BKLYN Magazine, Fall 2003
“Making A Big Scene” (excerpt)
By Howard Halle

Brooklyn has always harbored some of the nation’s greatest artistic talents – think of Walt Whitman – but for much of its history, the borough’s cultural ambitions were eclipsed by Manhattan’s. “High growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear skies,” is how Whitman described the most obvious manifestation of “the city’s” aspirations, and those spires cast long shadows indeed. It was hard to attract attention as a visual artist in Brooklyn – and even harder to show your work here.

But times have changed. So much so, for instance, that some art experts – okay, many of them from Brooklyn – are now saying that Williamsburg has now supplanted Chelsea as the place for artists to work and show. “Williamsburg is the engine of the art world,” says dealer Jessica Murray, who runs a gallery on North Sixth Street. “This is where most art is made. All the studios are here. People’s storages are here. This is where everything is created, and then it’s exported to different places.

Charlotta Kotik, who has been curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art for 20 years, agrees. “It’s a very exciting scene here,” she says. “In Brooklyn, ideas are being born. Pieces are being created and being shown and being sold – then being transferred into the consciousness of the greater art world.”

True, for the last half of the 20th century Manhattan was the global center for exhibiting art, first in SoHo and then in Chelsea. But Chelsea, where galleries moved after developers turned the once-bohemian area south of Houston into a shopping mall, has never been an artists’ neighborhood. It lacks that all-important ingredient called “dialogue” in the trade – the dynamic interaction that occurs when the producers and distributors of art exist side by side. Brooklyn has dialogue in spades, especially Williamsburg, where some 35 to 40 galleries devoted to young artists have sprung up since the mid-‘90s. “It used to be that Williamsburg was just a making center,” says Murray, 36, whose gallery, Jessica Murray Projects, opened a month after 9/11. “Now it’s a making-and-exhibiting-and-selling center.”

Williamsburg is actually experiencing a second and even a third wave of galleries. The neighborhood’s first spaces (Annie Herron’s Test Site and Mike Ballou’s Four Walls, both from the early ‘90s and now closed) were really meeting places for artists. The scene’s current eminence grise, Joe Amrhein, age 50, was setting out to create the same thing when he started the Pierogi gallery in the loading dock of an old warehouse on North Ninth Street back in 1994. A West Coast native, Amrhein had come to Williamsburg a few years earlier as an artist looking to break into the New York scene; Pierogi, whose name is an homage to the neighborhood’s Eastern European community, was originally his studio.

“The idea was to present really good art that I saw around from friends of mine who weren’t being exposed in Manhattan,” he says, sitting in his current – and far more spacious – studio on the second floor of he building next door. “It was a way to entice dealers and curators to come out and look at art without the involvement of a studio visit. There weren’t expectations on either side.” During the week, he’d do his own work – large layerings of texts, lettered sign-painter style – and then open Pierogi for shows on the weekends. Artists who had first exhibits there include James Siena, who now shows his dense abstractions at Gorney Bravin + Lee in Chelsea, and the late Mark Lombardi, whose conspiracy-theory drawings will be shown this fall in a retrospective at the Drawing Center.

Their success is reflected by Pierogi’s own; recently the gallery sold some work by a young self-taught artist named Carey Maxon to the Museum of Modern Art. “I’d never really had this idea of getting big collectors out here,” Amrheim admits. ‘It was more about this idea of dialogue and community. But then it just kind of grew.” Now, Amrheim represents artists like Robert Lazzarini, whose work was a standout at the Whitney Museum’s 2001 “BitStreams” survey of digitally influenced art.

Still in the scrappy start-up mode is Jack the Pelican Presents, a gallery just a few blocks from Pierogi. Opened less than a year ago by partners Don Carroll, 38, and Matt Zalla, 31, the gallery gets its unusual name from a conversation Carroll had late one evening with a stranger in a bar in Hawaii. ‘He kept talking about this artist, Jack the Pelican,” says Carroll, sitting in the back room of the gallery on Driggs Avenue. “I asked him where he’d seen this artist’s work, and he replied, ‘MoMA.’ And I said, ‘MoMA? How come I’ve never heard of him?’ And he began describing the work. I realized he’d been mispronouncing Jackson Pollock’s name.”

Jack the Pelican specializes in work that has a “conceptual or performative edge,” as Carroll puts it. He mentions two artists who will be showing there in the fall: Laura Emrick, whose Plexiglas sculptures and photo pieces propose the colonization of Mars; and David Shapiro, a documentary filmmaker who also creates elaborate installations with the detritus collected from his life. Zalla, an anthropologist, and Carroll, a writer and former independent curator, run Jack the Pelican in the same artist-entrepreneur mode followed by Amrheim. It’s a spirit they say is fostered by the neighborhood where they’ve lived for some six years. “There’s a freedom, an energy that is very supportive of creativity,” says Carroll. “Anywhere you go, people over here are thinking about things, they read books, they’re alive. I think that’s less and less true of Manhattan.”

Jessica Murray agrees. “The environment here is so dynamic and so interesting,” she says, sitting in her office as a selection of new video works blares from the gallery out front. “It’s extremely authentic. The commercial market is not the first thing out here. The first thing is art-making.

Murray’s operation is markedly different from Pierogi and Jack the Pelican. She is first and foremost a gallery professional, undistracted by other concerns. “My background is in art history,” says the Poughkeepsie native, a graduate of Bard College’s curatorial studies program. “I think that gives me a certain necessary distance from the artists I show. I don’t know how you could be an artist and give another artist a show, but that’s just me. I’m very competitive.”

That attitude is reflected in the look of her space. While both Pierogi and Jack the Pelican retain a whiff of let’s-put-on-a-show funkiness, Murray’s sleek digs look like a Chelsea gallery in miniature. Still, like Amrhein, Carroll, and Zalla, Murray is a longtime resident of Williamsburg who, by her own description, is “deeply invested” in the neighborhood. “Someone asked me the other day, ‘If you had unlimited funds, would you have opened in Chelsea?’ My answer was no,” she says. “We are part of the New York art world, and we operate like other small or medium-sized galleries in Chelsea. We have the same clients as they do. We’re participating in the same things they are – we’ve been nominated to be in the up-and-coming gallery section of ARCO [a major European art fair] – we’re just in a different neighborhood.”

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