View The Official Art Fag City BOS List in a larger map
All this week we’ve been recommending artist’s studios, but gallery spaces are joining in on the Bushwick Open Studios weekend, too. We sifted through the listings to pick out a few of our favorites. Among them, we’ve got neighborhood institutions like NurtureArt, Momenta Art, and “Mayor of Bushwick” Jules de Balincourt’s studio, but also brand-new spaces, sculpture gardens, walking tours, and a community darkroom. All are worth checking out, and to make it a little easier, we made you a map, too. See you in Bushwick!
Bushwick Basel
The mini-fair will take place in Starr Space, a.k.a Jules de Balincourt’s studio, and it will include curated booths from Regina Rex, Momenta Art, Interstate Projects, NURTUREart, Airplane, Studio 10, English Kills, Storefront Bushwick, Norte Maar, Valentine, and Parallel Art Space. Those are all galleries you need to see. Most will also host shows in their regular space.
17-17 Troutman Street
Regina Rex
Regina Rex has been all over this blog since the collectively-run gallery popped up in Bushwick in 2010, because in that short time it’s raised expectations for small Bushwick galleries. They’ve shown a few times at NADA, and their booth tends to fit well there. The space may be small and hard-to-reach, but it’s nonetheless keenly aware of what’s going on outside.
Parallel Art Space
The collective which used to be Camel has since been renamed for its two remaining members, artists Rob de Oude and Enrico Gomez. Parallel now resides a floor below Regina Rex in the warehouse 17-17 Troutman Street. It maintains the spirit of inclusivity that characterized Camel; when visiting the gallery last month, de Oude and Gomez shared plans to meet every artist in the building. If you’re familiar with the space, you know that’s no small feat.
56 Bogart
NurtureArt
Like Momenta, the umbrella organization and exhibition space NurtureArt is a benchmark for emerging art in the city. The gallery will be showing another edition of its video series, including work by artists from around the world.
Mark Tribe, "Rare Earth."
Momenta Art
Venerable nonprofit Momenta Art is always worth a stop, but their current solo exhibition of Rhizome founder and video/digital/performance artist Mark Tribe looks especially good. The show sets out to examine the conventions of landscape and combat through first-person shooter video games and rural militia training sites; the meat of the idea seems to be that in our attempts to perfectly recreate an image of combat, we have also created, less consciously, our image of the battlefield. The show invites you to read it as an exhibition of landscapes, but as in much of Tribe’s work, there’s something lurking underneath. Aside: are all of our civilization’s great landscape artists now working for Activision?
Agape
While you’re in 56 Bogart visiting Momenta and NURTUREart, see the year-old performance space and parlor gallery Agape across the hall, opened and co-run by Momenta founder Eric Heist and artist Kikuko Tanaka. The gallery will feature a solo installation by Shana Moulton.
Slag
Slag is presenting a solo show of paintings by Dumitru Gorzo. Though he’s not as well-known in the states, Gorzo had a major solo exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest soon before moving to Bushwick a few years ago. Among other things, he’s known in Romania for the controversy surrounding his self-described pornographic sculpture and paintings. We don’t think they’ll elicit the same shock value here, but it should be worth seeing.
More Galleries and Community Spaces
Norte Maar
What’s even better than free mimosas? Free mimosas…with maps! Thanks to Norte Maar, we’ll be enjoying these items on Saturday. Will the receipt of free booze and maps taint our steely incorruptibility? Stay tuned.
Screenshot from ecoarttech's video
319 Scholes
Can Bushwick be beautiful? With the help of a smartphone app and just a pinch of imagination, anything’s possible. One of the city’s leading spaces for new digital art will present a hike through the Bushwick wilderness by ecoarttech. From the looks of the site, their app guides participants through a renewed look at the existing landscape, one where dogs are people, an overpass is a strip of rock, and a puddle is a lagoon. Sounds like fun!
Kai Vierstra, Installation, Pleasant View Art Fest. Photo courtest of ArtCat.
Sculpture Garden
Onderdonk Farm House
Sarah Bednarek, Reade Bryan, Joy Curtis, Adam Distenfeld, Ryan Michael Ford, Wendy Klemperer, Jolynn Krystosek, MaryKate Maher, Jim Osman, Brent Owens, Kirk Stoller, Kai Vierstra, and Natalia Zubko
On the border of Brooklyn and Queens lies a remnant from New York’s time as a Dutch colony, the Onderdonk Farm House. “Sculpture Garden,” a show curated on the grounds of Onderdonk by Leslie Heller and Deborah Brown, will be open during the daylight hours of BOS weekend. From what we can tell, it looks like a lighthearted romp and a much-needed salve to spending hours indoors, winding through studio spaces. Every artist we contacted in Bushwick recommended it.
Bushwick Community Darkroom
It’s been a little over a year since the Bushwick Community Darkroom finally provided a community workspace for photographers. Find out what they’ve produced in their group show on Saturday.
Microscope Gallery
Remember the artist who gave birth in a gallery last October? That was actually an ongoing performance called Baby X, by Marni Kotak, in Microscope Gallery. Whether this is Microscope’s self-proclaimed cutting-edge experimentation or the sort of crazyass lengths a female emerging Bushwick artist must go to to get a Times write-up—or both—is for you to decide. The last thing you’ll find here is tedium. Note: this gallery is a little outside the Bushwick core, but while you’re in the area, it’s worth checking out nearby galleries Parlor and Airplane.
The Living Gallery
Inspired by Hennessey Youngman’s show at Family Business, the community workshop Living Gallery is hosting a BYO art show.
Shows in Studios
1100 Broadway
A studio of ten artists, including aforementioned Allie Pisarro-Grant, will be hosting an opening party on Friday from 7-9 PM. We can bet there will be a strong mix of painting and sculpture. The space is shared by Michael Assiff, DADDY (Scott Goodman, Devin K. Kenny, Alli Miller, Taylor Shields), Audrey Hope, Scott Goodman, Alexander Guerrero, Lisa Larson-Walker, Allie Pisarro-Grant, Saki Sato, and Clayton Schiff.
3D BuildingsBushwick
Bryan Sears is using Google Sketchup to render Bushwick warehouses and landmarks, with the hope of submitting them for use in Google Earth. This will serve as a record of the neighborhood, and it looks cool.
Two Coats of Paint
The prolific Two Coats of Paint blogger and painter Sharon Butler has invited Austin Thomas, a prime mover of the Bushwick art scene and creator of Pocket Utopia, to curate a painting show. This should be good. These two are Bushwick institutions, and Thomas will be drawing from a deep well.
