Open Calls
Together We Will… – Open Call for LGBTQIA+ Artists
Deadline: April 30, 2023
Exhibition: June 1 – August 31, 2023
Curators: Arts Gowanus, Brooklyn Pride, Inc., Old Stone House & Washington Park
Eligibility: Artists who are LGBTQIA+ and live or work in Brooklyn
Artwork displayed in this exhibition can depict and celebrate any aspect of the LGBTQIA+ experience and community. Accepted artworks will be printed on vinyl and displayed on the fence surrounding the Old Stone House & Washington Park.
Read more about Together We Will… using this link.
Submit your artwork using this link.
Family Ties – Open Call for BIPOC Artists
Deadline: May 15, 2023
Exhibition: August 14 – October 9, 2023
Curator: Jeremy Dennis
Eligibility: Artists who are Black / Indigenous / People of Color
Family is one of the most fundamental aspects of human existence. It is where we first learn about love, loyalty, and the power of connection. The relationships we form with our family members can shape our identities, beliefs, and values, influencing our paths throughout our lives. Whether you want to celebrate your family’s joy and love or explore the challenges and struggles that can arise, we invite you to submit your work for consideration.
Read more about Family Ties using this link.
Submit your artwork using this link.
Picturing The Constitution – Open Call for Artists
Deadline: May 15, 2023
Exhibition: October 2023 – January 2024
Curator: Katherine Gressel
Eligibility: All artists are welcome to apply
This group exhibition invites artists to respond to an aspect of the Constitution of the United States, including its amendments and interpretations by the Supreme Court and various governing bodies throughout history. To what extent do these founding documents still serve us (equitably)? What could we add or amend?
Contemporary Exhibits
Finding My Folk
Seven immigrant artists reshaping rituals and customs informed by “home”
On View: March 3 – April 10, 2023 see our calendar for visit hours
Opening Reception: March 3 from 6 – 8 pm
View a virtual tour slide show of the exhibition here.
Many of the artworks are for sale, contact us at info@theoldstonehouse.org to arrange a purchase.
Public Program: March 12, 3 – 5 pm. “Glitter Priestess Mad Tea Party”, hosted by artist Damali Abrams. The artist shares herbal remedies to alleviate the stresses of daily life and current affairs. RSVP on Eventbrite required to attend.
Overview:
The American Folklore Society defines folklore as “our cultural DNA. It includes the traditional art, stories, knowledge, and practices of a people. While folklore can be bound up in memory and histories, folklore is also tied to vibrant living traditions and creative expression today. Folklore adapts, and folklore endures.”
Folklore is so embedded in our daily lives that we are keen to overlook it even as we participate in its creation. Myths, dances, rhymes, toasts, jokes, holidays and festivals are all common examples of the informal, familiar and defining traditions of a community (ranging from a family to a nation or the global population).
Curated by Jamaican-born independent curator Krista Scenna, “Finding My Folk” engages seven contemporary immigrant artists whose practices embrace the folkloric and its propensity to adapt to its given place and time. As immigrants who hail from all over the globe and have long called New York home, these gifted creators are actively shaping their own traditions, rituals, and customs by blending elements of their past, memories of “home,” and visions of the future. Their folklore reflects a quest to understand and communicate a new narrative informed by notions of the familiar with notions of what could be. One also senses in their work an undeniable yearning to connect, cultivate community, and create a genuine space of their own making. Hence the title, “Finding My Folk”: a reference to the immigrant artist, the itinerant seeker, whose practice is generating and translating folk in the present sense.
Ai Campbell’s “Seamless” paintings reflect the artist’s recent fascination with Buddhism’s interpretation of time as one eternal moment – the “now” – that unifies both past and future. Rediscovering this philosophy on the heels of a simultaneous death and birth in her family, Campbell found solace in this concept upon returning to her homeland of Japan on an extended visit and embracing Buddhism in a way that had eluded her as a child growing up surrounded by its influence. In these paintings, the artist experiments with time and the mundane by blending collages of older work with new layers of paint and incorporating “to-do” lists and appointment reminders that cross her mind as she toils in the studio.
Angelica Bergamini’s, “Solo Journey,” references her family of mariners and how water connects the land of her birth with her chosen land. As such, it speaks to our universal journey through life from the particular (her personal experience) to the universal. “Solo journey” blends the geography of her origins with that of New York City and each boat marks a significant, time-honored passage: birth, navigating life, and ultimately, our last journey.
Blanka Amezkua has been known to blend the traditional polychromatic Papel Picado banners of her homeland, Mexico, with plant life she encounters during various artist residencies. She has trained with seasoned makers of Papel Picado and continues to teach others using traditional tools. Her other body of work, “Corners,” was created – often with the insertion of her own body – into corners throughout Greece: her “third home.” The artist lived in Athens from 2010 – 2016 and documented this action through photography of corners in various architectural forms.
Artist and curator Carl Hazlewood will debut mixed-media abstract work referencing Anansi: the cunning spider of Caribbean folklore with origins in West Africa. The daughter of Guyanese parents and a Queens native, Damali Abrams created an artist book combining pages from her father’s 1996 publication, “Metegee: The History & Culture of Guyana” with her own original artworks as a celebration of Guyanese folklore and a depiction of the first generation Afro-Caribbean experience. Also hailing from the Caribbean, artist Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow re-introduces the Jamaican Junkanoo carnival experience by performing her version of this storied myth on historic sites (such as Governors Island) in order to acknowledge the legacy of the Caribbean. Artist Jody MacDonald sculpts intricate, freak show archetype figures by hand and removes them from their carnival environment to explore how they might emigrate into alternative, contemporary settings: a midcentury modern backyard, a museum, a Brooklyn hipster bar. She poses the question: Do these displaced archetypes try to assimilate to their new environment or do they honor and celebrate their differences?
