All posts tagged: Greenpoint

Fun Friday 09.24.10

Fun-Friday

Nuit Blanche Coming to New York

An amazing array of artists working with light are transforming a portion of Greenpoint Brooklyn October 2nd for New York’s first actual participation in “Nuit Blanche” a celebration of Street Art from another perspective.  NYC has long been a center of electronic arts experimentation and the field is now flooding with amazing new talent.

BSA is participating and encourages you to participate – you will definitely see stuff you haven’t seen before in a welcoming public environment.  The entire event will also be simulcast live and will include cities around the world, including our sister city Toronto.

Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche NYC from Michael Zick Doherty

Volunteers are welcomed and needed, especially electricians, tech savvy folks, and people who support electronic art in NYC. To volunteer please email Jacquie at jacquie@bringtolightnyc.org

Dumbo Fest This Weekend

A number of Street Artists are participating in one of Brooklyn’s biggest art events this weekend, and all you have to do is wander the streets. Click the image to download a Map!

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No Longer Empty

As part of the Dumbo Arts Festival a few Brooklyn Street Artists have already prepared some new street work for “Watch This Space”, including Chris Stain, Imminent Disaster, Jordan Seilor, and the piece below by Helen Dennis.

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More information about the installations HERE

How to More Effectively Market Your Products Using Street Art

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Do Tank: Brooklyn Presents: “Bring To Light” New York City’s First Ever Nuit Blanche Festival (Greenpoint, Brooklyn NYC)

Bring To Light

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BRING TO LIGHT
NEW YORK CITY’S FIRST-EVER NUIT BLANCHE
A festival of light and projection art on the industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn
2010 October 2, Saturday
Dusk to Dawn
http://bringtolightnyc.org

DESCRIPTION
On October 2, from sunset to dawn, the streets of Greenpoint, Brooklyn will host Bring to Light, New York City’s first Nuit Blanche, an all-night public art festival begun in 1997 in Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg that has spread to cities across the world. The New York festival takes place on the postindustrial edges of an area reawakened in recent years by the migration of young culturistas into a mostly Polish neighborhood, and the opening of many new boutiques, bistros, bars and nightclubs. The nearby East River waterfront remains largely industrial, undeveloped, and publicly inaccessible, but for one night, the skywalks, open courtyards, alleys and adjacent streets around the Greenpoint Terminal Market will be lit up with site-specific installations, projections, interactive media, street performances, and a late-night dance party.

Bring to Light features works by over 50 international artists, performers, and musicians spread over four blocks, inhabiting street corners, galleries, shops, rooftops, vacant lots and buildings,
with opening performances on Noble Street, installations and projections inside the American Playground (on Franklin and Noble), and events hosted by neighborhood businesses including furniture company From the Source, Gym Park gymnastics center, Fowler Arts Gallery, Hollywood Stunts, and film production spaces of Seret Studios. These spaces will act as sites for light, sound and unexpected installations, performances, and projections. The event will be broadcast live during a simultaneous Nuit Blanche event in Toronto.

North Brooklyn’s growing food culture will be represented by vendors curated by the Greenpoint Food Market. In conjunction with Bring to Light, all weekend during the day, Greenpoint Open Studios, now in its second year, will offer a chance to visit the converted factories and warehouses, apartments and galleries where local artists produce artwork in all media.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
This event is being organized by DoTank:Brooklyn and produced by Furnace Media in collaboration with community advocates, curators, writers, neighbors and designers. We are thrilled to bring this international tradition of a night-time arts festival to enliven public space around the Greenpoint Waterfront area, just as New Yorkers are rediscovering this historic waterfront and a burgeoning artist community is making its mark,‚Äù  said the organizers.

DoTank is a public vessel for interdisciplinary exploration, engagement and enhancement of our urban environment through means outside of the formal urban planning process. We make rapid and meaningful change by exploring and testing in our laboratory: Brooklyn, NY.

Furnace Media is a New York City based film and design company founded in 2002 as a laboratory for innovative moving image media. Our work blends live-action filmmaking, re-mixed archival footage, and 3D computer graphics for performance venues outside of traditional movie theaters often in partnership with musicians (www.liveprojections.org) or as site-specific architectural installation.

LOCATION DETAILS
Noble Street between Franklin and West Streets, American Playground, and From the Source, 69 West Street, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Nearest subway stops: G train to Greenpoint Ave. or L train to Bedford Ave.

