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Inside Time to Be Happy, Benzi’s Bowery Art Experiment

Here's how the digital artist and Baked by Melissa co-founder's gallery and residency program prioritize access over exclusivity.

It can be refreshing to discover that things can be done differently. In a city where the art world often moves according to well-rehearsed routines, alternative models that allow creativity to circulate more freely can feel almost radical. Time to Be Happy presents itself without the pretense of being a gallery, a museum or anything the art world already recognizes. “If you come with some friend next time, don’t tell them what they’re going to visit,” Benzi, the founder, tells Observer after a rainy-day visit to his Time To Be Happy Gallery, where all concerns, worries and even any sense of time were suspended the moment we stepped inside the Bowery-based space, just next to the soon-to-reopen New Museum.

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Benzi, or Ben Zion as his birth name, turned to a full-time career as a digital artist after successfully co-founding the iconic New York cupcake brand Baked by Melissa. Art found him quite serendipitously around 2014. It was his sister’s 40th birthday. She was in Israel, and he was in New York, unable to travel for the celebration. “I wanted to do something special for her, some kind of gift,” Benzi recalls. “So I took photographs from different moments of her life and started combining them with places around New York that had some meaning or visual power.” He repeated the process in several locations around the city, creating small episodes that blended her memories with the urban landscape. When he finished the piece and showed it to people, their reaction surprised him. They felt something. “I realized that the work was affecting people in a way I hadn’t experienced before. That was really my first personal artwork. Before that, I hadn’t considered myself an artist. I had always been creative, but I had never made art in that sense.”

All the videos in the gallery are by Benzi: digital screens enclosed in repurposed found objects that function as frames. Many of the works portray other artists, whom Benzi filmed inside their studios or personal visual universes, often with a surreal edge. Earlier pieces sit inside Chiquita Banana boxes, a playful homage to pop art that debuted during his first proper art show in Miami. It is a limited edition of 100 copies, and he has sold most of them. About 18 remain.

His ties to the crypto and digital art community are also evident in a striking piece at the entrance, created in collaboration with CryptoPunks. It features 24 clocks, each corresponding to a time zone around the world. “According to the time on the clock where you are standing right now, there are 23 other places in the world that are either in the past or the future,” Benzi explains. “It’s a reminder that, even though we feel we’re sharing the same moment, we are always slightly out of sync. And time is only relative, in the end.”

That project began as an invitation to a group of CryptoPunks collectors. Benzi selected 24 punks and invited each owner to participate, each paying 1 ETH to be included. The piece ultimately allowed him to open the gallery in the first place, functioning as a form of crowdfunding that reflects the collaborative dynamics of the digital art community—an ecosystem the traditional art world tends to overlook.

Another work on view is a collaboration with Dr. Sian Proctor, the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft. One side of the piece features a poem she wrote while in orbit, while the front displays her spacesuit coin and mission patches. “Dr. Proctor says that while she was in orbit, she circled the Earth every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise and sunset every 45 minutes. When you experience time like that, your whole perception of time and space becomes very different.”

Many of Benzi’s works incorporate screens housed within vintage clocks, including IBM clocks manufactured between 1912 and 1930. IBM began producing these machines in the early 20th Century as part of an industrial effort to measure and organize labor productivity—one of the foundations upon which the tyranny of time in modern capitalism was constructed. “The cards would go in, workers would punch in and out, and the machine would track their hours,” Benzi says. In his installation, however, that logic is inverted. “Instead of punching in for work, we invite visitors to write one thing that makes them happy.” Surrounding the clocks are historical photographs taken around 1914 inside IBM factories in New York. He simply inserted the Time to Be Happy message into the archival imagery. The gesture is a quiet subversion of the regime of productivity that governs modern life.

“I believe you can open the door to discovering happiness by disconnecting from the regrets of the past and the concerns of the future,” Benzi reflects, speaking as someone who has arrived at this realization after a long personal journey. “Our minds are constantly moving back and forth between those two things. But the most beautiful moments in life are the ones when we’re fully present. That’s really the philosophy behind Time to Be Happy: it’s a reflection on time, happiness and the conversations that emerge through art and human connection.”