Participating Artists:
Ai Campbell (Japan)
Angelica Bergamini (Italy)
Blanka Amezkua (Mexico)
Carl Hazlewood (Guyana)
Damali Abrams (Guyana)
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow (Jamaica)
Jody MacDonald (Canada)
About The Curator:
Krista Scenna is a Jamaican born independent curator and gallery owner based in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BA in Art History and Spanish from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA in Interdisciplinary Contemporary Art from the XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York University.
Featured image by Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow, photographed by T. Pelichet.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Belonging
A Textile Arts Exhibition with Kimberly Bush, Stephanie Eche, and Traci Johnson
Opening Reception October 13, 2022 from 5 – 8 pm
Visit Hours Extended!
January 13, 20, 27, 28, & February 3 from Noon – 4 pm
January 21 from Noon – 2 pm
January 22 from 2 pm – 4 pm
Join us for an Artist Talk with the artists and curator on February 12 from Noon – 2 pm. Please RSVP on Eventbrite.
View a virtual tour slideshow of the exhibition here.
Artworks available for purchase and can be viewed online at whynotart.com.
Overview:
Belonging is a contemporary visual art exhibition highlighting 3 Brooklyn artists (Kimberly Bush, Stephanie Eche and Traci Johnson) who create work with fiber, cloth, thread and other textiles.
Textiles are having a “moment” in contemporary art. After decades of being excluded or dismissed as merely utilitarian, textiles are now embraced by major museums, blue-chip galleries and even department store window designers (see Traci Johnson’s recent commission at Bergdorf’s). Why now? Many textile artists use their work to explore healing, trauma and familial or cross-cultural understandings, which seems especially relevant as we transition through the COVID pandemic. Textiles are soft, warm, inviting and represent a feeling of safety to which many people respond immediately. Viewing these intricately woven and mended materials, even without touching, can evoke a sense of home and provide emotional comfort. Belonging taps into that sense of solace, community and joy after a time of grief and sadness.
With common threads, this intergenerational and diverse group of artists weaves together personal meditations that reflect broadly on connectedness, family, community and activism through fiber art. These year(s) of the pandemic have taught us that everything is attached and interconnected, like fibers and fabric. All beings need each other to survive and thrive; we all need to belong.
The rich and varied textures of the textile work on view include knots, tufted rugs, felted wool, and subtle stitches in a mix of natural and bombastic colors. The Old Stone House is a historic home that provides a welcoming backdrop and a contemplative space to discover the fine art handiwork.
About the Artists:
Kimberly Bush (she/her) is an artist and art therapist with over 30 years experience. Her practice of weaving fibers, mending torn and frayed edges, sewing fabric patches and pieces together, figuratively and literally, demonstrates the interconnectedness among humans. IG @kimberlybrooklyn
Stephanie Eche (she/her) uses found materials and natural fibers to create sculptures that investigate cultural identity, time, and memory. Her processes are intentionally labor and time-intensive, allowing her to reflect on the erasure of indigenous cultures as a result of colonization and capitalism, including the assimilation of her Chicana family. IG @stephanie_eche
Traci Johnson (they/them) is an artist and fashion model who presents bold, colorful abstract sculptural creations that bring a sense of euphoria and vibrant energy to the exhibit. The works embody the texture, softness and comfort of textiles while promoting healing, self-acceptance and self-love; they truly create a safe space for all. IG @kailuaa @rugsbykailuaa
About The Curator:
Grace R. Freedman, PhD (she/her) is a founder of Why Not Art which celebrates the vitality of the Brooklyn arts community by presenting interdisciplinary art shows in alternative spaces to reach expanded and diverse audiences. Contact: grace@whynotart.com; 718-858-4847, IG @whynotartnyc
Featured image by Kimberly Bush.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Temple of Acacia
A solo exhibition by Dario Mohr
August 21 – September 30, 2022
Opening Reception & Performance August 21 from 2 pm – 4 pm
On view during open hours (Fridays – Sundays) through September 30
Overview:
Temple of Acacia is dedicated to the spiritual practices of West Africa that have been and continue to be suppressed in the U.S. cultural zeitgeist. The Acacia tree is native to many regions of Africa, and became the primary icon representing the diverse tribal nations from which people of the African diaspora in the Americas are descended. In this site-specific, multimedia installation at OSH, Dario Mohr attempts to understand and relate his own evolving spiritual beliefs to those of his Indigenous ancestors, while drawing visually from the Anglican colonial religious practices of his upbringing which he later abandoned. The exhibition holds the religious rituals of Mohr’s ancestors and other descendants of this region in high esteem, transforming the gallery into a sacred space of veneration and remembrance of the spirituality that many Black people in the U.S.’s ancestors once practiced, and that continues to be practiced today.
The show is anchored by an image of multiple hands forming one family tree, which was first presented in Mohr’s Sow the Seeds mural currently on display at the Mitchel Housing district of the South Bronx. The hands represent the many tribal groups of West Africa. This exploration inspired Mohr to embark on a solo travel research tour of Ghana, Benin, Togo and Nigeria to visit the lands of his ancestors and document the journey through video and photo collage. These digital works, along with prints and assemblage, frame the central Acacia Altar in the Great Room.
The Temple of Acacia is part of an evolving series that included a recent exhibition at the Lewis Latimer House in Queens focusing on the artist’s Grenadian heritage. Mohr hopes that presenting this latest work at the Old Stone House, an institution dedicated to local colonial, Revolutionary and Indigenous history, will help honor the presence of the BIPOC community in the surrounding Park Slope area in the midst of its ongoing gentrification. In addition to providing vehicles for memorialization, Mohr’s work aims to inspire others whose heritage and legacy have been severed due to colonialism to “experience the reclamation of lost ancestral identity, and perhaps embark on their own ancestry research journey.”