To learn more about this event and see the complete list of participating artists go to:

http://bringtolightnyc.org/

http://dotankbrooklyn.tumblr.com/

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Free Art on the Street! PaperGirl Surprises NYC With Original Idea

331 rolls of art, 9 bikes, 3 boroughs, 3 bridges, 6 hours of insane fun, 1 sunny day.

Yesterday BSA participated in the first annual PaperGirl NYC where  pieces of original art were handed out for free to incredulous recipients in Bushwick, Williamsburg, Greenpoint, The Lower East Side, Union Square, The Meat Packing District, The West End Highway, The Upper West Side, Central Park, The Upper East Side and Long Island City.

Getting Ready (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

Art-gifting bike riders preparing at 3rd Ward before hitting the streets. (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

NewYorkers can be suspicious when it comes to free stuff on the street from strangers. Curious like cats, they love schwaaaaaag, and they’ll  grab shiny packaged free gum, energy drinks or diet nut bars from corporate vans and pickup trucks wrapped in splashy advertisements. Sometimes they’ll even wait, flirt and be nice to you to get a free sample of whatever food or drink it is that you are presenting to them.

But if you are pushing free original one of a kind pieces of free art – the responses can range from just flat out “no thank you”, to just “no” or a shake of their head. And that’s when they are being nice. In many cases they will just ignore you or give you nasty looks. Other times they’ll give you a hug and pose for pictures. You just never know.

Manhattan Bound (Photo © Jaime Rojo)
Manhattan Bound (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

Manhattanites are a tough crowd indeed. The number of people that rejected the free art in Manhattan was very surprising to many of us. The crowds in Union Square Park, for example, had little interest in free art and the same pretty much goes for the rest of the island. Williamsburg, Bushwick, Greenpoint and Long Island City residents were far more receptive and nice to our overtures and when they heard “It’s free art” you would see their faces light up and take the art with a big smile.

Lucky Art Lovers (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

Lucky Art Lovers (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

The people waiting in line to enter the studios TV show The Colbert Report were definitely not interested. When one standee timidly reached out to grab the art being handed to him on the sidewalk, a studio security guard promptly snatched the art from his hands and proceeded to lecture us about the dangers of handing down anything to them.

“These people, waiting in line, they belong to The Colbert Report,” he intoned with a straight face.

Of course when we challenged that ridiculous assertion of a public street somehow containing people who were enslaved and controlled by a television show, he became a bit more conciliatory. He explained that it was a matter of courtesy not to give free art to these people. The Colbert Report fans can’t enter the show with rolls of paper that might offend the host or gasp! the audiences back at home. Got it.

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A pleased recipient with her rolled up piece. Photo © Jaime Rojo

PaperGirl NY is a collective of artists and art lovers that put out a call to artists to create art and to participate on this adventure. Artists from 12 countries responded and the art was shown briefly in New York City and in Albany before it was rolled up and given away. It was street art indeed. The concept is different from what you normally consider street art to be but the art was on the streets and this time some lucky people got to take it home.

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PaperGirl – NYC takes a moment to rest and regroup. Photo © Jaime Rojo

The notion that someone would reject free art, or anything free for that matter seemed alien. The enthusiasm and glee in which those that accepted the art were contagious and pure joy to watch. That made the day an unforgettable one… and the weather was perfect.

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Yo, check it out. Free Art! Photo © Jaime Rojo


Heels on Wheels. She Biked With Them Pumps All Day. (Photo © Jaime Rojo)
Heels on wheels. This PaperGirl pumped in these pumps all day throughout the city. (Photo © Jaime Rojo)

To learn more about PaperGir-NY please visit the site below:

∆∆ Sina B. Hickey ∆∆
∆∆ PaperGirl-NYState ∆∆
Founder and Lead Organizer
518.379.7642
, PaperGirl.Albany@gmail.com
Bringing Art from the Gallery to the Street
www.PaperGirl-NY.com
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DoTank:Brooklyn Presents: “Bring To Light” Nuit Blanche New York (Greenpoint, Brooklyn)

What is Bring to Light?

Bring to Light is New York City’s first-ever Nuit Blanche festival. A Nuit Blanche is an all night arts festival of installations and performances celebrating the magic and luminance of light. Nuit Blanche events enliven cities all around the globe, but there has never been one in New York.