That ethos animates the entire space and Benzi’s broader vision for it, in that the gallery and the residency program are extensions of his own artistic practice. “When I opened the first gallery, it was actually a pop-up in Miami. At first, it only showed my work. After a few months, it did well, and then I organized a show here in New York around those clock pieces. It happened during NFT Week in New York, and it was a success,” he recalls. Eventually, he found this Bowery space, a former shoe shop with a street-level storefront and a basement. He decided to transform it into an artist environment—a residency program that functions as a nonprofit space for artists.

Yet Time to Be Happy deliberately resists conventional art-world definitions. There’s the museum, there’s the gallery and then there’s Time to Be Happy, which does not fully belong to any of those categories. The studio and the exhibition space merge into a cohesive whole. “It’s a cultural environment where people come to see art, make art and talk about it,” Benzi says. Upon entering, one might encounter an artist painting directly by the window, greeting visitors as they walk in, while another reads tarot cards and a sculptor works further down in the room. Art and artists are everywhere, creating a living ecosystem. “When you go to a gallery or a museum, the experience often feels very isolated. You walk in, you look at the work, and that’s it. Especially now, with everything happening in the world, it felt important to create something different. The idea here is to give people the opportunity to actually meet the artist. When you have a conversation, you suddenly realize that the work was made by a person. It becomes more personal.”

Only the downstairs residency functions as a nonprofit, while the street-level space operates as a gallery. “Everything that comes into the gallery goes directly back into supporting the artists and the space. We host events, workshops and residencies,” Benzi answers when asked about the financial model. “Some visitors prefer to donate instead of buying art. They’ll say, ‘I just want to contribute.’ That’s possible too.” He has begun exploring grants and partnerships with companies willing to support projects like this, even outside the traditional nonprofit framework.

Since Time to Be Happy’s opening in 2024, more than 100 artists have passed through the space, with some remaining since the earliest days. Artists apply to join the residency through an application process followed by an interview. According to Benzi, the quality of the participants matters as much as the quality of the art. “It’s important that they can be around others, that they contribute to the community,” he says. That philosophy becomes immediately evident downstairs, where more than 20 artists were working simultaneously during our visit, exchanging ideas and discussing each other’s work in an ongoing flow of creative dialogue. “What I’ve learned is that if you keep the energy of connection alive, people naturally feel happier. When you create a shared space like this, people want to contribute to it.”

Time to Be Happy is open every day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. to ensure access for those who work traditional hours and for visitors who might not otherwise feel welcome in the art world. “There are so many rules in the traditional art system, and no one seems to ask why those rules exist,” Benzi points out, noting how the establishment has remained largely unchanged even as the world around it transforms. “Technology, culture, opportunities—everything is different now. But everything is changing, and the system has to evolve as well. What we’re doing here is giving space to that possibility. In a way, it’s an experiment.”

“Most people have at least a small curiosity about art—either creating it or simply understanding what they’re looking at. But when you go to a museum or a gallery, you usually just see the work on the wall with a name next to it,” Benzi says. “The idea here is that you can simply walk in, spend time with artists, talk to them and see what they’re doing.” There’s no appointment required. The artists are here, working, and visitors can engage with them directly. “They can tell you about their process, what they were thinking about, what they were going through while making it. The more questions you ask, the more the work opens up. It becomes a conversation and a human connection.”

Time to Be Happy also hosts workshops and classes for kids. “Many children come here to learn and experiment with art. It’s becoming a real community space. You’ll see collectors, families, artists and even people who just wander in and decide to stay for a while,” Benzi says with a smile that reflects his passion for the project. “For me, it’s become a full-time mission. But honestly, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s never felt like a job. After about four months, I realized the project had grown beyond me. I shifted away from being the center of it. Now it’s really about the platform and the community.”

Benzi is convinced the project will continue to grow. “At this stage, my role is mostly to make sure everything works smoothly: that the artists have what they need, that the space is functioning, that people respect each other, that the heaters are on and the place is clean. Everyone has their own space to work and is happy. And when you walk in, it really does feel like entering another universe”—one that models how artistic and cultural production might adopt different frameworks of sustainability, both financially and from a human point of view.

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