swimming cities

chicken hut

oriana on 18 May ’15

[I’m counting down to the release of the Brooklyn Spaces book by doing one mini-post per day, sharing teasers of some of the places you’ll find in it. This is the last one—the book is out tomorrow!]

neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: living space | active since: 2000 | links: n/a

In a Brooklyn that gets more sanitized every day, there are still a few wild holdouts, and the Chicken Hut is one of the last men standing. “This is our reckless abandon studio,” says Greg H., who started the space with fellow woodworker JPL in the attic of what was then a working feather-processing factory. “It’s our home and the place where we’ve done every crazy fucking thing we’ve ever thought of.”

Chicken Hut bedroom [pic by Alix Piorun]

For fifteen years the Hut has been home to a revolving cast of more than 80 artists, builders, and renegade makers, from puppeteers to sculptors to luthiers. The space serves as an archive of their creations: robotic aliens, giant rubber sea creatures, and papier-mâché animal heads. Over the years the space has hosted art salons and open studios, as well as fundraisers for fellow artists, like Swoon and the Swimming Cities crew. And then there are the bikes. Chicken Hut is the unofficial clubhouse for the New York chapter of the mutant-bike-building group Black Label Bike Club. They’re also responsible for the annual freak-bike bacchanal Bike Kill, one of the craziest street parties of the year since 2002.

Chicken Hut founder Greg H. at Bike Kill 2014 [pic by Alix Piorun]

The Hut is also notorious for its parties—the crew throws a half-dozen jubilantly anarchic bashes each year, and each event contains many worlds: a dance floor helmed by housemate DJ Dirtyfinger here, a thrash metal band playing over there, a dirty marionette show down the hall, and a barbecue on the roof—with some 600 people bouncing back and forth among them.

Filthy Savage plays a wild party [pic by Walter Wlodarczyk]

The Chicken Hut is one of the longest-running underground outposts left in Brooklyn, a boisterous patched-together family that feels increasingly out of place amid the neighborhood’s myriad new condos and buttoned-up populous. The residents are currently in loft-law proceedings, and if they win, the building will be brought up to residential code and they’ll be granted the right to stay. “If I can’t live in this place, there’s no way I would stay in this city,” Greg says. “The grit and character this city is globally renowned for is just gone.”

Want to learn more about the Chicken Hut, and 49 other incredible Brooklyn Spaces? Buy the book!

flux factory

oriana on 7 May ’12

neighborhood: long island city | space type: art collective, nonprofit | active since: 1994 | links: website, facebook, twitter

all photos by Maximus Comissar (unless noted)

Yes, I know Flux Factory is in Queens. For what it’s worth, they actually started in Brooklyn—in the Monster Island building—and they’re one of the longest-running art collectives currently active. More importantly, though, they are, individually and as a group, terrifically creative, sensationally ambitious, and just unbelievably fun. I change the standards of what I’m going to cover on this site all the time, but the best way to sum it up is this: If I think something is fabulous, I want to cover it. And Flux Factory is fabulous.

some of the fabulous Fluxers

Housed in a converted greeting card factory in Long Island City, Flux has fourteen art studios and a staff of six. That’s around twenty people give or take, and in 2011 they held seventy-five different events (here’s a sampling), including art shows, installations, performances, screenings, workshops, lectures, and more. Everything at Flux is done, per their mission statement, with a “rigorous commitment to the collaborative process.” They have four major thematic group shows each year, involving art, performance, and community events, utterly transforming the gallery space each time. Recently there was “iSpy,” a “participatory collaborative game show” that encorporated guessing games, livestreaming, piñatas, feminism according to World of Warcraft, and tweets from the Flux toilet whenever it was flushed. Before that was “Banquet for America,” a month-long extravaganza that saw the gallery redone as an entire village, with a fifty-foot banquet table-cum-catwalk down the center and each artist manning his or her own shop, “selling” things like donuts and haircuts and feminist karaoke (I meant to sing “I Will Survive,” but I ran out of time). In addition, there are dozens of smaller projects, including educational initiatives, resident solo and group shows, guest-curated projects, Flux Radio, and a monthly potluck. There was a death match debate to discuss how artists are interacting with the #OWS movement. There have been lectures on social hijinx, interviewing skills, and kayak-building.

