The New York Times Friday January 23, 2004
"Sampling Brooklyn, Keeper of Eclectic Flames" (excerpt)
by Holland Cotter

If you say art and Brooklyn in the same sentence, you probably mean Williamsburg, which for about a decade has been the only viable alternative to Chelsea as a New York gallery scene. It's also an art neighborhood in the old, un-Chelsea way: artists live, work, kvetch and party there, even when their art commutes to Manhattan.

Not that everything is idyllic. Clubs, bars and latte joints continue to elbow aside the diminishing number of Polish-American shops. Rents are now punishing, with the result that artists and galleries have scattered into neighborhoods like Greenpoint, Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Red Hook. The borough's public exhibition spaces have always been outside the Williamsburg orbit, and still are. Several of them have joined forces this winter for an ambitious if problematic survey of African art.

A provisional account of this evolving activity will arrive in April with the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Open House: Working in Brooklyn," a historical overview of art produced in the borough since the 1970's. Meanwhile, that history is still in the making, and here's what it looks like — a little of it, anyway — at the start of 2004.

Maybe it's a winter slump, but the Williamsburg gallery situation feels static these days. Flagship commercial spaces like Pierogi, Bellwether and Roebling Hall have been augmented by a clutch of newer arrivals. But the census hasn't changed significantly in a while, and Manhattan remains an all-but-irresistible pull. Bellwether is moving to Chelsea next fall. Roebling Hall has opened a satellite space in SoHo. The successful young sculptor Robert Lazzarini, long represented by Pierogi, recently left the gallery to manage his career on his own.

Actually, one of the recent complaints about Williamsburg is that its art is undistinguishable from that shown across the river. The alternative is no alternative. Yet a difference in atmosphere is undeniable. This is less a function of architecture than of attitude, with Brooklyn continuing to value a degree of financial informality, an aesthetic of process, a we-won't-grow-up sense of community.

As a result, startup ventures are still possible, even if they last only a month. Some of the best art is in the form of events, the most formal of them open video nights at Four Walls; screenings of experimental work at Ocularis; and performances at Galapagos and Parlour Projects, where a video karaoke project with viewer participation is scheduled for February. There is a lingering sense — you get it on the Lower East Side, too — that flames could burn here that would die for want of air in Chelsea's concrete shells.

Williamsburg Group Shows

The curator of Champion's inaugural offering last fall, Reed Anderson, is also responsible for "On a Wave," a show at Jessica Murray Projects that takes its title take from Thad Ziolkowski's coming-of-age surfer memoir. The theme gets a clever workout in a surfboardish sculpture by Vincent Szarek and a sand-sprinkled one by Rosy Keyser, in Chris Gentile's photograph of a living room tsunami and an elaborate, mandalalike California-dreaming collage by Mr. Anderson himself. Brady Dollarhide's "Never Forever" has no surfer connection that I could detect, but it's such a good painting it doesn't matter.

Back to PRESS