The Bronx Museum of the Arts, with its soaring new addition designed by the Miami-based architectural firm Arquitectonica, is one of New York's leaders in supporting and presenting emerging artists. This Sunday, the museum will host an open house for Here and Elsewhere, an exhibition featuring 36 artists who live and work in the New York metropolitan area.

The exhibition celebrates the vitality of the arts today, with video and performance-based works prominently represented. The range of works on view is diverse, from new media, installation, and photography to drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking. What all the artists have in common is their participation in the museum's highly competitive Artists in the Marketplace program, or A.I.M., now in its 27^th year.

One of the artists represented is Patrick Grenier, who is also the Associate Director of Brooklyn's Rotunda Gallery. His performance piece, Democratic Decrees, was inspired by a feeling of helplessness caused by the current administration's policy of making laws based on fabricated facts and figures. By email and snail mail, he invited people to submit ideas for decrees that, in an ideal world, would become laws. In the museum, actors wearing period costumes perform the role of Town Crier, reading the new decrees from scrolls. The backdrop is a highly schematic theatrical set for a townhouse that might be occupied by a 17^th-century barrister. It includes a Plexiglas ballot box in which visitors to the exhibition may submit decrees they inscribe with quill pens provided. One of the contributions reads, "Hear Ye, Hear Ye: I hereby decree that same sex marriages will be honored in all 50 states regardless of the Bush-Cheney administration's attempts to suppress its legalization." Photographs, above left, © Patrick Grenier, courtesy of the artist.

Participating artists: Artists: Bami Adedoyin; Becca Albee; Fanny Allié; Jesse Alpern; Dorthe Alstrup; Gabriela Alva Cal y Mayor; Jill Auckenthaler; Gail Biederman; Hector Canonge; Christine Catsifas; Jillian Conrad; Vince Contarino; Jon Cuyson; Caroline Falby; Tracey Goodman; Patrick Grenier; Emily Hall; Joseph Hart; Ketta Ioannidou; Elaine Kaufmann; Jayson Keeling; Taeseong Kim; Joseph Maida; Amanda Mathis; Amanda Matles; Megan Michalak; Hiroyuki Nakamura; Alison Owen; Chihcheng Peng; David Politzer; Emily Puthoff; Jenna Ransom; Rashanna Rashied-Walker; Jason Reppert; Joseph Eli Tekippe; and Will Walker. Photograph, left, © Joseph Maida, courtesy of the artist.

For details and travel directions, please check the museum website.