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Inside the Carver Brothers’ Art Club for Everyone

With the NYC Culture Club, Clayton and Parker Carver are transforming public space, partnerships and persistence into a sustainable support system for artists.

Over the years, Clayton Carver  and Parker Carver, have made their presence a constant at art events in New York and beyond. As New Yorkers born and raised, they understood that showing up and networking was their recipe for carving out their space and voice in the city’s art ecosystem. During the pandemic, when the Carver brothers saw that vibrant yet fragile system needed new energy, they launched their own organization, the NYC Culture Club.

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Operating as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the NYC Culture Club offers professional opportunities for curators and artists, without cost or commission, through exhibitions, residencies, public art presentations and art fairs. Always keeping their events free and open to the general public, the organization has welcomed more than 240,000 visitors since opening at the World Trade Center in June 2021.

“Having been artists this whole time and in the system for many years, we realized how much it takes in terms of community for that success to exist,” Clayton Carver tells Observer. He and Parker grew up in New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, a period they remember as intensely creative, giving them early exposure to the city’s public art and artistic life that became foundational to the work they do now and who they are today. “We were lucky,” they acknowledge—despite growing up in Manhattan, they come from a middle-class background. Their parents moved to New York in 1981: their father to pursue acting and modeling, their mother to study education. She later earned a doctorate from Columbia University, while their father eventually became a private chef.

Creativity was encouraged at home, but their careers were not handed to them. Clayton’s first art-world role was gallery assistant. Parker worked as a freelance photographer for years, taking physically demanding e-commerce jobs, shooting thousands of images a day. “ We have hustled and toiled, and it has been blood, sweat and tears. Even today, we have a ton of back and forth because I am swamped on the work that pays my bills, and yet we have to get a grant deadline in at the same time,” Parker shares. To them, the NYC Culture Club remains a labor of love sustained by persistence.

The pandemic gave the project its urgency. Artists-in-residence at Three World Trade Center and working from a studio in the Navy Yard, they saw how drastically the New York art scene was changing. They realized how desperate people were to come together, even as many middle-tier galleries were closing or struggling. “A lot of really great galleries that are kind of in the middle-career range couldn’t afford rent anymore. That was true in the pandemic, and it is crazy that, all these years later, it is still true now,” Clayton says.

They approached........

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