A Year After Record Floods, Gowanus Open Studios Returns
This year’s theme, “Gowanus Under Construction,” invited participants to reflect on the gentrification of the historically industrial Brooklyn neighborhood.
Gowanus Open Studios returned for its 28th edition this weekend with more than 400 artists, organizations, and businesses opening their doors to the public. Organized by Brooklyn nonprofit Arts Gowanus, the free public event spanned Pacific Street to 19th Street (traversable by a helpful digital map) on Saturday and Sunday — warm autumn days that make Brooklynites flock to parks for picnics and pack the leaf-covered sidewalks for relaxed meandering.
ArtsGowanus Executive Director Johnny Thornton, who also owns Brooklyn’s Established Gallery, told Hyperallergic that preparations for this year’s event were far “less chaotic for everyone, since we didn’t have the added stress of flooding.” Last September, a tropical cyclone flooded dozens of artist studios in the low-lying neighborhood, destroying numerous artworks and materials just weeks before the event. As a result, the 2023 open studios event also served as a fundraiser to help support artists who lost work to the storm.
For 2024, the event took on the theme “Gowanus Under Construction,” reflecting the increasing number of residential high-rises and mixed-use developments gentrifying the historically industrial neighborhood over the past two decades, similar to other Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Bushwick.
Still, despite this massive transformation, “the people here care so deeply about retaining a sense of community and neighborhood identity,” Arts Gowanus Program Director Emily Chiavelli told Hyperallergic, adding that local artists “are nothing but supportive of each other.”
This local enthusiasm ran throughout conversations with participants and visitors on Saturday afternoon across the canal-centric neighborhood. At a four-story former brewery at 87 Third Avenue, visitors followed arrows on paper signs up a narrow staircase to a cluster of studios subrented out by Brooklyn artist couple Ken Johnston, who was displaying several pencil drawings and oil paintings of cubic assemblages, and Sally Gil, who presented a series of collage works consisting of print media images and painted elements.
Neighboring their displays were alcohol ink paintings by Christopher Varmus, several large-scale abstract works by Hiroshi Tachibana, and a series of fleshy and floral canvases by Morgan Everhart. A previous participant of the Open Studios event in Bushwick, where she paid double in rent for a workspace, Everhart told Hyperallergic that she enjoys the Gowanus event’s “familial” atmosphere as many visitors tend to be “locals who have been here for a long time.” She added that it draws newer collectors who get to meet artists in person and build a connection, which she has found is a “big selling point for really locking in a sale.”
Carroll Street was a party at the buzzing Textile Arts Center, where visitors perused portable looms outside and tried their hand at embroidery at a community table indoors. On display were works by the center’s newest group of residents, including New York-based visual artist Malaika Temba, who presented an intricately woven aquamarine and green portrait, and Miami-born artist Mark Fleuridor, who exhibited a mixed-media work consisting of images of his fiancé’s hands holding flowers from his parents’ garden.
A few doors down the street, scenic painter Morgan Smith and her partner Dante Mann transformed the driveway in front of their apartment into a pumpkin-decorating station and outdoor exhibition of sculptures that included a hot-pink toilet filled with candy, an oversized baby bottle and can of Raid, a neon green crocodile head, and voluminous lips hanging from a blue pickup truck used as a parade float.
The energy continued over at ArtsGowanus’s hub at 540 President Street, where many artist workspaces were heavily hit by last year’s flooding. In the maze of studios on the basement level, fiddle music flowed down a corridor, drawing visitors into rooms featuring a 3D-printed spiked throne by David Kim, glass oyster sculptures and furniture pieces by Michael Potecha, and landscape paintings by Kim Mathews.
By the end of the day, Mathews had sold two works, including an oil rendering of a Maine sunset that she told Hyperallergic the buyer had remembered after initially attending last year’s Open Studios.
“I am realizing there's a real benefit to being in the same place,” Mathews said. “People remember you, and a lot of people come back.”
