greenpoint – brooklyn spaces

no-space

oriana on 14 Jan ’13

space type: activism | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

No-Space is the current workshop for Not An Alternative, an art-and-activism collective that works to affect politics and culture through organizing, education, and partnering with community groups. The group is led by Beka, a progressive-nonprofit strategist, and Jason, an artist and video-production specialist. Not An Alternative’s old home, Change You Want to See Gallery, was an activism hub in Williamsburg in the mid 2000s, where the group hosted film screenings, lectures, workshops, and production meetings, as well as a rotating cast of collaborators, including the Yes Men, Reverend Billy, and members of the Barcelona activist collective Yomango.

all photos from Not An Alternative

The new space, in industrial Greenpoint, has coworking desks in the back and a production facility in the front. The group and the space have been very active in Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and many other Occupy and activist permutations. A large part of NAA’s disaster-relief contribution has been designing and producing visual symbols for the movement, such as vests, magnets, patches, and “way-finding” signs, to clarify and make physical the incredible work that Occupy Sandy has been doing since the superstorm hit. This work has been done in conjunction with Occupy Town Square, Pratt’s Disaster Resilience Network, and the Wise City.

Not An Alternative is always seeking coconspirators and collaborators, so get in touch to join in with their work. But first check out my interview with Jason!

Jason

brooklyn spaces: How did Not An Alternative come about?
Jason: It was created in the lead-up to the Republican National Convention in 2004. People had realized that reenacting tactics they’d seen in the sixties wasn’t going to work, so we had to think of different ways to affect transformation. Our space became an organizing and production hub. Every week we would hold a production meeting for a different group, and we would connect them with curators or people with space or materials, and just sort of help the whole thing get under way. After the convention and the election, we realized that we’d created an important thing. We were trying to decide how to continue it, and the next thing we realized, our neighborhood was under this massive rezoning. So we jumped into that, because it was really all the same thing. This is politics, this is globalization on a local level.

Change You Want To See Gallery

brooklyn spaces: So it evolved into a general gathering spot and workspace for creative activism, which became the Change You Want to See Gallery.
Jason: Yeah. We started hosting events around the same things, activism and technology theory. So it was brainstorming, theory, discussion, presentations, and workshops, and then production—taking all those ideas and putting them into practice with community groups, social movements, different campaigns.

brooklyn spaces: Are there community groups or campaigns that were particularly inspiring to you, or that you felt really worked?
Jason: We did some work with Picture the Homeless that I think was really good, after the crisis of 2008. We partnered with them on an action where they put up a tent city in a vacant lot. We pretended to be a film crew: we drove in with forty people, set up one of those white tents with tables and bagels, and shot a fake music video while our “stagehands” were in the back cutting down the fence and setting up the tent city. By the time the police came, the whole thing was erected. It got great media attention, we even had a story in the New York Times. There was a lot of pressure on Bloomberg at that moment, because he had just announced the results of a five-year plan to end homelessness, which had ended in an abject failure.

brooklyn spaces: What were some great presentations or workshops?
Jason: There were so many. Reverend Billy did the closing of the space, which was great. We had a great series called “Symbols, Branding and Persuasion,” where we had designers, activists, and people involved in branding talk about their practices. We had a friend of Beka’s who basically led the design team for Obama, we had someone who ran focus groups, we had the creative director of Interbrand, which is the largest branding company in the world. Activists are largely very alienated by advertising, it kind of suggests manipulation, but we tried to break those things apart.

brooklyn spaces: And Change You Want to See Gallery ended right before Occupy Wall Street, right?
Jason: Yeah, just a month before. By the time we left we no longer made any sense in Williamsburg anymore. We were across the street from the Knitting Factory, the Commodore, down the block from all those new restaurants; the whole scene was just completely different. We used to be outside on the sidewalk with table saws, and all the neighbors would send their kids over to learn how to make stuff. By the end we had people knocking on the door all the time going, “What kind of store are you?” So we got the new space in September, and then OWS happened, which thoroughly consumed us for a year. We even took over a second space downstairs that we used for production for awhile.

