gowanus ballroom

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: art & events | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook

Gowanus Ballrooom is one of my very favorite spaces, one I can’t help updating and re-writing about again and again. (In fact, check out my article from their Fall 2011 show “Paint Works” on Gowanus Your Face Off!) The space, most of the time, is home to Serett Metalworks, but three or four times a year it gets transformed into a massive art spectacle. They’re doing so much to make a home for emerging and underground artists in New York, and every one of their shows is spectacular—and necessarily ambitious, given the sheer scope: the Ballroom is 16,000 square feet on two levels, with 50-foot ceilings. You have to slink down a super-sketchy dark alley on the canal to get to it, but oh, man, is it worth it.

The group shows feature outrageously great art from up to fifty  artists at a time, including huge metal sculptures, lush photographs, hyperreal paintings, abstract assemblages, quirky dioramas, stained-glass windows, woven cloth streamers, giant wooden installations you can climb around in, collages you can run your fingers through, intricate ink drawings, shifting projections, and more. Plus live entertainment! Aerialists like Seanna Sharpe (in her first performance since her stunt on the Williamsburg Bridge), fire dancers like Lady C and Flambeaux Fire, and of course bands, including Crooks & Perverts, Les Bicyclettes BlanchesApocalypse Five and Dime, Yula and the eXtended Family (from Hive NYC), and Morgan O’Kane, the absolute most phenomenal banjo player you’ve probably never heard (unless you ride the L train a lot). At the 2011 Art & Architecture Show, he played past 2 a.m., almost two hours of just the best music ever, and I haven’t seen so much foot-stomping, arm-flailing, whooping joy since… well, since the last time I saw Morgan play, I guess.

2011 Art & Architecture show

Crooks & Perverts, photo by Megan K O'Byrne

 

Q&A with Josh, the Ballroom’s founder, and Ursula, art show curator

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of the space.
Josh: I run Serett Metalworks, and I moved the shop here a year ago from Nostrand Avenue. This is twice the space I need, but it was the bottom of the economy crash, and when I saw the space I knew that I would use it for other things besides metalwork. It’s a fucking beautiful shit hole, I love it. It doesn’t make sense for me to run a metal shop here, because you can’t heat it in the winter, there’s always water leaks, and it gets too hot in the summer. But we deal with it. We build weird art and architectures structures, so the people who work here, it kind of inspires them to do better work, to be happier about their job. That’s a big part of it, just the beauty of this insane old place. It used to be a steel mill, a boatyard, a cannonball factory, a chemical factory. The history here is ridiculous.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: In the metal shop, is it all your projects? Do other people do their projects here too?
Josh: It’s mainly our shop where we fabricate our stuff, but I also work with all these different groups. Someone comes and says, “Hey man, I need lockdowns for this WTO protest, can you help me build them?” Or like Swimming Cities, a bunch of fucking hippies who are building pontoon boats they can collapse, ship to India, and sail five hundred miles down the Ganges River. How fucking cool is that? I want to support those fucking maniacs, because that is awesome.

photo by Ursula Viglietta

brooklyn spaces: What made you start doing art shows?
Josh: I always wanted the space to be dedicated to art and architecture and engineering, mostly because architects and engineers, their social life is so fucking boring. But it’s a really interesting group of people doing really interesting work, and I like the idea of art and architecture and engineering together, because there’s a lot of aspects of engineering and architecture that are art. So the idea was to have a space for all three. We did the first Art & Architecture show in early 2010. The whole thing was thrown together in two weeks, and it went real well. Then we did another one about six months later that was really successful and really fun. But I learned it’s a lot of fucking work putting on a show, it’s an insane amount of coordination, and the person who’s doing the coordination loses their mind not at the end, but halfway through.
Ursula: I stayed pretty sane.