iSpy

Have I given you a sense of the incredible creativity and diversity of the artists in this group? This is why we live in New York, you guys, or at least why I do: to be able to see and participate in this kind of expectation-thwarting, envelope-pushing, rambunctious creative glee. And listen: the Fluxers are always looking for new friends, new volunteers, and new collaborators, so please, go on up to Queens and check them out. But first check out my interview with Executive Director Christina Vassallo, Residency Director Douglas Paulson, Press & Curatorial fellow Georgia Muenster, and artists Jason Eppink, Adrian Owen, and Richard Nathaniel.

brooklyn spaces: Is there a unifying theme among the artists here? How do you decide who gets to have a studio?
Christina: We’re not focused on a specific genre or discipline. It’s really people who are interested in working collaboratively; that’s our main criteria.
Douglas: Flux is an intentional community, and we rely on consensus-based decision making. The artists choose the next residents, conceptualize and generate the work for the shows, figure out who’s doing the chores. We discuss everything, and everyone has the right to object or bring new terms. Of course, there’s never unanimous agreement on anything, but after a discussion, the people who might not necessarily agree at least feel like they’ve had a chance to be heard. One thing that comes up a lot is the idea of “fluxiness,” which is a word we all know but no one can actually define. It’s the way we describe whatever it takes for someone to endure being part of this crazy mess.
Adrian: I think it’s wrapped up with the idea that we often take on ambitious projects that we’re not quite sure how we’re going to do and then figure it out as we go.
Georgia: Fluxiness to me is a cross between ingenuity and impossibility. And the color green.
Adrian: We want to make sure we’re perceived as professional as well as fun. So that’s part of fluxiness too, knowing that we have the heads behind all these crazy things we’re trying to do.
Jason: Yeah, but also? Fuck professionality. I think it’s more being able to execute what you can and pulling it through somehow. A lot of our peers don’t execute at the level we do. We actually make shit happen.
Georgia: We do so so so much. It’s kind of preposterous how much we do.
Adrian: Getting a fully functional administration rolling has allowed us to produce so much more.

Banquet for America

brooklyn spaces: Do you find any conflict between the organization required and the creative space of doing these sorts of projects?
Adrian: Yeah, that’s what we’re navigating all the time. It’s like herding cats trying to organize artists.
brooklyn spaces: Jordan from Silent Barn said exactly the same thing about musicians. Tell me about a favorite event or exhibit you’ve seen or been a part of here. I came to the opening of “Banquet for America” last month, and it was absolutely incredible.
Christina: That show was particularly fluxy in that it required extensive participation from the artists and the audience, with all the artists’ shops and performances. The more serious side of the show was an anti-capitalist statement about how mom-and-pop shops and independent retailers are getting pushed aside by big-box retail stores. Another show I loved was “Sea Worthy,” which, in typical Flux fashion, experimented with the boundaries of what an exhibition could be. It was in conjunction with the Gowanus Studio Space and EFA Project Space, and Swimming Cities contributed as well. We paired artists with boat builders to make a whole flotilla of artworks, and we brought members of the public around the New York City waterways. Again there was a serious discussion beneath the presentation: The water is the largest open space in New York City, and we wanted to show people that there are ways we can reclaim it.
Douglas: One of my favorites was “Congress of Collectives.” It was completely different from these sorts of spectacle-heavy shows. We invited representatives of more than thirty collectives from the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and we set up projects, discussions, panels, and talks designed to explore what it means to work collectively.
Georgia: One of my favorites was “Going Places (Doing Stuff),” our bus tour series, where you’d get on a bus and not know where you were going.
Jason: That’s what I was going to say too!