BRING TO LIGHT NYC will be held in Greenpoint, Brooklyn primarily on Oak Street between Franklin St. and the East River waterfront in Fall 2010, beginning at sundown. This unique block will play host to local and international artists, performers, galleries, and musicians as they Bring to Light the street itself as well as its unique assets including metal, set design and textile workshops, residential facades, an indoor gymnastics park, and much more.

The experience will be thrilling, original, mesmerizing, ceremonial, contemplative and illuminating. This is a one-night event to remember, but also the start of something intended to grow into an annual, world-class event. Artists will create works that inhabit street corners, galleries, shops, rooftops, vacant lots and buildings. These spaces will act as sites for light, sound and unexpected installations, performances, projections, works of art with natural and artificial LIGHT.

As and official sponsor and participant BSA would love to see you there!

Date

  • October 2, 2010 Saturday
    7pm – 7am
  • Location

  • Industrial Waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. See map
  • G Train to Greenpoint Ave.
  • FOR MORE INFORMATION CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW:

    http://bringtolightnyc.org/

    http://dotankbrooklyn.tumblr.com/

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    Electric Windows: Thundercut and Street Art in “North Brooklyn”

    Electric Windows: Thundercut and Street Art in “North Brooklyn”

    Together with new neighbors and old friends from back in the city Thundercut are steadily creating a cultural festival built around one of their first loves: Street Art.

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    The Street Art couple known as Thundercut are not the first Brooklyn artists to head to Beacon, New York, a picturesque phoenix on the Hudson River 59 miles north of Grand Central Station. Kalene Rivers and Dan Weise are just two of the most visionary and fun to talk with.

    Once a town known for it’s hat making, Beacon (pop. 16,000) had a reputation as a sketchy drug and crime ridden place when Dan and Kalene were growing up in the Hudson Valley during the 80s and 90s. When the Dia Arts Foundation (also of Dia:Chelsea in Manhattan) renovated a 34,000 sf former factory in Beacon to create Dia:Beacon and to house a collection of Warhol paintings, hulking Richard Serra sculptures, and fluorescent Dan Flavin monuments, among other post 1960 art, interest grew in the town and an artist community largely from New York began to blossom. Many of the original artists who had brought a bohemian caché to rundown neighborhoods like Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and Red Hook in Brooklyn relocated to Beacon as their neighborhoods blanded in the mid 2000s. Much like those original artist enclaves, Beacon has become home to artist collectives, house parties, and experimentation.

    Tina Darling poses in front of her work at Electric Windows (all photos courtesy and copyright of Thundercut)

    Tina Darling poses in front of her work at Electric Windows (all photos courtesy and copyright of Thundercut)

    While DIA was an important catalyst when it opened in 2003, Dan says the new residents brought a creative community that grew organically in it’s own direction.

    “The people that have moved here have a very DIY spirit and have created something very special that continues to reinvent itself each year,” says Dan. In addition to Dan and Kalene opening their own gallery, Open Space, which shows fine art by many friends and artists in the street art scene, they recount inititiatives by neighbors who organize live concerts, have annual open studio events, host drawing nights at home, and began non-art related groups like soccer and ping pong clubs. Open Space itself has hosted a series of comedy nights that play to packed houses.

    Says Dan, “If someone sees something missing in the community, they try to make it happen.”

    Begun as a place to house their graphic design business, Open Space took root as a gallery and a community gathering spot. Explains Kalene, “We are both very passionate about giving something back to the community, from bringing new artists to show in the gallery, to organizing events like Electric Windows, these are things that we think are great and we are excited to share them with the town.”

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    Which brings us to the third year of Electric Windows, a project that fills the eyes of a moribund electric blanket factory with new canvasses painted live on the street by artists while the public mills about. Now in it’s third year, with thirty artists, three buildings and live performances, EW is organized with their neighbors Jon Miles, Jeff Ashey and Nicole Romano.  With support from the mayor, a grant from the county arts council, donations from businesses of supplies and money, and even neighbors who are opening their homes to house the visiting artists, Electric Windows is thoroughly a community celebrating the creative spirit and the talent of Street Artists. The artists are traveling from Australia, Portland, San Francisco, St Louis, Milwaukee, New Jersey, and of course, Brooklyn without compensation and are all doing it for the love of the project.