About the Artist:
Dario Mohr is a first generation Grenadian U.S. citizen born in 1988. Based in New York City, Mohr is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and non-profit leader. He received a BFA in Painting from Buffalo State College, an MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York and an Advanced Certificate from Queens College. His work involves the creation of “sacred spaces” referencing his heritage, and expressing commentary on the cultural zeitgeist through immersive sanctuary experiences. His practice is interdisciplinary, converging painting, sculpture, installation, digital art and film, with creative reuse being a major part. Many leftover works from previous concentrations end up recycled and repurposed for new art. As a result, his work is constantly evolving, with each iteration building upon its associative complexity. He intends for people to relive or recontextualize memories, construct new narratives, and explore new perspectives and philosophies through their associations to the objects assembled within many of the works. He hopes that his audience can engage with and embrace the varied themes presented in the sacred spaces he creates either through their faith or decontextualized from religion.
Recently, Mohr has accompanied his work with performances, including “The Archetype Activation Ritual” presented in tandem with his solo show presented as artist in residence at Materials For the Arts. He also began presenting in public spaces, with notable works including “Sow the Seeds” created during his 2021 Fellowship with ArtBridge, and “Revelations Across Generations” exhibited during his solo exhibit at the Lewis Latimer House Museum. In addition to his individual art practice, he is also the Founder and Director of AnkhLave Arts Alliance, Inc., a non-profit arts organization for the recognition and representation of BIPOC artists in contemporary art.
About the Curator:
Katherine Gressel, contemporary curator, earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. In addition to organizing over a dozen major exhibitions to date at OSH, Katherine has curated and produced artist projects for Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Smack Mellon, FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. Katherine has written and presented on art and social impact for Americans for the Arts and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal
April 10 – June 26, 2022
Coffey Park Banner Opening April 9 from Noon – 5 pm, with art bazaar + performances
J.J. Byrne Playground Banner Opening April 10 from Noon – 5 pm, with art bazaar + performances
OSH Gallery Opening April 10 from 4 pm – 6 pm
Arts Gowanus and the Old Stone House & Washington Park (OSH) are proud to present Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal, a multi-site exhibition opening April 9th and 10th that will feature over 200 artists to considering what a “Utopia” (or ideal place) would look like for the communities of the neighborhoods bordering the Gowanus Canal. These include Gowanus, Carroll Gardens/Cobble Hill, and Red Hook.
Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal consists of an indoor exhibition at the Old Stone House (OSH) and two public outdoor art exhibitions of artwork printed on banners hung on the fences surrounding J.J. Byrne Playground and Coffey Park featuring a diverse group of local artists.
This project is part of the ongoing Brooklyn Utopias exhibition series, developed by OSH Contemporary Curator Katherine Gressel, that highlights the importance of artists and communities in helping shape the future of a changing Brooklyn. Some artists in Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal celebrate iconic or beloved aspects of the neighborhoods’ past or present that already feel “utopian” and the importance of their preservation. Others comment on existing plans for the area during a time of rapid redevelopment and rezoning. With climate crises, gentrification, financial instability and an ongoing pandemic hitting these communities especially hard, many artists present their own visions for a greener, healthier and more equitable Gowanus. Others explore a broader idea of urban utopia, with both local and global implications.
Select outdoor banners highlight local people and organizations that are actively working towards a better Brooklyn. Some feature the work of students created through workshops with youth organizations.
The OSH gallery exhibition’s artworks in diverse media provide deeper explorations. Daniel Anthony Vasquez, Chastity Fryer and Mary Glover, and Radha Korman celebrate the people–including artists, immigrants, public housing residents and families– maintaining homes, businesses and community gatherings in a rapidly gentrifying area. Ella Yang’s new “Disappearing Gowanus” paintings depict places that will be “nostalgic in the very near future” due to the rezoning of large portions of the neighborhood. Caitlin Miller’s dynamic sculptural installation chronicles the vacant storefronts in an area where “space is at a premium.” Public programs led by participating artists Clarinda Mac Low and Carolyn Hall, Iviva Olenick and Artichoke Dance will engage the community in such topics as Gowanus’s post climate-change future, textile art-making with local foraged plants, and the implications of developing an area still undergoing environmental remediation. Site-specific plant installations by Christina Massey incorporating materials from local manufacturers suggest the possibility of a more harmonious relationship between nature and industry. Public art in OSH’s gardens (in addition to the banner show) includes Sasha Chavchavadze’s directional signs alluding to the battles of the American Revolution that once took place at OSH/Gowanus, and Amy Ritter’s mailbox inviting visitors to comment on the American Dream today.
See below and visit artsgowanus.org for a full list of participating artists, curators, organizations, and events.
Brooklyn Utopias: Along the Canal is a partnership between Arts Gowanus, the Old Stone House & Washington Park, Coffey Park in Red Hook and The Red Hook Art Project. Funding for the Old Stone House exhibition is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Puffin Foundation. The banner exhibitions are part of the Arts Gowanus Gallery Dispersed program, funded in part by the Brooklyn Arts Council. Cover image: Leslie Kerby
ABOUT THE GALLERY EXHIBITION:
On view in the 2nd floor Great Room and garden at Old Stone House, 336 3rd St., Park Slope
Gallery Hours: Friday-Sunday, 12 pm – 3 pm or by appointment.