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk about the work you guys have been doing with Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Our work with Sandy is a continuation of the work we were doing with OWS. We saw Occupy as being fundamentally about the contestation of space, and we tried to focus that idea so it was clear to people. If you can articulate something, you can understand it. And if you can see it, if it has a material form, it can be reproduced. Zuccotti Park had a material form and was able to be reproduced in other cities. So for Sandy, we made construction vests that say “Occupy Sandy” on them, and we also made way-finding signs, which direct people to distribution centers where they can get medicine, lawyers, food, shelter, tools, information, or anything else. And then we went out and put up all the signs as if we had the authority to do so, right in front of the police and the National Guard. They let it happen because they know there’s a need for it, so it turns out that we do have the authority. This stuff is functional in terms of helping people find a location or a person who can help them, but it also affects the symbolic landscape in terms of making the Occupy network more visible. It transforms the relationship to power around the symbol, and around a certain kind of visual language code.

brooklyn spaces: And it certainly has echoes of branding, and of making sure there’s a public acknowledgment of who’s doing this. People outside of New York don’t realize how much of the relief work has been done by Occupy Sandy.
Jason: Although we do so much work with advertising, we’ve made a conscious decision not to describe what we do as branding. I rather think that we’re occupying the vocabulary of the public, the symbolic language that discusses public use of space. We’re not introducing a new “brand”; we’re inhabiting an existing vocabulary. That’s the way we talk about it.

brooklyn spaces: Got it. So having experienced the transformation of Williamsburg, and now the industrial edge of Greenpoint, do you feel that has had any effect on the way you organize or the way you run your space?
Jason: For sure. When we worked on the Williamsburg rezoning, our focus was on organizing the hipster community, because they were the least organized, due to all the things that make hipsters hipsters. The fact that they can’t self-identify as hipsters makes them unaware as a class, so unlike the Dominican or Latino communities who are like, “This is what we are, you can tell because we all have this tattoo,” the hipsters are like, “I have this tattoo and that means that I’m not part of any community.” But the neighborhoods we’ve been working with are also very creative, and we try to see how far we can push them toward becoming a creative political class.

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Jason: We would like to destabilize authority to the point that it becomes a question as to what was done by activists and what was done by a “legitimate” or existing authority. And I think that can actually happen. Our politics are about shifting culture, or shifting politics through transforming culture. I feel like this space is serving a very important role to social movements and community groups in terms of what we provide and what we’re modeling, ways of engaging in politics. So I would like to see it continue to grow.

***

Like this? Read about more activist spaces: The Illuminator, OWS art show, Bushwick City Farm, Books Through Bars, Time’s Up, Trees Not Trash, Brooklyn Free Store

ugly art room

oriana on 15 Oct ’11

space type: art gallery | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Ugly Art Room is a lovely little contradiction. They don’t have an art room, and the art they’ve got is certainly not ugly. They’re a group of four—Jen, Scott, Julie, and Martin—that make up a roving curatorial art project, putting on site-specific shows in nontraditional venues, including the Parlour Brooklyn hair salon, Brouwerji Lanes, The Gutter, Dandelion Wine, and Paulie Gee’s pizzaria, among others. Their aim is to explore the relationship between the artwork presented and the venue in which it’s displayed.

Martin, Julie, Jen, Scott. This & all photos courtesy of Ugly Art Room.

Ugly Art Room has their headquarters in the Terminal Building in industrial Greenpoint, along with the Fowler Arts Collective. They’re incredibly busy, having put on eleven shows and featured over a hundred Brooklyn artists in the year they’ve been active. In addition, Jen runs the popular neighborhood blog Greenpointers, and Scott is the director of the Distillery Gallery in Boston. For the incredible Bring to Light New York festival, Ugly Art Room contributed “Peep Show,” essentially a walk-up set of View-Masters, where several photographic works were displayed stereoscopically. Next up they have a collage show called “All That Remains” opening at Picture Farm on October 21st and running through November 19th. Definitely check it out! But first check out my interview with Jen and Scott.

"Peep Show" at Bring to Light New York

Scott: We actually want to start by saying that we’re really excited to be on Brooklyn Spaces, because we pride ourselves on the fact that Ugly Art Room doesn’t have a space. We only put on shows in venues that aren’t typically art-designated. I think showing art in alternative venues is absolutely a legitimate way of exhibiting these days. We’re able to expose so many more people to art.

"Noise Jam" at The Gutter

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so tell me about doing “Peep Show” at Bring to Light. What was that experience like?
Jen: It was unbelievably great. The light show is a big outward display, so I wanted to bring it inward and make our piece a more intimate experience. I’m a photographer myself, which means I’m a very harsh judge of photography, so I like that we presented it in a really unique but also weirdly traditional old-school way.

"Girls & Boys: An Undidactic Probing" at Dandelion Wine

brooklyn spaces: How was the audience response?
Scott: It was awesome. There was always a crowd of people waiting to see what it was. Curiosity for us is key. People couldn’t just see something projected on the side of a building and then keep on walking. They had to want to see what everyone else was seeing.
Jen: That was another idea behind it, that the viewer would become part of the show, because while you’re viewing, you’re being viewed. That’s what we were doing too, standing off to the side watching, listening to people’s reactions. We got such a kick out of it.