Flambeaux Fire, photo by me

Josh: Yeah, I’m getting there. I’m just finishing the story. Anyway, it blew my mind how much work it was. So I was like, all right, if our next show is going to be twice as big, it’s going to be a major ordeal. So I asked Ursula to get involved, and she came in and took the steering wheel, coordinating, organizing, categorizing, social working, all this stuff that has to come with an intense art show. And it was a great move, she really handled the stress well. There’s a lot of fucking stress involved. We pick people who do great art, but when you do that, you’re going to be dealing with some characters. That’s where the social-working aspect comes in.
Ursula: I’m actually training to become a social worker, so it worked out well. I think my background is just the right balance of art and psychology. It was a challenge and it was fun. I like doing really difficult things. If I see something that looks like you can’t do it, I’m like, “Okay, let’s figure it out!” I met a lot of really great people, and it was pretty inspiring for me as an artist.

Morgan O'Kane, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What happens to the metal shop during a show?
Josh: Believe it or not, moving the whole shop out of the way only takes three or four hours. And while the art show is up, we’re still fucking welding and grinding. All my guys love it. Setting up for this show, every single one of them came and worked fifteen, twenty hours for free, just because they loved it.
Ursula: Of course, they snuck their own artwork in as well. I’d come in and be like, “Where did that come from?”

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: How do you think Brooklyn affect a space like this, or how does a space like this affect the future of art in Brooklyn?
Josh: The beauty of the Gowanus Canal is that it’s now a Superfund site, and that means that 2,000 feet from the edge of the water, in any direction, you can’t build housing or food service of any type. So this area is going to be a great place for about ninety years. There’s always going to be this nice mix of industrial industry and art studios. It’s not going to be McKibben Street—puke my brains out.
Ursula: There’s also an artistic community here that’s a little bit hidden, so it’s a really nice spot to have a new exhibition space, because we’re not competing with what’s going on in Williamsburg or Chelsea. It’s a place for emerging artists to do what they want, and it’s huge. I mean, to be able to invite people who do the kind of large-scale installations that we had, and to tell them, literally: “You’ve got two weeks. Build something.” Not many places can do that. Especially when you’re dealing with artists who don’t have a name, and you’re just trusting them. So I think that’s something that we can offer to the neighborhood, and to the art community in general.
Josh: I started off working for Cooper Union, working with a lot of pretty big-name artists, and I was really turned off by the art world, how nasty it was, the money, everything was just politics and crap. This space is great because we can do it our way. We just fill it full of cool shit, and people fucking love it.

Lady C, photo by Megan K O'Byrne

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any advice for other people who want to take on a project like this?
Josh: Just call us. You got something crazy? You think you have schizophrenia? That’s beautiful. Call us. We like that.

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Like this? Read about more art & events spaces: Monster IslandBig Sky Works, Red Lotus Room, Gemini & Scorpio loftHouse of YesCave, Rubulad, Vaudeville Park, 12-turn-13Werdink / Ninja Pyrate

dumpster pools

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: silliness | active: 2009 | link: website

update, Aug 2011: Macro|Sea, the brains behind this amazing project, are at it again. In conjunction with 3rd Ward, Artists Wanted, The Danger, and chashama, they’re putting on The Palms, “a late summer ode to the Boca Raton Resort Pools of the 1940s (with more music, spectacle and hedonism).” It’s not actually in Brooklyn, but I headed to Queens to see it, with Leila of everydaytrash, of course (read her take on it here). I thought it was totally fun! DJs and lounge chairs and fancy cocktails and a lobster roll truck—and, of course, the pools, which are pretty amazing to behold. Here’s a few pix by Maximus Comissar (but with my crappy camera).


