threshold collective
Threshold Collective is a neighbor-built, interdisciplinary practice based in Upper Manhattan. We began as neighbors: visual artists, musicians, writers, performers, and thinkers meeting through daily interactions and hallway conversations that turned into creative exchange. Our name reflects the spaces we occupy and create, thresholds where disciplines overlap and solitude becomes communal.
our practice
Our mission is to celebrate Uptown Manhattan’s overlooked energy as part of New York’s artistic fabric. In a neighborhood rich with creatives yet frequently sidelined by the broader art scene, we build sustainable platforms to share skills, develop projects, and reinvest locally. We work across sound, performance, ceramics, and visual art, including painting, collage, photography, and film, drawing from Dominican, Filipino, Ecuadorian, and other immigrant backgrounds. Influences include experimental sound/musique concrète, domestic abstraction, documentary poetics, and social practice.
We envision intergenerational, multilingual, accessible projects: exhibitions, workshops, residencies, and media works built through reciprocity, artistic rigor, and attention to place.
Our Team
Adaley muñoz
Dominican-American visual artist and writer Hunter College, BA Studio Art
matthew ruela
Ecuadorian-American photographer/filmmaker Film and digital media; clinical research and social work
Filipino-American pianist and sound artist (Peabody Conservatory BM, MMmagnus villanueva
Featured Projects
su-casa
Threshold Collective brings a series of open-dialogue, art-and-sound sessions with guided lessons in journaling, collage, and gouache painting. Older adults will explore art-making techniques and reflective writing in response to a curated playlist and projected artworks, connecting what they create to their personal experience. The series culminates in a participant exhibition and artist talk. We aim to explore creativity and build connections between sound, the written word, and visual art.
The sessions will take place in spring 2026 at the East Side House Settlement Borinquen Court Mitchel Older Adult Center in the Bronx. The program will conclude with a free open studio and showcase: a small exhibition of journals, collages, and paintings, along with a brief artist talk facilitated by the teaching artists and featuring participating older adults.
This program is supported by public funds from the New York City Council, in partnership with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and Department for the Aging (DFTA). It is carried out in collaboration with New York City’s local arts councils. Additional support is provided by the Tiger Baron Foundation. LMCC.net
elements of the game
This media artwork is an ongoing project inspired by the 2026 World Cup as it is lived in New York City. As the tournament arrives in a place shaped by migration and constant motion, neighborhoods gather in bars, parks, living rooms, and streets. The game becomes a temporary commons, a refuge built from sound, movement, and shared attention.
Rather than documenting matches or outcomes, we focus on atmosphere, ritual, and presence. Soccer becomes a shared human practice through which elemental forces are felt and embodied: fire, water, earth, wind, and soul.
Built from non-narrative moving image studies gathered across New York State, the work centers texture and sensation: soil disturbed by movement, breath under exertion, rain on concrete, nets shifting in the wind, city lights cutting through the darkness of the pitch. There are no protagonists. What matters is what surrounds and sustains the game.
The project unfolds in three movements. Metanoia (Earth and Fire) holds contact and intensity, friction and turning. Ascension (Water and Wind) opens into suspension and flow. Glory (Soul) resolves into quiet presence, the stillness that follows gathering.
Sound anchors the work through layered field recordings from pitches, chants, sports bars, neighborhood gatherings, wind, rain, and post-game spaces. Influenced by experimental sound traditions and musique concrète, the soundtrack evolves through shifts in density, texture, and spatial movement, with sound and image in dialogue rather than synchronization.