Angelina Jolie wants to pick up where Warhol and Basquiat left off

The actress is building a community of artists, thinkers and doers of all kinds, in a storied building in downtown Manhattan.

It was a Saturday night, and behind the graffiti-scrawled facade of Atelier Jolie, her downtown creative space and gallery, Angelina Jolie was in conversation with artist Shirin Neshat.

The topics were heady: the plight of refugees, the rights of women, how to wrench meaning from exile; the value of art in all that. Jolie, ethereal in a cream dress with an embroidered capelet, was gracious. “I’m so happy to be with all of you,” she said to the invited 50 or so guests, adding that she sought community to “keep trying to understand ways to help”. For her, being an artist was a means of communication: “I want to know if you feel the same pain.”

Jolie listened intently to Neshat, an Iranian visual artist and filmmaker, a striking figure with kohled eyes. “Art doesn’t come from intuition,” Neshat said. “It has to come from the life you have led. It has to relate to the world.”

At the reception, notables such as musician Jon Batiste and author Suleika Jaouad (his wife), and Jack Harlow, a chart-topping rapper, mingled amid the artwork. A Sufi dancer in a crimson gown twirled between the tagged-up walls.

And Jolie, an Oscar-winning actor, humanitarian and object of global fascination, was not the red-hot centre of attention. Which is just how she wants it. “I like to see what other people make,” she said. “That’s part of my creativity.”

For a little over a year, she has endeavoured to build Atelier Jolie into a hub for artists and makers – and chefs, students and Broadway stars. The building comes with an almost unparalleled artistic pedigree: 57 Great Jones St was once owned by Andy Warhol, and inhabited by Jean-Michel Basquiat, who had his studio there until his death in 1988.

Jolie’s dream was for the space to once again be a cultural locus, a clubhouse full of inspired and international creatives, and also a magnet for a curious public – to come and browse, take a class, refuel with a slice of orange almond cake at the global-cuisine cafe, Eat Offbeat.

Its initial incarnation was as a pop-up fashion studio for visiting designers, “because I think the world’s most interested in that,” she said. “People focus on fashion.”

“But,” she added, “it was very quickly clear to me that that wasn’t going to be my love,” in part because she rejected the environmental impact of the typical fashion cycle – water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, landfill-fuelling consumption. “I don’t want to tell people that they need to buy something new every few months.”

So she pivoted, expanding her web and sharing the rarest New York commodity: square footage. For free.

French multimedia artist Prune Nourry, who helped organise the Neshat event as part of an exhibition called Strand for Women, has become the atelier’s artist-in-residence, with a second-floor studio where she expects to sculpt sometimes mammoth works over the next two years.

The Invisible Dog, a beloved, 16-year-old art space, whose original multistorey Brooklyn building is being redeveloped, has arrived as a resident gallery. Nourry introduced its founder and curator, Lucien Zayan, to Jolie, and he is busily programming shows and cultivating community in his new Manhattan neighbourhood. In the Warhol-Basquiat era, he said, the building was a gathering place, too: “There was a big communal table in the space. People were always coming and chatting together,” he said. “That’s exactly what she wanted.”

For Jolie, a singular celebrity with a reputation for unknowability – a mystery, in an era when the famous spill all on social media – to start a public gathering space seemed an improbable move. She has been far more visible in her advocacy for others, as a high-profile envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency. (She stepped down from that post in 2022, after more than two decades.)

But in her circles, she is known as a connector, who is quick to open her home, offer help and learn one-on-one; she has painted, danced and attended silk-screening, felting and cooking classes at Atelier Jolie. “I wanted a place where I could spend time with local artists,” she said. She hoped to conjure the vibe of a film set, she said, especially one with a crew from the far-flung corners of the world: “You can feel that feeling of being purposeful with others.”

Jolie said, “It’s like a platform for discussion. It’s not dictating.”

Nourry, 40, and Jolie, 49, met nearly a decade ago through a mutual friend, film-maker Agnes Varda, after Nourry was diagnosed with breast cancer. Jolie, who lost her mother, grandmother and aunt to cancer, and who underwent a preventive double mastectomy in 2013, advised Nourry early on. And she co-produced Nourry’s 2019 documentary, Serendipity, in which Nourry takes stock of her own illness through art making. In the introduction to one of Nourry’s books, Jolie recalls being in her Paris studio, looking at her sculpture of a breast carved in wood, which had split during fabrication. “Isn’t it even more beautiful?” Nourry asked her.

Nourry’s light-filled space at Atelier Jolie (which once housed Basquiat’s bed), is filled with anatomical models and history books. In “Strand for Women,” people from around the world snip off a bit of hair, in solidarity with the #WomanLifeFreedom movement for women’s rights and justice. (Jolie donated some strands with her daughters.) The locks hang in the basement at Atelier Jolie, below what looks like a minidress made of hair, by Iranian German artist Homa Emamy, seen in an exhibition here presented with the help of The Invisible Dog.

