BSA Interview, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, May 2025

If you’ve ever wandered down Frost Street and caught a whiff of turpentine, weed, and burned toast, you may have walked right past the unmarked doorway where Williamsburg still quietly seethes and happily bubbles with creative resistance.

A community center, performance space, art gallery, flea market hybrid, the space welcomes you to the latest show, “Money Talks,” which doesn’t need an opening reception flier. It has its gravity and pull — the kind that draws a packed audience into a labyrinth of rooms, exhibition spaces, and performances. A sign of success, it spills onto the spring Friday night sidewalk, where smokers and sharp talkers hold court between sets by a shaggy 70s rock band that might or might not be ironic.

Inside, four artists — Specter, Rene, CASH4, and ITIN — served up a visual demolition of American currency and its cultural metaphors. It wasn’t bitter, but it wasn’t sweet. Like the Williamsburg of old, before the glass condos, this was salty, smart, funny, blunt. No manifestos on the wall, just wry, sharp-tongued critique told in paper pulp, paint, and political memory.

The anchor piece? Gabriel Specter’s massive currency-redesigned The State of America. A redux of the reverse of a dollar bill — if it had lived through January 6. The Capitol dome smokes like a symbol under siege, while foregrounded rioters pose in shades of government green. It’s beautifully executed, deeply personal, and visibly furious — a portrait of patriotism cracked in half. The loft is loud, the floor sticky, the ideas sharp. Money Talks doesn’t have a social media campaign, instead you feel like it has conviction. It doesn’t need a QR code. The rent may be high, but the spirit here is still gloriously low-rent — and unbought.

Specter, a visual bard of the 2000s and 2010s Brooklyn scene, known for work that didn’t just decorate the streets but spoke to social realities, talked to us about this piece — and about the spirit of a space that still knows how to host shows that mean something.

BSA: How would you characterize the space where “Money Talks” took place — not just physically, but in terms of its function as a creative platform? Is it more of a cultural incubator, a performance venue, or a kind of underground laboratory for dissent?

GS: The best way to describe the space is talking about the people who occupy it. Each person coming in and out of the studio, the workshop, performance and gallery space shapes it into a one-of-a-kind arts venue. To answer whether it is a cultural incubator, performance venue, or underground laboratory of dissent, I would say all three apply. We’re inclusive of all forms of expression but we have an anti-establishment edge. Respect and kindness overrides difference of opinion.

BSA: Your painting The State of America, featuring figures from the January 6th Capitol riot, was a powerful centerpiece. What emotional or psychological space were you in while creating it, and how did the act of painting become a way to process or confront that moment in history?

GS: Because of the amount of detail required to execute the work, I had to focus on the rendering of each figure in the painting. I was physically trying to individualize them, an accurate representation of what was happening. My brain was not focused on anything other than the actual painting of it. It put me in a meditative state creating it.

As I would take breaks from the laborious rendering, I would take a step and look at what I’d completed so far. Because I was trying to be so accurate about representing each individual, the stepping back and seeing them altogether, it honestly brought up a lot of hatred. For what they represented, and what they did on that day. In doing this painting, I was painting a lot of patriotic things and my version of patriotism is a lot different than what the scene depicts.

BSA: The exhibition seems to grapple with money not just as currency, but as a symbol of power, manipulation, and social fracture. Was the show intended as a direct critique of American capitalism, or are you also exploring more personal or ambiguous relationships to money and value?

GS: Each artist in the exhibition has their own take and I can only speak to my own. So yes, my work was a critique of money as a tool for manipulation, and how this has seeped into societal values. But as I said, every artist contributing took Money Talks as a way to take back power with money.

BSA: You’ve been making work since the 2000s, including street pieces that captured daily city life and the people who live here. How has your perspective — and your medium — evolved in response to the widening economic divide and the political climate of recent years?

GS: I think my work has evolved to the times we are living in. I feel more than ever that my work needs to draw a line in the sand and represent my values as a human. I don’t try to take sides but I express what I think is right and I feel there is a sickness in our society at the moment.

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