Participating Artists and Arts Groups:
Lisa Aurigemma, Sasha Chavchavadze, Dov Diamond, Chasity Fryer and Mary Glover, Nathan Kensinger, Leslie Kerby, Radha Korman, Clarinda Mac Low and Carolyn Hall, Karen Mainenti, Christina Massey, Robin Michals, Caitlin Miller, Carolyn Monastra, Lynn Newman/Artichoke Dance, Iviva Olenick, Red Hook Art Project, Amy Ritter, Manju Shandler, Daniel Anthony Vasquez, Liam Wiesenberger and Ella Yang
ABOUT THE BANNER EXHIBITION:
Coffey Park Participating Artists:
Abigail Romero Montetro, Alanna Flowers, Amanda Aponte, Andrew Huff, Annakiya DeCoteau, Annemarie Waugh, Areta Buk, Argun Ulgen, Aspen (bri) Villar, Aynsley Leonardis, Beau Madden, Bernard Hallstein, Brie Spielmann, Brooke Julien, Carlos Moreno, Carmella Gullo, Carolyn Monastra, Chao Wang, Daniel Genova, Dytanya Mixson, Elisa Soliven, Elizabeth Meggs, Epy Carrieri, Faye Harnest, Felipe Torres, Fernando Sanon, Gabrielle Lansner, Hong Wu, Imari DuSauzay, Jenna Spevack, Jeremy Dennis, Jethro Gedeon, Jeylani Thomas, Johnny Camacho, Joseph Anastasi, Karen Margolis, Kasia Zurek-Doule, Katie Saltoun, Katie Godowski, Kendry Corbin, Kiki Valentine, Laura Corrin, Laziza Rakhimova, Li Ordanov Dan, Liev Arpante, Lisett Clark-Dziedzic, Lorna Leighton, Maria Lewis, Marie Hueston, Massah Fofana,Mayana Torres, Michael Flaherty, Michelle Mannix, Mollie Serena, Monica Gutiérrez Kirwan, Nicholas Papadakis, Nicole Vergalla, Patricia O’Rourke, Rachel Schapira, Richard Vivenzio, Sanny Ng, Sasha Lynn Roberts, Scarlett Esquivel, Stacey Billups, SumiSnack Symin Adive,Taeesha Muhammad, Terumasa Fujita, TiffanyStevens, Tizian Mazziotto, Tyesha Colthrust, Unice Gomez, Valerie Hill, Vanesa Alvarez, Whitney Lukens, Yue Yi Jiang
J.J. Byrne Participating Artists:
Aleathea Sapp-Jimenez, Allison Kaufman, Alicia Mccarthy, Amy Morken, Andrew Smenos, Anne Bartoc, Annette Rose-Shapiro, Anne-Sophie Plume, Aubrey Nolan, Audrey Anastasi, Axelle Destaing, Caitlin Miller, Catalina Lucero, Chasity Fryer, Christopher Swain, Daniel Anthony Vasque, Daniel McDonald, David Barthold, David Kutz, Dennis Darkeem, Doug Gately, Dov Diamond, Emily Chiavelli, Ilse Knecht, Jan Rattia, Janet Pedersen, JD Weiner, Jenna D, Jessica Dalrymple, Jessica DAmico, Jill Inbar, Jo-Ann Acey, Joann Amitrano, Joanna Oltman Smith, JoAnne McFarland, Joe Cantor, John Azelvandre, John Wilkens, Johnny Thornton, Jonathan Blum, Josh Seiden, Joyce Riley, Julia Forrest, Julie Peppito, K Haskell, Karen Cuchel, Katherine Gressel, Kathleen Collins, Kathleen Dobrowsky, Ken Rush, Kevin Rogan, Kristin Ducharme, Lawrence O’Neill, Leslie Kerby, Linda Adato, Linda Berkowitz, Lindsey Jones, Logan Kisiel, Lynn Cole, Manju Shandler, Maria Paula Rennis, Mari Renwick, Mark Thomas, Mark Phillips, Marybeth Zeman, Mary Negro, Michael Amendolara, Michael Koehler, Michael Freedman, Michael Jacobson, Miguel Ayuso, Miska Draskoczy, Monica Rich, Owen Foote, Peikwen Cheng, Peter Darnell, Phil DeSantis, Philippe Regard, Preetha Stephen, Radha Korman, Raya Dukhan, Rebecca Carmel, Rich Garr, Rick Secen, Risa Glickman, Robert Gould, Robert (Bob) Levine, Robin Michals, Robin Roi, Roxanna Velandria, Ryan Gallagher, Sandrine Gigon, Sarah Lucas, Sarah Drury, Sasha Chavchavadze, Seth Hillinger, Sherry Davis, Sofya Yuditskaya, Stacy Bergener, Steve Pauley, Susan Newmark, Susan Greenstein, Susan Yung, Tiane Goines, Traci Johnson, William Bartoc, William Patterson, Yukiko Izumi
Participating Organizations and Individuals, “Making a Better Brooklyn” Banners:
Cora Dance, 350Brooklyn, HashtagLunchbag, Gowanus Canal Conservancy, Tiffiney Davis, Camp Friendship, Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation, Portside, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Why Not Art?, Forth on Fourth Avenue, The Powerhouse Arts Youth Advisory Council, Park Slope Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, Groundswell, Textile Arts Center, Turning The Tide, Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice, Theresa Davis, The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club, CHiPs, Park Slope Parents, Gowanus Mutual Aid, Exploring the Arts, Theater of the Liberated, Arts Gowanus Artist Advisory Committee, David Kutz, the Old Stone House
Locations: Coffey Park, Dwight and Verona Streets, Red Hook, Brooklyn; J.J. Byrne Playground/Old Stone House, 336 3rd St., Park Slope, Brooklyn.