"Opening Rejection" on Bedford Ave.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some other shows you guys have done.
Jen: We did one called “Opening Rejection,” which was a 6 x 6 x 6 white cube with all the art bolted to the walls inside. Scott built that, It was its own piece of artwork with artwork inside. He’s basically a wizard; he built “Peep Show” too.
Scott: “Opening Rejection” was cool because we got to put it on in two different places. First it was part of Northside Open Studios. They closed Bedford Ave for Williamsburg Walks, and we put the cube on the street and watched hundreds of people walk by, kind of wonder “What’s going on here?” and then go in and figure it out. That was super. And then we put it on Governor’s Island for the 4Heads Fair, which was a blast. Another cool show was “B Is for Bear,” which we put on in a daycare center as party of Bushwick Beta Spaces. That was another event we were so lucky to be a part of, because it was so well put together and so well attended.
Jen: Another show we did was “Landing Jam,” which Martin curated. It was in Greenpoint, in the skylit hallway of a third-floor walk-up, and all the work was abstract painting. It was art I didn’t initially relate to, but the way he put the show together and the feeling of it inside the space was terrific. I think it was one of the best examples of what Ugly Art Room does.
Scott: There’s a new show that Martin is working on, it’s a two-person show, with one painting from each person, and we’re going to reuse the 6 x 6 x 6 cube, but it’s going to be in a boxing ring, so you’ll actually climb up into the ring, into the mini-gallery, to view these two paintings facing each other. He describes the work as very ego, very self-involved.

"B Is for Bear" at Beta Spaces

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being artists and curators in Greenpoint?
Jen: We love Greenpoint! Ugly Art Room started during Greenpoint Open Studios. The sense of community and the support for the arts here, not only among artists and art enthusiasts but also among local businesses, is phenomenal. Fowler had a big opening and where twenty local businesses donated hundreds of dollars worth of gift certificates and merchandise for raffle.

"The Man, The Myth, The Moustache" at Brouwerji Lanes

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired by living in Brooklyn?
Jen: Oh yeah, Brooklyn’s awesome. It’s always been a place that has identified itself outside of Manhattan. It has its own identity and its own grit and feel.
Scott: There’s so much talent here, the bar is set so high. You really have to give it so much more than your all in order to pull it off here, and that’s great. People respect it, people acknowledge it, people come out and support it. When you do put out the effort, it’s recognized, it’s not just lost in the shuffle.
Jen: It’s also a place where you can build your own community, your own scene. Ugly Art Room is building a community of art appreciators who look for art outside of traditional galleries, and I think Brooklyn is the perfect place to do that. A lot of people are here because they’re not into the art scene in Chelsea and they want to do something different.

"Head Space" at Paper Garden Records' Multiverse Playground

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future?
Jen: We want Ugly Art Room to continue to put shows in unique locations and be able to sustain itself doing that. I want to continue to show Brooklyn artists, but at the same time, I think it would be cool for Ugly Art Room to expand. New York’s awesome, Brooklyn’s awesome, but there’s an entire world of weird places out there.

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Like this? Read about more art galleries: Wondering Around Wandering, 950 Hart, Concrete Utopia, Central Booking, Invisible Dog, Micro Museum, See.Me

bring to light | nuit blanche new york

oriana on 12 Oct ’11

space type: public art show | neighborhood: greenpoint | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook

I’m a little late to the party; there have been dozens of articles written about this incredible public art show, from Free Williamsburg to Flavorwire to Greenpointers to Brooklyn Based. But the aim of Brooklyn Spaces is to make a compendium of creative ways to use space in Brooklyn, so of course I’m going to add my own gushing endorsement to this amazing festival.

Nuit Blanche started in Paris in 2001, and has since expanded into a global night of revelry in over thirty cities across the world, including Nuit Blanche Asterdam, Northern Lights Montreal, La Noche en Blanco in Madrid, and Roppongi Art Night in Tokyo. It happens every year on October 1, and brings millions of people out to experience free, site-specific art installations involving light, sound, and projection. New York’s festival is only in its second year, but despite this year’s chilly temps and intermittent rain, around fifteen thousand people of all ages flocked to an unappreciated (and stunning) corner of industrial Greenpoint for some absolutely amazing art.