Collaboration is the thread: “That’s kind of the rule – you can’t just come in for yourself,” Jolie said. “You have to come in and also be there for other artists.”

Through Eat Offbeat, Nourry hosted an “archaeological dinner” with an Afghan chef who cooked a traditional meal covered in clay. “Everyone had a little hammer, like an archaeologist, and had to break the clay to get the dish,” Nourry said. It was a reference to the ancient Buddhist monuments, a source of national pride, that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, and to Nourry’s own sculpted Buddhas.

Atelier Jolie is barely one-fifth the size of the 30,000sq ft Invisible Dog, a nonprofit that opened in 2009 in a former factory. But Zayan said that he and Jolie, from their first conversation, shared a conceptual blueprint that incorporated performance; viewed dining as a form of cultural discourse; and gave artists studio access. “When you create work in the space, that makes a huge difference,” he said, “because you leave the spirit, the soul, in the space. It’s not just hanging art.”

Atelier Jolie, a for-profit public benefit corporation (a certified B Corp) with the goal of social good, is not charging The Invisible Dog any rent for its yearlong residency. In Brooklyn, the gallery needed US$500,000 ($882,000) annually “just to open the door,” Zayan said, and regularly held fundraisers. Now, donations can support work directly. “We’re doing well, and we’re building a new model,” Jolie said of the financial prospects of Atelier Jolie, which has an eight-year lease on the building.

Zayan aims to make it a destination for downtown and beyond, just as The Invisible Dog was in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. And Jolie has been an eager partner. They communicate almost daily, he said. “When you email her, you never know where she is, what time zone, but she answers you immediately. She’s very involved.”

Fashion is no longer as central to the atelier, but Jolie still gave a studio stint to Zarif, a brand created by artisans in Kabul, Afghanistan. With its founder, Zolaykha Sherzad, Jolie sketched a capsule collection of embroidered jackets and capes, which she wore to the Neshat talk. Jolie offered the atelier “as a platform to highlight the craftsmanship, their talent, their resilience,” Sherzad said of her team of Afghan weavers and tailors.

Although films still take up much of Jolie’s life, she has been spending more time in New York lately, for the gallery and as a producer of The Outsiders, a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Cast members turn up at the atelier, helping her think through how the space can serve young artists. “To see these worlds all coming together, that’s what’s so exciting,” she said.

Jolie loved the squat, sprayed-up building (which had recently housed a restaurant) when she first saw it in 2023 with one of her daughters. “I wasn’t interested in being on the Upper East Side,” she said, explaining why she sought out the downtown neighbourhoods she had wound through in her 20s, while studying film at New York University. But, she said, “I was also intimidated by the history”. She got in touch with Basquiat’s sisters, who gave the atelier their blessing, and turn up at events.

The architects Bonetti Kozerski, who designed the Pace Gallery flagship in Chelsea, oversaw a renovation, preserving walls covered in graffiti by Al Diaz, who created the SAMO© tag with Basquiat. Basquiat’s early comics are still pasted up there, too – a portal to another New York legacy. The facade changes constantly, as taggers continue to leave their tributes.

In conversations this month, Jolie seemed frustrated that the atelier was viewed as another exclusive downtown boutique. “The act of creation should be accessible to everyone,” she said.

“It’s what I need as an artist,” she added. “It’s what I want for my children – to learn about other people and discover and connect and share and play.”

She was speaking from a Manhattan hotel room; the New York apartment she bought in her 20s is now inhabited by one of her sons, and is a crash pad for his five siblings. Mum is welcome – sometimes. “The other day I said I was going to pop by, and he was like, can you just give me a day to clean?” she said. “I thought, I appreciate that, you should clean up for your mother. But also, how bad is it?” She laughed, and I got a glimpse of the less studious Jolie that friends know.

“Whenever I’ve seen Angie in the field, she loves to sit with a group of people, whoever it is, and just feel part of that community,” said Giles Duley, a British photographer and chef who met Jolie through her UN work.

Last summer, Duley, who lost both legs and an arm to an explosive device in Afghanistan in 2011, exhibited at Atelier Jolie his images of unexploded landmines. “I did a talk in there, and people sat on the floor and kind of perched on the side of tables and chairs,” he said. “It’s certainly not a place full of airs and graces.”

At the event with Neshat – on International Women’s Day – Jolie answered questions from Bronx high school students and greeted artists from the Middle East and Europe. Her friend Mustafa, a 28-year-old Canadian Sudanese musician, brought Harlow, the rapper, as his guest. He marvelled as Jolie worked the crowd. “This is not her at her most comfortable,” Mustafa confided, adding that she put herself there to spotlight the work of those around her.

As Jolie moved through the rooms of her gallery with a cup of tea, she paused to take in the unlikely scene. “Sometimes I think, what are we doing?” she said. A clutch of women had found their place beside her, urgently wanting to talk about art and activism. “And then I think, no, this is everything.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Melena Ryzik

Photographs by: Clement Pascal and Amir Hamja

©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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