brooklyn spaces: I didn’t know that was a Flux project. Where were some of the places that you took people?
Jason: This was a three-summer project. The first year I went on three of them, and it blew me away, it totally made my summer. I wasn’t part of Flux then, but when I heard they were doing it again, I had to get involved. My friend Matt Green and I led one called “Quest for Immortality.” First we went to visit the Self-Transcendence 3100, which is a 3100-mile foot race around a single city block, started by the late guru Sri Chinmoy. Then we met Ashrita Furman, who holds the most Guinness World Records, and we set our own records, like “most people flossing their teeth with the same string of dental floss at once.”
Adrian: I beat some fifteen-year-old girl’s record for speed-eating a bag of Skittles.
Jason: Next we went to visit a monument of Crete that this old guy has been building in his yard in Bay Ridge, and then we went to Staten Island and climbed these abandoned liquid natural gas towers. We finished at Lemon Creek State Park, where this guy has been building rock cairns along the beach for about ten years. It used to be this trashy, gross place, and he has completely transformed it.
Adrian: I have two favorite Flux experiences: “The End of the End of the End,” the last show at the previous space, and “Housebroken,” the first show at this one. They were absolute mayhem from a curatorial standpoint, but just so much fun. Every single room had something happening in it at all times. There were like 200 artists involved in each. Every nook and cranny was programmed. It was intense and awesome.
brooklyn spaces: Did you perform or curate or make something for them?
Adrian: My metal band White Limo played both, and at “Housebroken” I sang opera in the shower with the door open and the shower curtain closed, wearing gold trunks. One girl actually pulled back the curtain because she probably thought it was a recording, and she just screamed and ran out.
Jason: Another awesome thing about that show was that everyone was invited to give us something we could keep, as a way to have artists help us finish the space. Most of the artworks that you see around this space came from that show.
Richard: I think my favorite experience is the monthly Flux Thursday. It’s all the people you know and tons of people you don’t, and everybody’s showing work and drinking and talking and high-fiving.
Georgia: Those are potlucks. We love to feed people.
Richard: Also the Greenpeace stuff was dope. We worked with them to sell real estate on top of black coal mountains. Just light stuff, you know.
Adrian: It was the performance-art portion of a project for a coal awareness tour they were doing with one of their Ice Breakers. It was in Chelsea Piers, right next to the driving range. One of our artists got hit by a golf ball.

brooklyn spaces: So when an artist has a studio here, is it only about working collectively?
Douglas: No, everyone here is pursuing their individual art and their own career in one way or another as well.
Christina: Through the years we’ve gotten really good at focusing on the collaborative aspects, and now we’re starting to get better at nurturing the individual simultaneously.
Douglas: Flux used to be a lot of people in their early twenties who just got out of school, but now it’s older, more serious. We had a Fulbright Scholar here, we have career artists. But we’re extremely conscientious about maintaining the existing community. We’ve dedicated one studio to people who have had a residency here already, so there are always former residents coming back. That’s extremely important, and it’s something that we’ve been very conscious of as we’ve transformed to a formal residency program: how to maintain that kind of cohesive fluxiness.