PUBLIC PROGRAMS:
May 22, 2 pm: Gowanus Climate Futures: Collage Workshop
What do you want your climate-changing future to look like? Imagine and build your own utopian future for the Gowanus through collage making with Sunk Shore, Carolyn Hall & Clarinda Mac Low. Materials provided. This is an outdoor workshop (weather permitting) in the garden outside the Old Stone House.
June 25, 11 am: Gowanus plant foraging and natural dye workshop with Iviva Olenick, using local native and nonnative plants: Through foraging, touring OSH’s gardens and using local plants as colorants, participants will become more aware and knowledgeable of local native and cultivated plants, animals, insects and habitats. Meet in front of the Old Stone House.
June 25 and 26, 1 pm -3 pm: Brooklyn Utopias Interactive Performance Tour of Gowanus with Artichoke Dance. Through an immersive experience, audiences interact with and learn about the environmental justice issues impacting the neighborhood, community initiatives in relation to the impending rezoning of Gowanus, and the current remediation of the Gowanus Canal, New York City’s first named superfund site due to decades of extreme toxicity. More information and tickets available HERE! Tour begins in front of the Old Stone House.
CURATORIAL COMMITTEE:
Tiffiney Davis, co-Founder and Executive Director of Red Hook Art Project; Tiane Goines, artist and member of Gowanus Mutual Aid; Katherine Gressel, Contemporary Curator, Old Stone House & Washington Park; Elizabeth Masella, Senior Public Art Coordinator at NYC Parks; Johnny Thornton, Executive Director of Arts Gowanus and Gallery Director at Established Gallery; and Pam Wong, art writer and curator, Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse.
BACKGROUND ON BROOKLYN UTOPIAS AND EXHIBITION SITES:
The Brooklyn Utopias series was first conceived in 2009 by OSH Contemporary Curator Katherine Gressel as a way for artists to respond to Brooklyn’s resurging popularity in the 21st Century and often competing and controversial rebuilding and rebranding efforts. It was also inspired by Brooklyn’s history as an enclave for artists, social reformers, immigrants, environmentalists and others drawn to its iconic neighborhoods.
The Old Stone House (OSH) is a reconstructed Dutch colonial farmhouse located in Park Slope’s Washington Park/J.J. Byrne Playground. The playground and house restoration were first developed by Robert Moses in the 1930s, but the land surrounding the house made history long before then as the site of the 1776 Revolutionary War Battle of Brooklyn, and as a 19th Century Brooklyn Dodgers practice field. OSH is at the crossroads of ancient Lenape paths, adjacent to the historic town of Marechkawick, and has recently updated its permanent exhibition with information about the area’s native inhabitants, also making this a focus of our contemporary art programming. Today, OSH hosts history and environmental education programs as well as cultural and family events. Artists may contact OSH as a resource on the history of the Gowanus Canal and its connection to these historic events.
Opened in 1901 and bound by Verona, King, Dwight, and Richards Streets, Coffey Park is named for Michael J. Coffey (1839-1907), the former state senator, alderman, and district leader representing Red Hook. Renovated in 1999, Coffey Park features a playground with swings, benches, game tables, picnic tables, basketball courts, handball courts, and a baseball diamond.
Struggling Toward A Better World: Bev Grant Photography 1968-1972
February 13 – March 27, 2022
Opening Reception: February 13, 2 pm – 4 pm
Gallery Hours: Noon – 4 pm, Fridays – Sundays
Image Credit: November 22, 1969, Women’s demonstration at the court house protesting the trial of Black Panther leaders, Erika Huggins and Bobbie Seale. New Haven, Connecticut. Courtesy of OSMOS New York.
Public Programs:
March 6 at 2 pm: Book Signing + Talk with Bev Grant and Suzanne Cope, moderated by Linda Villarosa
March 23 at 6:30 pm: Film Screening + Discussion of of Bev Grant’s film Bev Grant Photography: Photographs of Struggle for Change Through the Eyes of an Insider, more details to come
Overview:
This exhibition by Brooklyn-based photographer, musician and activist Bev Grant is part of a series of events accompanying the launch of Grant’s first monograph, Bev Grant Photography 1968-1972, published by OSMOS Books, New York (2021). The book and exhibition draw from Grant’s extensive archive of photographs from this time period when she was on the frontlines as a feminist and political activist. After moving to New York City in the 1960s, Grant began photographing while participating in demonstrations such as the No More Miss America protest in Atlantic City and the anti-Vietnam War Jeannette Rankin Brigade in Washington, DC. As a member of the film collective New York Newsreel she gained access to groups including the Young Lords Party, the Black Panther Party and the Poor People’s Campaign.
Bev Grant’s photographs document pivotal public events, as well as intimate, behind-the-scenes organizing, including community support initiatives such as the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program and clothing drives and the Young Lords’ Garbage Offensive. Together, these photographs emphasize “the intersectionality and humanity of people struggling together towards a better world,” in the words of the artist (all quotations are from Bev Grant Photography 1968 to 1972, edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, published by OSMOS Books, New York, (2021). They highlight the presence of women as a potent political force in many of these movements, and of multiracial coalitions. An image of the 1969 New Haven demonstration to free Black Panther leaders Ericka Hudgens and Bobbie Seale hones in on the sizable crowd of women of diverse ages and races (similar to the makeup of a contemporary Women’s March or Black Lives Matter protest).
This and other works for this exhibition were selected for their visual ties to past and present activism, in keeping with OSH’s mission to connect its revolutionary war-era history to today’s activist movements through contemporary art. The use of street theater and anti-capitalist messaging in the Halloween 1968 W.I.T.C.H Hex on Wall Street image evokes the 2011 Occupy protest. Specific protest signs and posters from this era feel strikingly similar to today’s slogans about women’s reproductive rights, police reform and the government’s failure to address economic or racial inequality and uphold the values on which the nation was supposed to be founded (one of the photographs on display captures a protester from the 1968 NYC Anti-Imperialist March carrying a quote from the Declaration of Independence).
