Smart City Organizes Art Tour

It’s only taken fourteen years for New York City’s government to recognize the importance of Brooklyn’s thriving art scene. Galleries like Pierogi and Jack the Pelican have been touchstones of Greenpoint and Williamsburg’s culture and economy since the mid-1990s, but have garnered little attention from city officials until now. Sunday saw the first-ever smART Brooklyn Gallery Hop, a set of four bus tours organized by Brooklyn Tourism and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. With by far the highest proportion of living and working artists of any borough, Brooklyn covers a lot of ground: Twenty-five galleries in Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Bushwick constituted just one of the routes, which a bus looped once every hour.

Riders who boarded the bus at its hub, the Williamsburg Art and Historical Society, were slightly confused by the bus’ schedule: If they wanted to ride from stop to stop, they had to wait an hour for the bus to loop back. On the other hand, several of the clusters of galleries making up the bus stops were within walking distance of one another.

Philae Knight, who during the week works for the auction house Phillips de Pury, rode the bus and acted as the Gallery Hop’s docent, helping advise those interested in buying art. Calling Williamsburg “the artists’ SoHo,” she described the neighborhood’s emergence as a living and working space for artists after Manhattan became too expensive.

Pierogi, on North 9th Street between Bedford and Driggs, was one of the first galleries in Williamsburg when it opened in 1994 and, because of its ongoing commitment to local artists, it is still among the most important in the area. On Sunday, the walls of Pierogi’s main space were covered with the artist Andrea Way’s “365 Paintings of 2007” project. Way suffered a concussion in December of 2006 that prevented her from working for the rest of the month. But when she started painting again in January of 2007, she found herself producing an image a day, and kept up the pace for a year. The results are a rhythmic balance of organization and randomness.
At Slate gallery on Wythe Street between North 8th and North 9th, a series of large watercolors was on its last day of public display. By Cheol Yu Kim, the paintings blended biological and architectural forms. Slate was founded three years ago as a place to display young artists’ work, by the sculptor Boaz Vaadia, whose life-size stone figures are housed in the gallery’s backspace, and his wife Martha.

Galeria Janet Kurnakowski was the only gallery in Greenpoint included on the gallery route. But even though the bus stopped right outside its door on Norman Avenue and Humboldt Street, no one from the tour visited the gallery, Janet Kurnakowski said. “The bus driver apologized for the fact that no one came,” she added. Galeria, which is in its fourth season, was showing a series of precisely textured paintings by Scott Malbaurn called Nautical Sun.

Owners of several galleries said they had not sold anything from their current exhibitions, citing the economic downturn. Pierogi manager Sarah Hotchkiss, Martha Vaadia at Slate, and tour docent Philae Knight all said that the Gallery Hop brought a more wide-ranging crowd to the galleries than the locals who usually visit, but in general these were not the ones buying. Still, they hoped that with better organization, and maps of the area, future gallery hops would be more successful. Knight knew of only one purchase made by someone on the smART tour, at AdHoc Art in Bushwick. Among gallery owners, there was a sense that this kind of attention from the city government would have been welcomed sooner, along with a hope that it will not be a unique event.