brooklyn spaces: How do you think Flux is affected by being in Long Island City?
Christina: There are so many things we get here that we wouldn’t get anywhere else. If we were in Manhattan we’d just be another group fighting for the same resources and the same eyeballs and audience.
Adrian: It definitely makes it harder to attract foot traffic, though. Queens holds such a stigma—even though it’s easier to get here than to most of Bushwick. It’s like, “Did you say Queens? I don’t know, man.” So that’s a big hurdle.
Georgia: It’s somewhat absurd to me; there are dozens of arts organizations out in Long Island City. Sculpture Center, Noguchi, PS1, Fisher Landau, Socrates Sculpture Park, Museum of the Moving Image…
Douglas: And the fact that we’re not in Brooklyn has allowed us to make our own identity rather than being just another Bushwick space.
Jason: I feel like if we were in Brooklyn we’d be overrun. I think it’s kind of to our advantage that people think it’s not as easy to get here. The people who want to get here, get here. It’s already an awesome, big community.
Adrian: We’re starting to get a few relationships locally. We’ve been here long enough, and people are starting to figure out what we’re up to.
Jason: I love that the people from the neighborhood see us as these crazy art people. We get to be that for a lot of New York. My first experiences of Flux were like, holy hell. This is much better than art. It’s wacky and playful people doing really exuberant things. I actually think that gets back to what fluxiness is. I think that’s sort of our legacy.
Adrian: I totally agree. That’s exactly what happened to me. I had a friend who lived in Queens and I was like “What? I’m not going over there.” And then Flux asked my band to play, so I made the trek—and I’ve been here for seven years. My eyes were opened in a whole new way. I was like, “You can do this?”
Georgia: It’s the same story for me too. The sense of playfulness is just unmatched anywhere else.
Jason: There’s no context for this sort of stuff in mainstream culture. To be exposed to this happening? It’s amazing.

***

Like this? Read about more art collectives: The Schoolhouse, Rubulad, Swimming Cities, Monster Island, The Hive, Arch P&D, Silent Barn

oriana on 3 Oct ’11

neighborhood: gowanus (and the world!) | space type: art collective | active since: 2001 | links: website, blog, facebook, twitter

update, Nov 2011: Want to see some absolutely amazing photos from Swimming Cities’ incredible trip down the Ganges in India? Check ’em out on their blog here.

***

With this post, I am thrilled to say that I’ve covered all the spaces that inspired me to start this project! Not that I intend to stop; I’m just really excited to have finally gotten to talk to everyone I’d initially set out to, and to celebrate all their crazy brilliance.

So let’s talk about the crazy brilliance of Swimming Cities. They’re a nebulous art collective of somewhere between ten and thirty people who build boats out of found materials and sail them all over the world. The boats themselves are essentially floating works of art, and the group does visual, musical, and dramatic performances atop them as they go. The first project, started by Callie (aka Swoon) and assorted friends, was the Miss Rockaway Armada (since splintered into its own collective), which went down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to St. Louis in 2001. The next project, Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, went down the Hudson River, from Troy to Deitch Projects in Long Island City, in 2008. Then in 2009, Swimming Cities of Serenissima sailed down the Adriatic Sea, starting in Slovenia and winding up in Venice to crash the Biennale. And now, in September 2011, Swimming Cities Ocean of Blood is making their way down the Ganges in India, starting in Farrukhabad and ending in Varanasi for the Diwali festival.

photo by Tod Seelie, from Arrested Motion

They’re a well-connected group in the Brooklyn underground & art communities. Over Swimming Cities’ history, all manner of artists and collectives have taken part, including members of the Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Infernal Noise Brigade, GreenBusTour, Black Label Bike Club, Flux Factory, and dozens more. Much of the initial work on the Ocean of Blood boats was done at Serett Metalworks, and they throw crazy themed fundraising parties at the Gowanus Ballroom, Electric Warehouse, Chicken Hut, the warehouse on Ten Eyck, 285 Kent, and lots of others. The collective is also naturally involved in the Burning Man community and participates in Maker Faire, often winning awards for their ingenious floating creations. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign to help them get home from India, but first check out my interview with Orien (third from left) and crewmember Angie (far right).

Ocean of Blood crew

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?