    Thundercut at work against a backdrop of lush Hudson Valley trees (© Thundercut)

    Thundercut at work against a backdrop of lush Hudson Valley trees (© Thundercut)

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    Brooklyn Street Art: How did the Electric Windows project first develop?
    Dan Weise:
    The Electric Windows building is what we see when we look out of the windows of Open Space. It is a beautiful turn-of-the-century factory building which, when we first got the space, still had the partially broken glass windows in the frames. It was a postcard for urban decay and having just moved up from Brooklyn, felt like home. Shortly after we opened the gallery, the owner removed all the glass and installed grey plywood window protection in its place. This was far from an improvement in our opinion, so we started discussing what could be done to bring life back to the building. This is when we began seriously talking about the idea of “Electric Windows”.

    Our neighbors at the time, an art store named Burlock Home, really loved the idea and were on board to help make it happen. The four of us teamed up and put the whole project together in three months.

    Elbow Toe returns this year to Electric Windows (© Thundercut)

    Brooklyn Street Artist Elbow Toe returns this year to Electric Windows (© Thundercut)

    BSA: This year features 3 buildings, instead of one.  Do you have enough artists?
    Kalene Rivers:
    We are excited about expanding the project to include more locations in the same area and all surfaces are accounted for. Everyday we think about how lucky we are to know so many incredibly talented artists and we just keep meeting more and more. Not only are they talented but they are amazing friends willing to donate their time and talents to events like Electric Windows for the love of making art and supporting positive projects.

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    BSA: Street Art is normally associated with large metropolitan areas. How does Beacon fit in to the equation?
    Dan:
    Historically, Beacon was a town of manufacturing and the evidence still remains. There are some really phenomenal factories here in town, some vacant, some in the process of renovations and others like the Nabisco Factory, which now houses DIA, have been transformed into something new. I think this helps bring a bit of an urban feel to a quaint little upstate town. Also, when we moved up here we realized that not many people even knew about Street Art. This being the something that we are both very passionate about we wanted to open the gallery and share this world with people beyond the Bronx. Open Space Gallery was formed, Electric Windows was conceived, and slowly the infiltration has begun!

    Alison from PMP shows kids how to screenprint (© Thundercut)

    Alison from PMP shows kids how to screenprint (© Thundercut)

    BSA: Would you say most of these artists are Street Artists? Or are there also graffiti artists, fine artists….
    Kalene:
    I would say that most of the artists are Street Artists but there certainly is a good group of graffiti and fine artists in the mix. Of course the first people we think to invite to the project are friends. Being involved in the Street Art scene for seven years means that these are the people we know best. However, it is wonderful to work with a variety of people from different backgrounds. The artists have to be able to paint big and fast so our selection of qualified participants is pretty limited to a certain kind of artist.

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    BSA: What’s your favorite part of the event?
    Dan:
    Well, after we stress out for months planning and trying to take care of all the details, it is great to look up and see it all in action. Music filling the air, fumes wafting by, people admiring the amazing murals being created, children laughing and dancing. That is when it feels like it has all been worth it. But the event is just the beginning once the crowds leave and the art has been installed the projects gives back to the community, to visitors and to us each and every day.

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    Returning Artists for Electric Windows: Buxtonia, BoogieRez, Chris Stain, Depoe, Elbow Toe, Mr Kiji, Michael De Feo, Peat Wollaeger, Rick Price, Ron English

    New Artists for 2010: Big Foot, Cern, Chor Boogie, Chris Yormick, Elia Gurna, Erick Otto, Eugene Good, Faust, Gaia, Joe Iurato, Kid Zoom, Logan Hicks, Lotem & Aviv, Paper Monster, Ryan Bubnis, Ryan Williams, Skewville, Thundercut

    Daryll Peirce at Electric Windows (photo © Thundercut)

    Daryll Peirce at Electric Windows (photo © Thundercut)

    This year’s event, which includes two days of preparation by the artists, a one-day exhibition and street fair, music and dancing by M*POWER ELITE TEAM, live screen printing by Buxtonia, and an Open Space after-party, is expected to draw approximately 5,000 people to Beacon’s Main Street corridor.

