Off the Wall is written by the staff of Hyperallergic.com, a Williamsburg-based art blogazine covering Brooklyn and beyond—exploring the exploits of the North Brooklyn art community outside of the traditional art gallery.
Sure, Chelsea gallery openings are nice, and hitting up a Manhattan museum every once in a while keeps us all on our artistic toes, but when it comes to the cutting edge of contemporary art, the best place to see the newest work is right in the artists’ studios. The upcoming Northside Open Studios, running from Thursday, June 16 to Sunday, June 19, is an opportunity to take in the latest in visual aesthetics without having to deal with the middle man. This art is straight from the source.
Northside Open Studios grew out of Greenpoint Open Studios, an annual event founded in 2009 by local writer, food scene figure, and art impresario Joann Kim. A longtime resident of Greenpoint, Kim noticed that the neighborhood was packed with artists and studio space, but the artistic community lacked any opportunities for a unified presence. What better way to show off North Brooklyn’s creative capabilities than to open up these private spaces to the public eye?
Obsessed with 1970s American male pop icons, Chasse has a mustache-filled studio at Fowler Arts Collective.
“By allowing artists to open their studios to the public they have an opportunity to share their work in a way they often don’t have to,” says Kim. Through open studios, “the general public can create some sort of dialogue, a conversation and relationships with local artists.”
The original neighborhood event has been expanded in collaboration with L Magazine’s Northside Festival, a “four-day showcase” of the best in recent music, film, art, and ideas held within a walkable radius of Williamsburg and Greenpoint. That area is loosely defined as everywhere north of Grand Street.
Visual art is important in this Brooklyn cultural mix “because it’s a huge part of the many components that make Williamsburg one of the most inspiring places in the world,” says Northside Festival’s Sarah Shanfield. “Just like Soho’s galleries were a huge part of what made Soho what it was, the visual art scene in Williamsburg has its own aesthetic, feel, look, and design … The culture here is thriving, full of people who aren’t afraid to take risks, and that is always the best ingredient for artistic media,” she says.
The colorful studio of Bizzid, one of the many artists in Greenpoint.
Williamsburg Notables
On the Williamsburg side, neighborhood staple Parker’s Box gallery (193 Grand Street) will feature an exhibition by French artist Briac Leprêtre called Like It Is, presented in collaboration with Rennes, France, alternative art space 40mcube. The show features delicate paintings of half-finished domestic interior spaces, but tweaks these traditional works with more conceptual sculptures, a trompe-l’oeil architectural column, and tiny monuments made of cast concrete. Like It Is closes June 19, so Northside Open Studios will be your last chance to check it out.
Ventana 244 Art Space at 244 North 6th Street, also in Williamsburg, will be showcasing interactive digital and multimedia work during Northside Open Studios. INTENSITY includes four separate projects, ranging from Brett Murphy’s interactive “soundstage” table to Martin Bravo’s “Skittish Tree,” a sound-reactive sculpture that “responds with skittish behavior to loud noises,” swaying gently in calm audio environments, but “getting scared and dropping its leaves” at higher volumes, says the artist. INTENSITY will be on view Thursdays and Fridays from 7pm to 9pm through the end of July.
Some more Williamsburg studio and show picks for Northside Open Studio-goers:
Christopher Clary’s studio is worth a visit if you like your art homoerotic and conceptual
87 Richardson Street, #300J
Get on the Block at Camel Art Space
722 Metropolitan Avenue
Eight members of the Cohort Collective are mounting a group show titled The Myth & the Mountain, which will explore “personal mythologies and the landscapes or the atmospheres in which they occur.”
143 Richardson Street. 1st floor
Brooklyn Street Art presents Last Exit to Skewville, which they promise will be a LIVE urbanscape by street art team Skewville
82 North 11th Street
And Hyperallergic HQ will be the venue for a unique mail art exhibition all weekend, featuring mail art from around the world
181 North 11th Street
Greenpoint Checklist
Stacy Fisher’s impressive sculptures were on view during last fall’s open studio event in Greenpoint.
Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, located at 205 Norman Avenue in Greenpoint, is one of the commercial art spaces participating in Northside Open Studios. The gallery will be hosting a project by artist collective Temporary Antumbra Zone, open Saturday from 1 to 7pm and Sunday from 12 to 6. “The artists in Temporary Antumbra Zone have come together,collaborating through the lenses of painting, photography, video, and mixed media sculpture,” says gallery director Janet Kurnatowski, promoting collaboration “as an invaluable mode of artistic production.” With over two dozen artists in the collective, the show is sure to be a party.
The very cool and Greenpoint-based Fowler Arts Collective will be hosting a group project in their own studio space, a warren of cordoned off artist cubbies and exhibition areas located in the Greenpoint Terminal Market warehouse (67 West Street). Their collaborative work, called Paint it Now, is “an immersive painting installation that has covered all of the walls of the Fowler gallery with black and white images” created jointly by the 19 participating artists and curated by participating artists Scott Chasse and Thomas Buildmore, says Fowler Collective founder and director Lia Post. And while you’re there be sure to check out the 24 artist studios. The Northside Open Studios reception for Paint it Now will be held Friday, June 17 from 7 to 11pm
Aimee Lusty, a Brooklyn-based zine expert, will be curating an exhibition of printed matter to coincide with Northside Open Studios called Master of Reality. The exhibition is intended to give zine artists “a gallery space and fine art platform to show their non-print/zine work, allowing them to show original pieces, to work larger and with fewer restrictions,” Lusty says. “It’s really all about the artists!”
Hosted at Booklyn Art Gallery (37 Greenpoint Avenue, 4th floor), Master of Reality will include site-specific installations as well as paintings, drawings, and sculpture. The four participating artists will also produce a limited edition collaborative zine, Lusty tells us.
Some of our Greenpoint studio picks and solo-artist shows:
Rachel Sussman’s studio will present a small show titled, The Oldest Living Things in the World, which are photographs of exactly that.
(940 Lorimer Street, 4B)
Scott Chasse is an artist who can’t resist a good Burt Reynolds moustache, so his show at Brouwerij Lane, The Man, The Myth, The Moustache, should come as no surprise.
(78 Greenpoint Avenue)
The Mobile Tea Garden is a roving art work that welcomes you with a cup of tea and a piece of random writing to induce your inner self to explore
(61 Greenpoint Avenue, #305)
255 Calyer Street is an artist studio-rich stop, but make sure to check out Kristine Moran’s studio (3rd floor, Studio 11) for her vibrant paintings that are equal parts surreal and abstract.
A view of the ethereal landscapes by Christopher Saunders in The Pencil Factory.
The famed Pencil Factory (61 Greenpoint Avenue) is also filled with studios, so if you make it there we recommend checking out the work of studio mates Jackie Hoving and Christopher Saunders (3rd floor, #9). Hoving produces trippy figural works and Saunder’s space is filled with ethereal landscapes that have a zen-like quality (sadly, Saunders will only be opening his space on Sunday)
With help from L Magazine collaboration and the open’s studio’s expanded reach into Williamsburg, the event is “bigger than it’s ever been” in its third year, says Kim. “There are more artists in Greenpoint now than I remember, and every year there’s a growing number of artists who want to participate,” she says.
For more information about Northside Open Studios and the location of participating artist studios and spaces, visit www.northsideopenstudios.org.