Miss Rockaway Armada boat

Orien: I had a boat and was living on the Gowanus Canal, and Callie lived a few blocks away. We met at Pratt, and she would hang out on my boat and we’d talk about building a floating performance art space. Then I left and spent some time in India, and she did Miss Rockaway Armada with several other artists. After that we did the Hudson River and Venice projects together, and then Callie was giving the project up, so I asked her if I could keep it going. India was the obvious choice for me; it’s my favorite place. But there was a lot of ambiguity about whether this would actually happen. I’m not a famous artist, I don’t have any money, I don’t have backing. But it gradually gained momentum, and now Swimming Cities has a presence beyond its association with Swoon and the other projects.

boats in Venice, photo by Tod Seelie, from Brooklyn Street Art

brooklyn spaces: Before we get too much into India, what was it like being in Venice for the Biennale? How was the reception?
Orien: Being in Venice with a boat is so much fun. I don’t recommend going there if you can’t get a boat, it’s just going to drive you crazy. And the reception was great, everybody loved it. Except when we went into the Arsenale, which is a military base, like a fortified marina, this big square with water and some sort of promenade around it. We went in there with Dark Dark Dark playing on the roof we and tied up the boats, and they came and cut our lines and told us to fuck off. But come on, we basically came uninvited in junk boats, so of course they did that.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so now tell me about India. How many of you are going over, how many boats do you have, how did you set it all up?
Angie: There’s five boats, eight people are going, and we have a couple of Indian people there. We sent a scout a few of months ago, and he lined up places for us to stay and to store stuff, and people to help us, and institutions and permits and things like that.
Orien: They government wanted to know what we were doing. They don’t want to be like, “Oh, you’re doing a performance? Great!” and then you get there and quarter a cow or do something really offensive. But we got a letter of support from the Ministry of Culture that says something like, “Your project is not specifically offensive to us from a cultural perspective.”

sketch for part of the Diwali performance

brooklyn spaces: The highest praise. What are the performances going to be?
Orien: We’ll be pretty far out on the water, so it’s not practical or logistically possible to have sound or a plot. It’s going to be a gradual, five-day visual performance with a very vague narrative. It’s kind of like architectural puppetry.
Angie: We’ll have a big mechanical sculpture involving lights and movement, and at the end the boats come apart.
Orien: It sort of demonstrates the function of what makes the object interesting.

five boats in radial formation, photo by Ben Mortimer

brooklyn spaces: What do you guys do in between trips?
Angie: We have a lot of events. Most of them are fundraisers, but this summer we did the Battle for Mau Mau Island in Gerritsen Beach, where we got all our friends to form boat gangs. There was a race, a battle, and boat jousting.

West India Day fundraiser, photo from Laughing Squid

brooklyn spaces: What’s your motivation for doing this?
Orien: I’m really interested in boats as pieces of architecture, as objects. I come from an industrial design background, that’s what I went to school for. And all these people really enjoy being a family and having a common goal that isn’t about money or the banality of the homogenized world of bullshit. So I just keep doing it. It’s a reaction to the alternative. To exist in the actual world isn’t really an option for me; if I don’t do this, what the fuck am I going to do?

Bordertown party at Electric Warehouse

“Caddywhampuss,” which won Best in Show at the 2010 Maker Faire, photo from Makezine

brooklyn spaces: What’s next for you guys?
Orien: We’re probably going to go to Russia, down the Volga river to Moscow. I really want to go to Lake Baikal, which is one of the world’s largest lakes, it represents one-sixth of the world’s fresh water. It’s got seals and underwater caves, it’s insanely deep, and it’s in the middle of Siberia, there’s nothing near it. And surrounding Moscow is the Golden Ring area, the oldest part of Russia, so you have this really old architecture and culture.

welding pontoons with a martini, photo by Mayra Cimet

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired as an artist by being in Gowanus, or in Brooklyn in general?
Angie: We were totally lucky to have Josh get that shop on the Gowanus.
Orien: Oh yeah. We built the first boat in this tiny place on Nostrand Avenue, and then Josh was like, “Guess what? I’m getting a new shop and it’s insanely massive and it’s on the Gowanus Canal.” It was just the most ridiculous luck we’ve ever had. This project wouldn’t have happened without Josh and Serett, it literally would not have. But other than that, I don’t find New York especially inspiring. It’s basically an impossible place to get anything done.

