A new play space for kids to make art has opened on Warren — Playday — the product of one man’s quest to find a drop-in visual art class for his young daughter.

Gregory Okshteyn grew up in Chelsea with a (famous) artist for a father and a gallerist for a mother, so he knew he had to pivot. His career as an architect and designer was launched after grad school with Studios Go, an architecture and branding company that does high-end entertainment, hospitality, retail and residential. (He still has his day job; Playday is his extra-curricular.)

Eight years ago — Okshteyn has lived in Long Island City for decades — his 5-year-old said she wanted to do art after school and he couldn’t find anything nearby.

“So out of necessity I opened Playday in Long Island City and found amazing instructors from Vassar, Oberlin, Yale — from the beginning the concept has attracted incredible talent,” he said. Tribeca is their seventh location, “and no end is in sight! I want one in every neighborhood.”

Most simply it is a children’s art enrichment space. But the program is extremely flexible — that was his main goal as a parent, Okshteyn said. Customers can pay by the hour, by the half day, by the semester, or by the year. The company built its own reservation engine and offers every kind of schedule: every day is a camp day from 9a to 5p, or a one-hour drop-in, or anything in between. “It took me five years to build a schedule that could accommodate that flexibility. Then we trained people, and now we are learning how to scale it,” he said. “It’s been an amazing ride.”

The big difference is this is not an art school; the classes are not incremental. “We don’t teach, we play,” Okshteyn said. “We play Basquiat, we play Mondrian.” The website lists the specific activities every day so a drop-in class can be different every time. There’s abstract expression, book making, sculpture, paper play, cartooning, etc.

As the son of a professional artist, Okshteyn’s secondary mission was to create a company where creatives could have a career. His first instructor is now the director of HR. “We get MFAs — and yes, we pay better than Starbucks! And they are a client of mine! I saw the talent of their baristas and I wanted to fix that,” he said. “Our instructors love art and love kids and love education.”

The studios also offer birthday parties, of course, and every location has a full-time manager. There are then two to three instructors, depending on the class and the sign-ups. A 60-minute drop-in art class is $45. There are 10-packs and offerings for all sorts of time blocks. The capacity at our location is 30.

The idea is simply for kids to love making art and for parents to find some flexible options.

“I got through math and history knowing that I had art in fourth period,” Okshteyn said. “It took us some time to get this right, but the concept just attracted extremely dedicated, very hard working people. That’s the secrete sauce.”

Playday
72 Warren | West Broadway & Greenwich
551-349-3351
tribeca@playday.com