Meet Hanne Tierney, founder and director of FiveMyles Gallery, located at 558 St. Johns Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
FiveMyles is a a performance and exhibition space whose mission is to advance public interest in innovative experimental work.
Exhibitions at FiveMyles are often inspired by art rooted in non-Western cultures and have included photography and video from East Africa and contemporary Native and Caribbean art.
The New York Times, Village Voice, Artnews, Art in America, and other press have given FiveMyles outstanding reviews for its exhibitions, and in 2000 FiveMyles received an OBIE award for "presenting magnificent contemporary performance work."
But with all that can be lauded about FiveMyles, Hanne, as an artist, has an amazing history all her own: She immigrated to the United States from Germany when she was 19 years old as a performance artist who specialized in very high-level puppet shows.
Hanne Tierney's first public performance was at The Kitchen in 1980, followed by performances at Franklin Furnace, Queen's Museum, Whitney Museum, Sidney Biennale, Espace Kiron, Paris, and the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin. She was invited by the director at the time, Tom Messer, to perform Maeterlinck's The Intruder at the Guggenheim Museum in 1986.
In 1996, Hanne Tierney was commissioned by BAM to perform Flatland by E. Abbott for the Next Wave Artists in Action series, followed soon after by performances at Bitef, International Theater Festival in Belgrade in 1997. She also presented work three times at the Jim Henson Festival of International Puppet Theater.
Hanne founded Five Myles Gallery in 1999 in dedication to her son, Myles, a journalist who was killed while filming a documentary on the incarceration of children who were forced into conflict during wartime in Rwanda.
For the past 15 years, Hanne has dedicated herself entirely to fulfilling her aspiration of identifying and exhibiting the work of under-represented artists, and engaging the local community through participation in the arts.
In her son Myles's honor, Hanne is devoted to building bridges of understanding across all cultures, so that as long as she can help it, not another artistic voice will be cut short due to conflict.
