Living at the Club

Michael Shane Neal is just the third artist in 117 years to occupy this studio at the National Arts Club.

- WENDY GOODMAN

HOW A KID FROM Nashville, Tennessee, lucked out,” Michael Shane Neal tells me as we sit in the northern afternoon light of his double-height art studio behind the National Arts Club that he was granted possession of during the pandemic. The club, founded in 1898, occupies two former mansions overlooking Gramercy Park: No. 14 and No. 15, both built in the 1840s and merged into one for Samuel Tilden in the 1880s (Calvert Vaux, one of the architects of Central Park, created a new façade). In 1906, George B. Post designed the Arts Club Studio Building in Tilden’s former rear garden. There, qualified members of the club can rent apartments in which they can live and work. Their names are picked out of a hat.