In his introduction to the monograph Bev Grant Photography 1968-1972, William Cordova writes that rather than trying to “convince us of the significance of a static moment…Grant compels us to narrate our own experience in what we see.” Such details may remind us of ongoing struggles for justice decades later, but also of progress made due to the creativity, persistence and coalition-building depicted in these images. Says Grant, “I am hopeful about the future, but I don’t try to give advice to the younger folks who are shaping it. The most I have to offer is a look back at history – from which we all can learn.”
About the Artist:
Bev Grant (born 1942) grew up in Portland, Oregon and moved to New York City in the 1960s. She was radicalized through the Anti-War Movement and became involved in the Women’s Movement and the Civil Rights Movement as an activist, musician, and photographer. Much of Bev Grant’s photography documents political activism and consciousness-raising events from 1968 until 1972. Thereafter, she began to focus more on her music. Her exceptional oeuvre includes photographs of the Black Panther Free Breakfast Program, the Jeanette Rankin Brigade March on Washington, the Fillmore East Takeover, the Poor People’s Campaign, GIs Against the War and the Young Lords Garbage Offensive. Additionally, Grant’s photography depicts her own activism and her involvement with New York Radical Women. Her documentation of the Miss America Protest and W.I.T.C.H. Hex on Wall Street (both in 1968) has been featured in numerous news outlets and exhibitions.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Bev Grant’s band Human Condition performed folk, rock and world music. In 1991, Grant joined the United Association of Labor Education Northeast Union Women’s Summer School as Cultural Director. Since 1997, she has been Founder and Director of the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus. From 2006 to 2008, Grant performed with other female musicians as part of a group called Bev Grant and the Dissident Daughters and later as WOOL&GRANT. She released a solo album, It’s Personal, in 2017.
Grant’s photography was used in the film She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, released in 2015, and her first solo exhibition, in 2018, was co-curated by Alison Gingeras and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz at OSMOS Address in New York City.
About the Curator:
Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
About the Publisher & Book:
Bev Grant Photography 1968 –1972, was published by OSMOS Books, New York (2021) and edited by Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, with an introduction by artist William Cordova and an essay by author and historian Johanna Fernández. Totally independent and self-supporting since 2012, OSMOS has published more than 30 bound volumes in circulation, including OSMOS Magazine (21 issues to date) and monographs with artists such as Leslie Hewitt, Eileen Quinlan, Wardell Milan, Kon Trubkovich, Marcelo Krasilcic, Glen Rubsamen, Nilbar Gures and others. OSMOS titles are distributed by DAP/artbook.com to discerning retailers with a special preference for museums, independent bookstores, art galleries and curated concept stores. We promote and believe in the hands-on, haptic experience of content, both on-the-wall and on-the-page, and thus we dedicate limited resources to the content on our digital outlet www.osmos.online. For more information: osmos.address@gmail.com
Struggling Toward A Better World is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Descendants
Artwork by Dianne Hebbert
October 16, 2021 – January 30, 2022
Opening Reception October 16, 2021, 1 pm – 3 pm.
Gallery hours Friday-Sunday, Noon – 4 pm beginning October 22, 2021.
Public Programs: Join Dianne to make a painted portrait of your loved one, perfect for personalized holiday gift giving. Bring a favorite photo and learn all the steps of the process.
October 24, 4 pm – 6 pm & November 21, 11 am – 1:30 pm. $10 suggested donation.
Overview:
Descendants is a new body of work by Dianne Hebbert depicting people of Indigenous descent in collaged paradisiacal landscapes. Through larger-than-life representations of real people that claim space, the work celebrates people of Latinx and American Indigenous heritage and the continuation of their cultural traditions as a form of resilience.
About the Artworks:
Portraits include members of the artist’s Nicaraguan Miskito family; youth from the Brooklyn-based Mexican and Latin-American immigrant empowerment organization Mixteca; and descendants of the Lenape tribe that originally inhabited the land surrounding the Old Stone House (OSH). The choice of subject matter was inspired by Hebbert’s past work as a teaching artist with Mixteca and visits to the NYC-based Lenape Center events as well as historic Lenape images. The portraits’ backgrounds consist of collaged images of Caribbean landscapes and reserved Indigenous land in the United States.
Continuing the artist’s ongoing investigation of glorification, migration, and displacement through posture and fashion, this new body of work further pushes experimentation with materials and representation. Inspired by Italian Renaissance, Egyptian and Buddhist art, Hebbert incorporates gold to attribute the highest value and esteem to her figures, creating superlative beings. Site-specific exhibition components include large suspended figures on mylar in the gallery and an outdoor installation featuring traditional Indigenous crops that reference native plants in the OSH garden and continued life, growth and adaptation.
Descendants corresponds with the opening of the OSH’s new interactive exhibit on the Lenape history of the site. OSH is at the crossroads of ancient Lenape paths, adjacent to the historic town of Marechkawick. In the 1640s, the Dutch West India Company began a series of violent confrontations known as Kieft’s War, breaking its agreements with the Lenape. By 1645, the Lenape of Marechkawick agreed to sell their lands in what would become Brooklyn, forcing them west to Staten Island and the Hudson Valley. Today, despite the displacement of its original Lenape residents, New York City still has one of the largest intertribal Indigenous communities in the country.
Descendants is one of a series of exhibits and programs at OSH that provide opportunities for contemporary Indigneous artists to connect a greater awareness of the past to critical conversations about Brooklyn’s future.
