art for free, donated by the artists who were eager to have their work seen and to help regular people to start their art collections.  In 2009 they set up the second incarnation, Free Art Stand…, at the SEVEN Art Fair in Miami. They told me that through the three versions, they have exhibited and distributed hundreds of original works of art from at

Peacock Interventions Video