With over fifty artists participating, the Greenpoint waterfront, alleyways, and a playground were utterly transformed. There were projections of people climbing up buildings, huge sculptures made of neon tubes, light-box photography displays, flashing and cascading lights synced to live music, and on and on. In good Brooklyn fashion, every other person had a fancy camera to try to capture the surreal night, there were several food trucks on hand, and the art was extra-rewarding and strange for those who ventured down the darker alleys or out to the pier. Some standouts for me included Amanda Long’s “Swings”, an “interactive video sculpture” featuring projections in real time of people on a swingset; Dustin Yellin’s “Surfaces for Rent”, backlit collages of architectural Greenpoint; “BOB” by Shai Fuller, Jocelyn Oppenheim, Jacob Segal, Bryce Suite, and Chris Jordan, which was an “environment for light” created at Columbia University; and Youth Poetry Illuminated, a traveling “poem-mobile.”

No interview in this post, but scroll down for more gorgeous photos from Julia Roberts!

Raphaele Shirley, "Light Cloud on a Bender"

Marcos Zotes, "CCTV / Creative Control"

Ellis & Cuius, "The Company"

Devan Harlan and Olek, "Suffolk Deluxe Electric Bicycle"

"Peep Show" by Ugly Art Room

Organelle Design and Elliot+Goodman, "Heavy Breathing"

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Like this? Read about more public art & performance: Dumpster Pools, Idiotarod, Lost Horizon Night Market

lifelabs new york

oriana on 19 May ’11

neighborhood: nomadic | space type: skillshare | active since: 2001 | links: website, facebook, twitter

In Brooklyn these days, we’re in the midst of a renaissance in shared learning experiences, like skillshares, interactive teaching, and different kinds of adult “ed.” There’s so many different avenues of nonconventional learning, from places like Brooklyn Brainery, TradeSchool, Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, Alpha One Labs, and The Commons, and series like OCD Lectures, Nerd Nite, Adult Ed. And one of the older groups focused experiential learning is LifeLabs NYC.

Started by social psychologist LeeAnn Renninger, who has a doctorate in urban ethology from the University of Vienna, LifeLabs is “an incubator for ideas on living wisely and well, offering courses, labs, and events for the common good.” What kinds of classes? Oh, awesome things like Yapper Lab (the art of better conversation), Sense School (fine-tuning your five senses), and Surprisology (adding surprise to every aspect of your life).

lost horizon night market

oriana on 9 May ’11

neighborhood: nomadic | space type: guerilla art | active since: 2009 | links: website

Okay, the Lost Horizon Night Market isn’t exactly a space, it’s more an idea contained in many, many spaces. But it’s such a spectacularly fun idea—and several of the awesomest nights I’ve had in my ten years living in New York—I couldn’t possibly not cover it.

The Night Market is a crazy guerilla art event, masterminded by Mark Krawczuk and Kevin Balktick (interview with Kevin below!). Every few months, dozens of people rent box trucks, make them over into interactive art installations, park them on an empty block in a desolate corner of Brooklyn, then roll up the doors and invite people in to play. The whole event only lasts about four hours, and then the trucks drive away and it’s like nothing ever happened. Melissa, who did the Campfire Truck with her art collective, Blood Dumpster, said, “The whole concept reminds me of gypsy caravans or traveling circuses in the way that they would roam from town to town, set up shop for the day, and then be gone by morning.”

photo by Maximus Comissar

At the Night Market in March 2011, some of the trucks I played in were: The Teapot Dome Disaster, where we all sat around a long table and were served green tea; Granny’s Attic, dense with clothes and dishes and books and detritus, all for the taking (I got a plate and a scarf!); Bass Tsunami Truck, where I walked along suspended planks and my whole body vibrated with the pumping bass; Space Truck, filled with fog, where moonmen urged us to “drink of the body of space” while proffering a goblet of punch; the Petting Zoo and BBQ Truck, in which, after cozying up to some very lifelike papier-mâché cows and pigs, we were served delicious cubes of barbecued pork; and the Smash Truck, where lucky participants went behind plexiglass and donned goggles to smash up old electronics with a hammer. Some trucks I missed: the Hot Tub Truck (yes, for swimming in), the Strip Truck (yup, with actual strippers), the Boxing Truck (with a ring and costumes for the competitors), and so much more.

The Big Quiz Thing, photo by Maximus Comissar

According to Melissa, “making a truck pushed me to think outside my normal boundaries. This was trying to immerse not just one person, like most art, but a large group of people into a different setting, and to play on the expectations of what they would find in the back of a truck.” The possibilities really are endless.