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My brilliant friend Leila, one of my main blogging inspirations, writes an amazing garbage blog called everydaytrash.com. In 2009, she and two other trashies (visible trash and Ruby Reusable) started Decorative Dumpster Day, “the biennial holiday during which we take a moment to think about where we are depositing our waste by posting photos on blogs of decorated trash receptacles,” and this year she invited me to participate. Of course the first thing I thought of was the Dumpster Pools, which I’ve read about, but sadly never got to see. It’s one of the projects that caused the idea for Brooklyn Spaces to start percolating in my head, though, and I’m happy to pay tribute to a fantastically cool idea.

photo from current.com

ReadyMade Magazine broke the story. Inspired by a similar project in Georgia by Curtis Crowe of Pylon, in 2009 a trio of designers called Macro|Sea (Jocko Weyland, David Belt, and Alix Feinkind) decided to create functional guerilla art by repurposing Dumpsters into swimming pools. According to the group, the point of the project was to show that “with not too much expense, you can creatively reuse what is basically considered urban detritus and make something really cool and fun and also fairly easy to put together.” The Dumpsters were donated by a construction company, and then cleaned, sealed, lined, and filled with water—all in only twelve days. The pools opened on July 4th, 2009, and the group held very exclusive, invite-only pool parties all summer in a rented lot on the Gowanus Canal, which, in addition to the three pools, featured a BBQ grill, lounge chairs, a changing cabana, and a bocce ball court.

photo from superforest.org

In August 2010, the project was replicated in Midtown Manhattan, by invitation from Mayor Bloomburg. Macro-Sea has future plans to take the project on the road and set up Dumpster pools in strip malls all across the country, starting in Atlanta. With such a terrific intersection of practical reuse, summer fun, and serious silliness, the Dumpster Pools were a perfect Brooklyn summer project well worth sharing with the rest of the country.

pools under construction (photo from ramblinworker.com)

photo from readymade.com

Read more about the Dumpster Pools: ReadyMadeInhabitNew York TimesGawker, Brokelyn, Gothamist

Like this? Read about more public art & spectacle: Bring to LightLost Horizon Night Market, Broken AngelIdiotarod, Cathedral of Junk

proteus gowanus

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: museum & events | active since: summer 2005 | links: websitefacebook

The first time I went to Proteus Gowanus, I couldn’t find it. I walked around and around the block, checking and re-checking the address, and getting more and more confused. Finally I peered down a dubious-looking alley just around the corner from where it should have been, and sure enough, there was light spilling from a doorway halfway down. So, word to the wise: Proteus Gowanus is a little bit hidden, but it’s there.

Housed in a box-making factory from the 1900s, Proteus Gowanus is a multipurpose art space with a lot going on. It includes an art gallery with rotating and permanent exhibits, a micro-museum, a library, a reading and study room, an event space, and a collaborative nonprofit boutique of unique publications and “protean objects.” Proteus Gowanus has a broad scope, but all of its disparate parts come together to make a varied, fascinating whole.

Among their exhibits and projects:

  • The Observatory Room, an interdisciplinary event space that hosts discussions, film screenings, and lectures on a wide range of topics, from Parisian brothels to Italian medical museums to Haitian voodoo to American cartoons. (I’ve been to three Observatory events, and they’ve all been amazing.)
  • Morbid Anatomy, an outgrowth of the blog by the same name, featuring a collection of books, photographs, ephemera, and artifacts relating to anatomical art, cabinets of curiosity, the history of medicine, death and mortality, memorial practice, arcane media, and other topics.
  • Hall of the Gowanus, a micro-museum of local curiosities, including old Gowanus maps, pressed flowers from the region, a Gowanus historical timeline, and much more.

Hall of the Gowanus

  • The Fixers Collective, an idea that grew out of an exhibit in the gallery, which encourages people to bring in something broken, which the collective members make a collaborative effort to restore, mend, repurpose, or enhance.
  • The Reanimation Library, an almost whimsical permanent collection of outdated, worn, or discarded books.

Reanimation Library

  • Proteotypes, which extends some of Proteus Gowanus’s shows and exhibitions into the field of printed matter.
  • dedicated to assembling apparently incongruous ideas or forms to construct surprising yet meaningful compounds and dialogues.
  • The Writhing Society, a weekly class/salon dedicated to constrained writing.
  • A study hall and writers space in all galleries and reading rooms. (Membership only $50/mo!)

(photos from the Proteus Gowanus Facebook page)

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Like this? Read about other micro-museums: City Reliquary, Micro Museum