brooklyn spaces: But overall, has this been a rewarding experience?
Orien: Definitely. I have all the things I was looking for. We have the best friends anyone could have. We have something to do that isn’t awful, that doesn’t contribute to the greater horror, that doesn’t hurt people. No one has gained anything from what we’re doing, except maybe the beer distributors. Other than that, no one’s getting rich off us, which is nice. That’s about all you can ask for.

photo from Pipe Dream Museum

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Monster Island, Hive NYC, The Schoolhouse, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Flux Factory

egg & dart club

oriana on 13 Jul ’11

neighborhood: ft. greene | space type: social club | active: 2010–2012 | links: blog, facebook

Egg & Dart was a social club just off the Brooklyn Navy Yard in Ft. Greene run by Alita and Angie, service-industry veterans who are well connected to the Brooklyn creative scene, regularly bartending at places like the Red Lotus Room and Rubulad, and involved with the fantastic Nonsense NYC. At Egg & Dart, they hosted a slew of events, including weekly poker nights, barbecues, live music, craft parties (bonnet making!), gardening classes (terraria!), gay brunches, film screenings, and more. They collaborated with Flux Factory, Swimming Cities, DJ Sticker Guy, Bonnie Montgomery Trucking, applewood, Alan Lomax Archive, Quince Marcum, and Lamia Design. They closed their doors in the summer of 2012.

photo from Egg & Dart's Facebook

The first time I went was for the Rooftop Sprinkler Slushie Hootenany, a potluck barbecue with music sets by the Home for Wayward Drummers. It was a beautiful night and the party was lovely, mellow and relaxed. The few dozen people were of all ages, with a handful of dogs running around underfoot. The music was awesome, the food was great, and everyone was incredibly welcoming.

Q&A with Alita and Angie

brooklyn spaces: How did you pick the name?
Alita: The space used to be a social club, in the seventies, and they had egg-crate foam all over the walls because of the sound. I think it was called the Egg Drop Space, so Egg & Dart came out of that.

photo from Egg & Dart's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What made you decide to start a social club?
Angie: We’ve been talking about it for a really long time, and looking at spaces, and when we found this one, we decided to go for it.
Alita: Angie and I both work in the service industry, and we’re interested in bringing the skills we have from that—like getting people together, and creating a special space and occasion—to meet the amazing weird art projects we work on the rest of the time, and the people involved. I’m a bit of a matchmaker and a people collector, and I love nothing more than introducing some of my favorite people to other favorite people.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: Is there a division of labor between the two of you?
Alita: We work really well together. The labor falls kind of naturally between different things that we’re inclined to do. We pretty much do it all together.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What’s your favorite event you’ve done?
Angie: Oh, there have been so many good ones! We get such a great crowd, it’s always really mellow, nice people, very friendly, a very good vibe. I can’t pick a favorite, they’re all so good.

photo from Egg & Dart's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What made you pick this neighborhood?
Angie: Our studio is really close, just a couple blocks down. And I love the neighborhood, I’ve spent a lot of time here. There’s metalworkers over there, our next-door neighbor has a vintage shop; it’s just mechanics and nice people all around. We were lucky to find something here.

photo by Rachel Eisley

brooklyn spaces: What are your goals for the future of the space?
Alita: I’d like to have more people doing more stuff. We have a theatre director coming to look at the space, and we’re trying to find someone to help us book music, and someone to build up the gardens. There’s a lot of possibilities for collaboration.
Angie: We love people who want to work with us, because that makes it more fun. That’s really the point. It’s not just our thing; we like everyone else’s ideas too.

photo from Egg & Dart's Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Has anything about doing the space surprised you?
Angie: It’s kind of like an organic thing that changes and goes in different directions, but that’s what makes it fun and interesting. We don’t know who’s going to come to us next!

