A Guide to Bushwick Open Studios 2012

James writes:

If there was any doubt about the vitality of the outer-borough scene, just go to artsinbushwick.org and scan through the more than 500 venues now participating in Bushwick Open Studios, to take place June 1 through June 3.

This year BOS will include the neighborhood’s first art fair, cheekily called “Bushwick Basel” (with several participants from Ridgewood).

Here's also what I'm looking forward to:

• the final weekend for the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House installation.
• The shows at The Active Space. 
• The works of Dana Gordon (more here).
• My colleague Rebecca Litt
• The 1980s Bushwick photographer Meryl Meisler (whose work I first saw in Steve Malanga's history of Bushwick for City Journal)
• Cathy Nan Quinlan and Kurt Hoffman at Valentine Gallery (more here)
• Amy Lincoln and Kevin Curran
• Maps and Mimosas at Norte Maar
• Group painting organized by Julie Torres at The Coin Locker
• And a show at Sharon Butler’s studio honoring the blog Two Coats of Paint curated by Austin Thomas (whose pioneer Bushwick gallery Pocket Utopia has recently reopened on the Lower East Side).

Bushwick is the place to be for its sixth and biggest open studios this coming weekend. Visit artsinbushwick.org to make your own list.   

Deborah Brown, Freewheeling II (2012) at The Active Space

Meryl Meisler, Vanessa Mártir, Patricia O'Brien, Defying Devastation: Bushwick in the 80s, at The Living Gallery

Rebecca Litt, Elsewhere in the City (2011)

Dana Gordon, Untitled (2011)

Amy Lincoln, Breakfast Table

BOS2012 : Be sure to wear your walking shoes! Here's a map of the shows

 --adapted from "Gallery Chronicle," The New Criterion, June 2012

Ridgewood Comes into its Own

James writes:

History isn’t always so precise, but it’s possible to declare May 12 as the day when the arts of Queens came into its own. On that Sunday, the Queens Museum of Art organized what it promised would be a “historic art crawl” through an event called “Actually, It’s Ridgewood.”

The title was an amusing response—a declaration of independence aimed at Bushwick, Brooklyn, the neighborhood bordering Ridgewood that usually claims the Queens arts spaces as its own. The symbol for the event included a rendering of Arbitration Rock, the traditional border delineating the two boroughs, and included the motto “vere, Ridgewood est.”

Among the stopovers was the ersatz “Bushwick” gallery building 1717 Troutman, the influential galleries Valentine and Small Black Door, and the temporary sculpture garden, curated by Deborah Brown and Lesley Heller, now at the Vander Ende-Onderdonk House, the oldest Dutch colonial building in New York City.

The event became the talk of Twitter and was a coup for the Queens Museum (the Brooklyn Museum, which must need a trail map whenever it steps off Eastern Parkway, was notably absent from the proceedings).

The crawl also showed how this neighborhood, once the bastard child of Bushwick, is coming into its own.

One Ridgewood show I am especially looking forward to it Cathy Nan Quinlan and Kurt Hoffman at Valentine Gallery, opening June 1. 

There's a gallery in there: Valentine Gallery (red brick building), 464 Seneca Avenue, Ridgewood, Queens 

Cathy Nan Quinlan, The Morandi Series: The Candy Dish (2010). 

Cathy Nan Quinlan, The Footed Bowl (2009)

--excerpted from Gallery Chronicle, The New Criterion, June 2012

Carol Salmanson & Stephen Truax at Storefront Bushwick

Stephen Truax, Untitled (from the Xena series), (2011)

James writes:

Storefront Bushwick recently featured work by Carol Salmanson and Stephen Truax. 

Deborah Brown, the owner of Storefront Bushwick, has a particular talent for seeing cross currents and pairing artists. Salmanson makes wall sculptures of led bulbs, Truax paints geometric abstractions on canvas, but both artists seem to work with light.

Truax’s symmetrical forms are like the shapes of a kaleidoscope, sharing some kinship with the prisms that reappear in the paintings of Brooke Moyse and the floodlights of Halsey Hathaway’s circles—two artists who have shown here. Truax also revisits Bauhaus textile and the radiance of Charles Sheeler.

Stephen Truax, Untitled (2012)

At Storefront, he still seems to be working through a range of different paint handling, and I found the best pieces had the cleanest edges.

Carol Salmanson's medium: her collection of LEDs

Salmanson is also an experimenter, taking up the led, or light-emitting diode, as her medium. She uses these tiny bulbs and wires to carve out illuminated shapes on a plexiglass ground. The technique, clearly labor intensive, is full of promise, and Salmanson has a delicate sense for how the wires can become a form of drawing.

Carol Salmanson

The installation at Storefront had a remarkable glow, with some work using multicolored bulbs (made of old leds she has collected) and others with a more monochrome palette. I preferred the latter, which seemed more cohesive and did not overpower the compositions with multiple colors. I also question some of the shapes Salmanson traces out—calligraphic doodles that are then embedded with lights. The leds tie down many of these forms like little buoys, with the energy no longer running across the picture plane but radiating out as light into the gallery space. A different, perhaps simpler, approach to composition might solve these formal concerns.

--adapted from Gallery Chronicle, The New Criterion, June 2012