These NYC artists turned studio scraps into gallery art. Here’s how they afford to keep creating in the city.

Gabrielle Shelton, 53, originally from Los Angeles, has been living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for 31 years. As a metal sculptor, she also runs her own business, Shelton Studios Inc., which produces high-end custom architectural metalwork for homes, businesses, hotels, and other spaces.

“I specifically placed myself and started a business that could feed my art without me having to come up with another way to make money,” she said. “The only way that I could access materials and space is if I started a business that focused on the same materials that I wanted to make my sculpture out of.”

For the exhibition, she used leftover scrap metal from previously sold sculptures and brought them together.

“I have a lot of little, really beautiful scrap metal or offcuts or prototypes and jigs,” she said, “and the last couple years, I started taking them out and making sculptures out of them, joining parts that never would have joined.”

To balance managing her self-owned business, her artwork, and her family life with her husband and two children, Shelton worked during the day, spent the afternoons with her kids, and returned to her studio at night.

“For many years, I worked about 70 to 80 hours a week,” she said. “I basically didn’t sleep for about 20 years.”

Damien Olsen Berdichevsky, a 65-year-old sculptor and musician born in Argentina, has lived in the city for 28 years. For the show, he submitted The Book of the Comfort Zone, a piece he started when he first used an issue of The Brooklyn Rail journal to wipe his brushes.

“I was using it to clean my brushes, and it all started with a stain. Then I started painting page by page every night,” he said.

From February to May, he painted all the magazine’s pages, complementing the book with a music video displayed alongside it.

Berdichevsky primarily works with wood and cardboard — not too hard to come by in New York City.

“The streets are piled with those materials,” he said. “Besides, there’s a lumberyard a couple of doors from my house, and I can’t tell you the amount of wood they throw away.”

While the city provides some materials for free, Berdichevsky does pitch in to buy paint, paper, and glue. In the past, he has also worked as a “ghost artist” and bought and resold music instruments and antiques on eBay to make extra money.

Yet, he said he has been dealt a lot of luck. Thanks to his wife’s family, he receives financial support and lives in a 150-year-old family home in Greenpoint that she inherited, where he also has space to work instead of renting a studio.

“I’ve never had to interrupt my work because I couldn’t afford it financially,” Berdichevsky said. “How much of your merit is at play, or is it simply good luck?”

Native New Yorker Jessica Nissen, 59, prioritizes spending on her art over other indulgences, setting aside money for materials and her Brooklyn studio. Through her daily life, she’s balancing work and art, not work and leisure, she said.

To support herself, she works as a scenic artist for film and television. In this role, she helps bring designers’ visions to life by painting and finishing sets, both in studios and on location.

For Nose to Tail, she exhibited 4×4 oil eye paintings on blocks of wood. She works on these when she gets stuck while working on larger paintings.

“They help me keep moving and painting and thinking,” she said. “The material I’m using is expensive, and I don’t have endless funds, so I don’t want to waste the material on my palette.”

Nissen said New York’s creative community depends on a balanced ecosystem between cultural producers and consumers.

“Artists are culture producers, and it’s really important to recognize that as the cost of living goes up and people struggle in the city, creative people struggle to stay within the city,” she said. “If we’re forced to move elsewhere, what do you end up with in the city? You just end up with consumers.”

Jason Rohlf, 56, moved to New York City from Milwaukee in 1999. As a full-time artist, he and his family have lived in the same Williamsburg loft for roughly 27 years, with rent protection under the NYC Loft Law.

The around 1,300-square-foot loft doubles as his home and studio. Yet, although the Loft Law statute protects these industrial lofts inhabited by artists, preserving the space has required lawyers, legal expenses, and years of uncertainty.

“Every time the state says, ‘Oh, we’re going to revisit the loft law,’ you get an email, and everybody’s panicking,” he said. “I don’t think many people’s lifestyles involve having a housing lawyer on their phone.”

Yet maintaining affordable housing has also benefited Rohlf. During the 2008 financial crisis, many of his peers relocated, unable to afford NYC, while he was able to stay. Now, it has helped him continue to afford his housing as other prices continue to rise.

“Every number is exponentially going up, and so for us to keep the housing costs low made one of those numbers manageable,” he said.

For the exhibition, Rohlf presented muslin shop towels he uses to clean paintbrushes. For the past 20 years, he has made and stored thousands of these towels. For the show, he and co-curator Jeanne Heifetz selected 42.

Rohlf works on a portable scale, developing small ideas with materials already in his studio.

“My creativity kind of flourishes in a microcosm,” he said. “If I only painted on giant canvases made with expensive materials, my studio would have ended a long time ago.”

San Francisco-born textile artist Oriane Stender has lived in New York City for over 20 years. While weaving and painting fabric, she began placing scrap paper beneath her loom to catch dripping paint and discovered that it captured impressions of the threads.

“When I realized the prints were really beautiful themselves, I started doing them on nice, large watercolor paper,” she said.

For her, compromises, such as moving farther out, are key to being an artist in the city. Stender does not have a car, rarely buys new clothes, and lives “frugally.”

“It sort of depends how much you want to be part of it and what you’re willing to give up,” she said. “I don’t have children — there’s a lot of things that I don’t do that people think they might want to have with their life. You give up some of that if you want to be an artist.”

Today, she lives in a Brooklyn apartment and uses it as her art studio. The only thing she said she misses is traveling.

“New York is expensive, so it’s harder just to be an artist for the pure love of being an artist,” she said. “I would be making art whether I ever sold it or not.”