With Atelier Jolie, actress Angelina Jolie wants to pick up where Warhol and Basquiat left off

NEW YORK – It was a Saturday night, and behind the graffiti-scrawled facade of Atelier Jolie, her downtown creative space and gallery, American actress-director 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, 49, listened intently to Neshat, an Iranian visual artist and film-maker, 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 American musician Jon Batiste and his author-wife Suleika Jaouad, and American singer-rapper Jack Harlow mingled amid the artwork. A Sufi dancer in a crimson gown twirled between the tagged-up walls.

And Jolie, the Oscar-winning Hollywood star, 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 Street was once owned by the late American visual artist Andy Warhol, and inhabited by American artist 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 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.

It did not immediately work out as she envisioned. “It’s been tricky,” she said in a recent interview. “I found that this has been a lot of what not to do.”

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, 40, 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 multi-storey 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.”

In Nourry, Jolie has found another artist striving for community.

With her non-profit Catharsis Arts Foundation, Nourry has planned monthly talks at Atelier Jolie as part of her residency.

The first, with Dr Rita Charon, a Columbia University medical professor and literary scholar who created the field of narrative medicine, drew other searching minds, including American musician-author David Byrne.

The topics vary – Neshat spoke about Iranian liberation – but the themes are similar – whether “art can heal”, Nourry said.

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

As she 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.” NYTIMES