    The line-up of live music at ELECTRIC WINDOWS includes: Ben Neill, Aabaraki, Hart Costa, DJ Birds in the Building, DJ Bobby Collins, DJ Krisis, Dr. Ambassador, Gold Monkey, and Scambler Seequill.

    See Chor Boogie's "Romanticism" and other works by Electric Windows at Open Space online by clicking this picture.

    See Chor Boogie’s “Romanticism” and other works by Electric Windows artists at Open Space online by clicking this picture.

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    Electric Windows Beacon

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    Street Art Conversations on Gentification, Mayor Mike, and PIGS

    In 2005 a 175-block area of North Brooklyn (mainly the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg), was rezoned for architects and developers who had watched the influx of artists in the previous 15 years turn the area into a hotbed for creativity and exploration of new art, music, and performance.

    Miss Bugs on the site (photo Jaime Rojo)
    Miss Bugs on the site of a new building going up in Williamsburg. (photo Jaime Rojo)

    It’s a well-worn story of course. The surge in popularity that follows when artists bring new cultural life to a dying industrial part of town is the double edged sword for a neighborhood, and not everyone is going to be happy with the cause or the effect.  Today, nearly five years into an unprecedented building boom of glass and steel rectangular residential buildings marketed to professional consumers and their Boomer parents, the hard-hitting recession has killed some construction projects, stalled many, and slowed others.  Condos are even turning into affordable rentals! Egad.

    A Mike Marcus troop keep watch over the new arrivals. (photo Jaime Rojo)
    A Mike Marcus troop keeps watch over the new arrivals. (photo Jaime Rojo)

    Street artists probably know their days in Williamsburg are numbered because soon the same people who were attracted to the neighborhood for it’s quirkiness and free spirit of creativity will effectively squelch it – but as long as there are construction sites, there is still scaffolding to adorn.  In fact, one developer went as far as hiring artists a couple of years ago to hit up his scaffolding with work that resembles a street art aesthetic, as written in the Gothamist by Jake Dobkin.

    A huge postering campaign
    A huge campaign of thousands of posters on construction site scaffolding for a clothing company was hacked this spring when street art collective Faile placed animal kingdom heads over Lou Reed’s (photo Jaime Rojo)

    The real competition for space are the advertisers who plaster multiples of posters for cell-phones and hair gel in block-long mass-appeal campaigns, far dwarfing the amount of space any street artist could hope to cover with their home-made wheat-pasted piece.  Aside from construction sites of course,  as long as there are still abandoned and moribund buildings that have yet to be demolished, a canvas on the street beckons.

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    The title of PIGS’ program

    A brief street installation on one of these construction sites this past weekend by an artists/activist group attempted to open the conversation about gentrification to the young pretty passersby who have been attracted to the cache of a hip neighborhood with close proximity to the island of Gotham (and NYU).  In a dramatically metaphorical way, Political Interactive Gaming Systems (PIGS) points to the wooden walls that guard the open construction sites and contends that they are purely a way of hiding the wounds of a freshly lacerated and bleeding part of the city, rather than a public safety precaution.

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    People putting words in the mayor’s mouth.

    Part of the Conflux Festival, the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space, PIGS put up a large magnetic board on one of these blue-walled construction sites with the words of a speech from the mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg.  Much like the refrigerator game it resembles, the words were yours to rearrange. With the goal of raising awareness about gentrification, luxury condos, and displacement of the poor, Josh and Jessica Public happily participated.

    OMG!  I, like, could like say SO MUCH right now but I'm like rully rully busy?
    OMG! This is like so great!  I, like, could like say SO MUCH right now but I’m like rully rully busy texting?

    Or as they say, “PIGS invites you to play a game: Can you get Mike to express how you feel about your changing city? Rearrange the words, and feel the pleasure of getting a politician to actually represent you.”

    It’s hard to measure success on a street installation like this because anybody who walks by may or may not know what in the Sam Hill you are talking about. According to somebody from PIGS who spoke with anonymity, “We observed that many players focused their arrangements around the words  ‘defeated’ and ‘enterprise,’ while the word ‘liberty’ was almost never used.  We also observed that when passersby saw something written that they didn’t like or agree with, they took the liberty of rearranging the text to reflect their sentiment – which to us, is what politics should be: the work of reciprocal exchange where the rights and sentiments of each person are present in an equal discussion.”

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    “Believe in Yourself”
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