About the Artist:
Dianne Hebbert is a Nicaraguan-American artist and curator. She works primarily in painting, printmaking and installation art. As a Miami native she attended New World School of the Arts before she earned her BFA in Painting and Drawing from Purchase College and her MFA in Printmaking from Brooklyn College. Hebbert is a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and residency, and she was selected as a Smack Mellon Hot Pick Artist in 2017 and an Emerging Leader of New York Arts 2016-2017 Fellow.
Hebbert has completed residencies at Trestle Art Space and Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and is currently a Chashama Space to Connect artist. In the fall of 2019 Hebbert created an installation at Fordham Plaza in the Bronx, NY for Chashama and the Department of Transportation.
Since 2011 Hebbert has independently curated exhibitions with a focus on diversity for small galleries in Brooklyn, the Virginia Center for Latin American Art, The College of New Rochelle, and most recently for Chashama’s Space to Connect Program.
About the Curator:
Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Descendants is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Land Markings
Artwork by Dennis RedMoon Darkeem, Jeremy Dennis, Ella Mahoney, & Natasha Smoke Santiago
August 22, 2021 – October 11, 2021
Opening Reception September 12, 2021, 4 pm – 6 pm (originally August 22, delayed due to weather).
Gallery hours Friday-Sunday, Noon – 3 pm beginning August 27.
Watch the recording of our Closing Conversation, held on October 12.
Public Program September 19, 3 pm – 5 pm: artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem will lead a workshop on remembering the past to honor the future. This will include meditation and stress-reducing techniques as well as art-making inspired by Indigenous sounds, storytelling, smells and tea drinking. Register here.
More details and a full schedule of public programming in conjunction with this exhibition will be announced soon.
Overview:
Land Markings brings together four New York-based artists of Indigenous heritage who have created site-specific work commenting on the past, present and future of land use in the areas surrounding the Old Stone House. Their work explores such topics as the acknowledgement and preservation of local Indigenous cultural sites in Brooklyn and New York State; under-recognized histories of local trade and land transfer (including the seizure of colonized land); and land use issues facing contemporary Indigenous and other BIPOC communities.
A central theme in all the work is the importance of recognizing the continued presence and influence of Indigenous communities in the New York area. Yet the work also suggests the limitations of mere acknowledgment, in some cases proposing or supporting models of Indigenous sovereignty and sustainability that defy a singular narrative or type of mark-making. Many of the works on view combine traditional craft with contemporary art practices, while rejecting cultural assimilation and asserting the importance of craft, performance and storytelling in maintaining ties to land and community and as a form of activism.
Land Markings precedes the upcoming redesign of the Old Stone House’s permanent exhibit to include its Lenape history. OSH is at the crossroads of ancient Lenape paths, adjacent to the historic town of Marechkawick. In the 1640s, the Dutch West India Company began a series of violent confrontations known as Kieft’s War, breaking its agreements with the Lenape. By 1645, the Lenape of Marechkawick agreed to sell their lands in what would become Brooklyn, forcing them west to Staten Island and the Hudson Valley. Today, despite the displacement of its original Lenape residents, New York City still has one of the largest intertribal Indigenous communities in the country.
Land Markings is the first in a series of exhibits and programs at OSH that will provide opportunities for contemporary Indigneous artists to connect a greater awareness of the past to critical conversations about Brooklyn’s future, including fair and sustainable uses of our natural and built environment.
About the Artworks:
Shinnecock Nation enrolled tribal member and artist Jeremy Dennis presents new photographs of culturally-significant Native American sites in Brooklyn, part of his ongoing On This Site – Indigenous Long Island project to raise awareness of the history and continued existence of native populations on Long Island. His Rise photo series references pop-culture zombie films to convey the ongoing subtle fear of an Indigenous uprising in the United States: “Fear, in this instance, may come from acknowledging our presence, not as an extinct people, but as sovereign nations who have witnessed and endured the process of colonization for hundreds of years and remain oppressed.”
For Haudenosaunee/Mohawk artist Natasha Smoke Santiago, the act of creating traditional Iroquois pottery is integral to “living sovereign” by “living one’s culture…daily, without permission.” For this exhibition she has created an original ceramic tile documenting the history of trade between the Haudenosaunee, Lenape and Europeans in New York State.
Several bodies of work by Yamasee Creek -Seminole and African American artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem reflect on his experience of living as a mixed-race person in New York City, including “dispelling myths about Native Americans and what we look like.” His work transforms everyday objects that reflect on the historical understanding of the past and explore new ideas of future, questioning post-colonial ideas of value, ownership and exchange. His Land Keepers collages on historic New York land deeds “consider those who are responsible for taking care of land, and…allude to the idea of sovereignty over one’s body without the fear of being displaced.” Large flags, one with a land acknowledgment statement and one that proclaims, “NYC: Only the Strong Survive” address themes of “existence, survival and and taking ownership of historic narratives.”
Ella Mahoney draws from her Aquinnah Wampanoag background to imagine a decolonized future for the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. A series of new painted outdoor banners created for OSH explore “what the space could be if we healed our relationship to the land and water.” Looking at the potential of the planned Gowanus rezoning to consider affordability and access to marginalized populations, she asks, “How can we make space in the city ecosystem to care for all beings?”
About the Artists & Curators:
Dennis RedMoon Darkeem is inspired to create artwork based on the familiar objects that he views through his daily travels. He discovers elements in existing architecture and among everyday items found within the home. Ultimately, he sets out to express a meaningful story about events in his life and those found with the communities with whom he works. Since his work as a professional artist commenced in the early 2000s, it has evolved into critiquing social and political issues affecting US and Indigenous Native American culture. Much of his art has focused on issues like institutionalized racism and classism, jarring stereotypes, and displacement of people of color. As a multimedia artist, Darkeem expresses these motifs through fine art, performance, and photography. He received a BA and MFA from Pratt Institute. He has exhibited locally and nationally and received awards and fellowships from the Bronx Council of the Arts, Bronx Museum, and the Laundromat Project, among others.