Noah, who did the Big Quiz Thing, a spinoff of his company of the same name, said, “This is the kind of thing we live in NYC for. I’m always amazed how much effort people put into things like this, expecting no financial reward. It renews your faith in the human race, and in the positive power of art.” I couldn’t agree more!

photo by Michael Blase

brooklyn spaces: What was the genesis of such a crazy project?
Kevin: Mark saw this pickup truck with a pagoda thing on top at Burning Man, and he thought they were serving sushi. It turned out that they weren’t, but he thought it was great and wanted to do something like it. There’s an event called Decompression that the New York Burning Man community puts on here, and he decided to do it there. I was working that night, and I was on the radio, and someone announced, “By the way, I would strongly suggest that everyone check out the secret Japanese noodle restaurant running out of a truck in the parking lot.” And, lo and behold, there was a fully functioning ten-seat restaurant serving freshly made noodles, running out of this rental truck. Mark did that a few more times, once in front of Rubulad, once in Dumbo, bringing the truck to different parties. And then we started thinking, “Let’s do an event where everything is in trucks!” The first official symposium for the Night Market was held in a truck parked behind a building in Dumbo, and the first Night Market was three or four blocks from there, during the Dumbo Arts Under the Bridge weekend about a year and a half ago. We had about ten trucks, and it was the only Night Market that will ever happen where every person got to see every truck. This past one is the fifth we’ve had in New York. San Francisco has had two. There are other cities that are interested in picking it up, too. It’s turned into a really nice project. And it started with Mark and the noodle truck at Decompression.

outside the Boxing Truck, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: I tried to get into the noodle truck, but the line was too long.
Kevin: Yeah, it gets pretty brutal.
brooklyn spaces: But they did a good job, they had someone standing outside giving haiku assignments to keep the masses entertained.
Kevin: That’s something we just learned. One of the San Francisco Markets had an Alice in Wonderland truck, and there was a guy at the back of the lift-gate telling riddles, and whoever answered the riddle got to go in, whether they’d showed up an hour ago or five seconds ago. That was the dawn of the line-based entertainment. I’ve got to do something for my truck next time, because I always have a line, and people are always standing there looking unhappy.
brooklyn spaces: Because especially as it gets later, you start to panic, since there’s so much left that you haven’t seen yet.
Kevin: Well there’s no way to see all of the trucks at this point. In theory if you spent exactly six minutes in each truck or whatever you could do it, but that’s kind of pointless.

inside the Teapot Dome Disaster, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How did you publicize it at the beginning?
Kevin: We didn’t. And the reason for that is because it’s an event with a very finite capacity. We’ve always said that the rule of thumb is: “Don’t invite anyone you wouldn’t invite to a party in your home.”

Circus Truck, photo by me

brooklyn spaces: As the originator of the event, how much authority do you bring to it? How much do you have to do?
Kevin: Technically speaking, we have no authority. These are all things that happen in public places, so from a certain perspective, we can’t tell anyone what to do. The planning really consists of getting our friends together and encouraging people to do trucks, helping them conceptualize and things like that, setting up the meetings and symposia, and then Mark and I drive around a lot and look for places that we feel would work right. It’s actually a sort of very reasonable amount of planning, because everyone is totally self-contained. It’s just not a ton of work for something that creates a lot of joy for a lot of people. Everyone involved does a little bit of work, but no one has to give their life up to make sure one of these things happens.

Campfire Truck, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What have been some of your favorite trucks?
Kevin: I’ve actually seen fewer trucks than most patrons, since I’m often presiding over my own. But some of the most memorable for me have been the Surveillance Truck, the Sleep EZ Motor Inn, the Hot Tub Truck, the Strip Truck, Make It Happen, the Smash Truck, and, of course, the Lost Horizon Noodle Bar.

brooklyn spaces: What are some you’d still like to do or see?
Kevin: There are so many ideas out there. My favorite clever idea that no one has done yet is the Needle in a Haystack.

Pillow Talk Truck, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Any final thoughts?
Kevin: The Night Market gives people a platform to realize projects without having to worry about renting a venue or promoting themselves. It’s a forum for DIY creativity and entertainment. We believe that it’s a nicer world when everyone can create with and learn from one another instead of relying on the world of commerce to tell you what to do and who to meet. We didn’t invent and certainly don’t own the idea of truck-based entertainment. Anyone can do this; you don’t have to wait for us to tell you when the next one is going to be. Rent a truck. Do something neat. Invite your friends. Have fun.

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Like this? Read about more public art & spectacle: Dumpster Pools, Broken Angel, Idiotarod, Bring to Light, Cathedral of Junk