***

Like this? Read about more collaborative event spaces: Page Not Found, Hive NYC, Greenroom Brooklyn, The Schoolhouse, Bushwick Project for the Arts

gowanus ballroom

oriana on 12 May ’11

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 Blanches, Apocalypse 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 Island, Big Sky Works, Red Lotus Room, Gemini & Scorpio loft, House of Yes, Cave, Rubulad, Vaudeville Park, 12-turn-13, Werdink / Ninja Pyrate

bushwick print lab

oriana on 10 Apr ’11

neighborhood: ridgewood | space type: commercial & studios | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook

I hope I’m not going to have to change the name of this blog; Bushwick Print Lab is yet another space (like Silent Barn and Arch P&D) that is—technically, and only barely—in Queens. But it’s such a neat space, I had to cover it. BPL is a collective silkscreen studio where you can contract printing projects from very talented printers, or rent space and time to do it yourself. They offer basic silkscreening and textile printing workshops, too. Hourly rates begin at $25, monthly at $125, and their equipment includes a 44-inch exposure unit, a coating and drying room, a power washer and back-lit washout, flatstock printing tables, large paper drying racks, four-color tabletop presses, a flash unit, discounted paper stock, t-shirts, and inks—all the tools a screenprinter needs. In addition to being involved in the greater Bushwick art community, BPL does month-long art shows whenever someone wants to curate one. So read my interview with Ray, and then get in touch with him to start doing some projects!
brooklyn spaces: How do clients find you?
Ray: It’s mostly friends of friends and word of mouth, although if you Google “silkscreen” and “Brooklyn,” we come up pretty high. There aren’t a lot of labs like us. We have most of the tools that you need, although it’s not necessarily the highest-end, or the most expensive production. We’re more DIY, for artists. There are a few others, like ABC No Rio is the one that most people know, where you put $5 in the coffee can and you coat your screen and go, but we’re a little more professional, for things that have to be precise, with no fingerprints.

brooklyn spaces: What kinds of clients do you get?
Ray: We’re pretty affordable and open to different people, so it’s a little bit of everything. We have high school kids come here, and we have career printmakers. We get a lot of people from the digital art world who want to do something more physical. We get activists; we just did the plaques for the Ghost Bike Project, and the Yes Men have a screen here right now. We made a screen for Swimming Cities. SVA and Parsons have even had classes come here. And then of course lots people from bands.

brooklyn spaces: Is it just you running the whole thing? Is there a staff?
Ray: It’s sort of a benevolent dictatorship. I’m the one who runs it, and I tend to use the space more than everyone else because I’m doing my own jobs to help pay for it. But there’s a few other people who have been helping out: Kevin from Just Seeds works here one day a week, and Melissa, who’s an assistant for Molly Crabapple and does Dr. Sketchy stuff, she does admin assistance. And we had an intern, Ben, he’s from this Walkabout program in Westchester, he was here for six weeks. That‘s basically the staff.

brooklyn spaces: Why did you pick this neighborhood?
Ray: It’s the neighborhood I know, I’ve been working out here for four or five years. And my friend Todd, he and all these people from Graffiti Research Lab needed to move studios, so we moved in together. I love the building, and our neighbors are great, like Yarn Wire, Regina Rex Galleries, Brooklyn Salsa Company, and Lang Percussion. Plus it’s just a nice area. We’re technically in Queens, which is interesting. You can really tell; it’s industrial Bushwick until you get to Cypress, and then it’s all row houses. It’s a whole other life in Queens, it turns out.

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you want to tell the world about BPL?
Ray: We’re happy to work with people, and we try to do it as affordably as possible. It’s been really nice doing this, everybody who works is here really cool and supportive and interested in each other’s projects. It’s been working out. I’m really happy about everything.

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Like this? Read about more makers: Werdink, Gowanus Print Lab, Pickett Furniture, A Wrecked Tangle Press, Metropolis Soap, 6 Charles Place, Arch P&D, Gowanus Ballroom, Urbanglass, Better Than Jam, 3rd Ward