With over 200 artists participating in GO Brooklyn in my neck of the woods of Greenpoint, I decided to beat the crowds and visit the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, choosing the last page in the festival brochure with the least amount of artists participating: Coney Island. Here’s what I found.
Art
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GO Red Hook: Three Themes Observed
When the artists of Red Hook, the waterfront neighborhood on the western edge of Brooklyn, opened up their studios for the GO Brooklyn weekend, it felt more like they opened Pandora’s box. There was no limit to the creativity on view — every trend, mannerism, style, and strategy imaginable was on display. Still, certain threads emerged from the time I spent exploring. The three themes that I spotted in Red Hook were glass vessels, dot fields, and the Old Testament.
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Faultline: An Interview Exploring Glitch Art
What do you do when the technology you depend on every day messes up? Instead of getting frustrated or throwing a machine out, Phillip Stearns makes art out of errors. We talked to Stearns in his Brooklyn studio about glitch art and bringing technological bugs into the home.
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Reading Beyond the Page
The other day I saw two solo exhibitions: The Words by Jen Mazza at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery and Game Plan by Alighiero Boetti at MoMA. Both artists want to show you what they value in their lives, but they use their inspiration to different ends. Mazza paints unassuming still lifes of books. Boetti, on the other hand, used various lines of attack to realize his many projects, which ranged from sculpture to mail art to collaborative embroideries.
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GO Crown Heights: Away from the Hype
I’m skeptical of crowd-curating and crowd-sourced art-prize voting. I’ve written about it here on Hyperallergic. Still, as the date approached, I found myself really excited about this past weekend’s GO open studios event, organized by the Brooklyn Museum — not because I wanted to vote for who would win a show at the museum (I’m not voting), but because I wanted a chance to meet artists in the neighborhood where I live, Crown Heights.
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How Lawyers Ruined a Great Photograph [UPDATED]
Photographer Mo Gelber captured this rather romantic moment outside the Manhattan Criminal Court on August 16. He entered the image into the Project Imaginat10n contest organized by director Ron Howard and Canon. Gelber’s photo is obviously quite powerful but the contest administrators let the photographer know that they needed written permission from the subjects in the shot in order to qualify.
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The Art World Needs Some Shock Therapy
It all started with a write-up on the Gallerist blog about Jordan Eagles’s new show at the Krause Gallery where his blood paintings are currently displayed. I immediately cringed when I went on a journey following all of his press, posts about him on Facebook and Twitter, and real life opinions with real life people. Everyone seemed to be so in awe of paintings made out of blood, finding it so shocking that someone could use such an “unusual” and “disgusting” material to create something so beautiful. All I could do was roll my eyes.
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Giant Rodent Menaces Chicago
CHICAGO — Chicago has a rat problem, and you would be justified in thinking that Belgian street artist Roa is paying tribute to the tenacious rodent. According to the Chicago Urban Art Society, which arranged for Roa to bring his distinctive style to this neighborhood, it is in fact a possum.
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GO Sunset Park: An Emerging Art Community
The waterfront of Sunset Park in south Brooklyn was a major hub for military shipping and related industry from the world wars until its decommissioning in 1960, and, as happens with underused monumental warehouse spaces, artists have now moved into some of these towering structures. This past weekend’s GO open studios, organized by the Brooklyn Museum, were all about engaging the borough with its local artists in a community curation project for a December group exhibition, so I decided to explore the studios of artists creating work in these relics of industry lining the Brooklyn shore.
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A Map That Never Stays the Same
Sun Tzu’s Sixth Century treatise, The Art of War, is one of the precursors to Gertrude Stein’s How to Write (1931). Written in different epochs, under different dark clouds, war either in progress or just around the fork in the road, these manuals are invaluable to an understanding of writing and the written, but in dissimilar ways. The primary difference is that Sun Tzu believed in narrative, with its carefully constructed beginning, middle, and end. It was an arc, though not a rainbow.
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When an Immovable Object Meets an Unstoppable Force
On Sunday, my Hyperallergic Weekend colleague Claudia La Rocco published a piece in The New York Times titled “Museum Shows With Moving Parts,” which explored the expanding presence of dance in museum settings.