Jeremy Dennis is a contemporary fine art photographer and a tribal member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation in Southampton, NY. His work explores Indigenous identity, culture, and assimilation. Dennis was one of 10 recipients of a 2016 Dreamstarter Grant from the national non-profit organization Running Strong for American Indian Youth. Residencies include Yaddo, Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, North Mountain Residency, Shanghai, WV, MDOC Storytellers’ Institute, Saratoga Springs, NY, and the Vermont Studio Center hosted by the Harpo Foundation. He has been part of several group and solo exhibitions, including the Parrish Art Museum; The Department of Art Gallery, Stony Brook University; the Wallace Gallery, SUNY College at Old Westbury, NY; the Flecker Gallery at Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY; and the Suffolk County Historical Society, Riverhead, NY. Dennis holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, and a BA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, NY. He currently lives and works in Southampton, New York on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.
Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Ella Mahoney is a member of Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) based in Brooklyn, NY; an artist, illustrator, and teacher. She received her BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has since illustrated children’s books, exhibited work in many galleries, and created installations in collaboration with performers. Primarily working in oil, acrylic, and most recently silk paint; her work is based in storytelling and draws inspiration from creation stories; as well as from narratives of her personal experience of indigeneity through lenses of love and nature. Her recent projects explore large-scale silk painting and installation as a medium that invites people to play and participate in creating comfortable, loving spaces connecting them to each other and the surrounding environments.
Natasha Smoke Santiago was born in Rochester, New York and brought up in Haudenosaunee tradition. Her grandparents were part of a Mohawk diaspora in the mid 20th century who moved to cities like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo and NYC following the steel trade. She works in many mediums, chronicling traditional Haudenosaunee culture, contemporary life, the miracle of pregnancy and the beauty of the natural world. Natasha is one of a handful of artists, historians and living history enthusiasts attempting to resurrect and further elevate the Iroquoian style of pottery. The Tradition of the Longhouse and living one’s culture, by one’s cultural values, daily, without permission, is a central theme in her being. In the words of an Onondaga Leader: “To be sovereign, one must live sovereign.” In this tradition Natasha attempts to live sustainably on a small piece of disputed farmland, in a land claim area adjacent to Akwesasne. In addition to art, she also practices Indigenous seed keeping, gardening and occasional farming.
Land Markings is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Nature Contained
Artwork by Jessica Dalrymple, K. Haskell, & Suzy Kopf
May 15, 2021 – June 25, 2021
Opening Reception May 15, 2021, 3 pm – 5 pm.
In conjunction with We’re Still Here…Creative Outdoor Bazaar and outdoor portrait show, organized in partnership with Arts Gowanus.
Gallery hours Friday-Sunday, Noon – 3 pm.
Take a virtual tour of the exhibition.
Public Program- Sunday, June 13, 11 am-12:30 pm: Meditative Garden Journaling with Jessica Dalrymple in the OSH garden.
Watch the recording of Craft Your Artist Statement with Suzy Kopf online at any time.
In their new site-specific collaborative and individual works, artists Jessica Dalrymple, K. Haskell and Suzy Kopf respond to growth and death in the Old Stone House (OSH) garden. Inspired by visits the artists made pre-COVID-19 to the garden in summer and fall of 2019, three large collaborative pieces represent Haskell, Kopf and Dalrymple’s first time merging their signature styles together to make a new body of work. Combining watercolor collage, ink on mylar, and oil on paper, these works engage with the life cycle of urban nature, contained. They encourage a deeper understanding of specific plant life and celebrate the beauty of the cyclical quality of nature, to help catalyze individual and collective rejuvenation after a year of global pandemic. In contrast to its surrounding neighborhood, OSH and its grounds harken back to an older Brooklyn where people subsisted, at least in part, on food they could grow and forage themselves. The works in Nature Contained also evoke the importance of acknowledging Brooklyn’s indigenous past, native plants, and sustainable practices.
Additional works by the individual artists include Jessica Dalrymple’s Three Siblings mixed media piece that honors the Native American farming tradition of companion planting and serves as a visual metaphor for the community spirit fostered by the OSH gardens. K. Haskell’s graphic studies in the Flourished and Decomposed series amplify sometimes-overlooked elements of nature in various parts of the life cycle. Their source material includes OSH’s garden and local yards, parks, tree pit gardens, and bodegas. Suzy Kopf’s collage depicts the gardens in high summer using recycled scraps of paper as part of her no-waste studio practice. Visitors can take and plant her coloring pages printed on seed paper, to grow wildflowers native to New York and found in the OSH garden.
About the Artists:
Suzy Kopf was raised in Silicon Valley, on a cul-de-sac that used to be a plum orchard that used to be an army encampment on occupied Ramaytush land. Suzy currently lives and works in Baltimore, in a house on occupied Piscataway land that was once the right field of the second Oriole Stadium. She completed her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons and a BA in Art History from Eugene Lang College. She has attended numerous residency fellowships including Kala, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Playa and VCCA. She received a Design History Society Travel Grant as well as several research grants to support her art practice. She regularly leads workshops and lectures on professional development for artists. She teaches watercolor painting and museum studies at Johns Hopkins University and MICA. Kopf has previously made paintings, artist books and wallpaper that address the division people make between the desirability of perennial plants and weeds. In 2017, Kopf collaborated with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy to create “Gowanus Natives” a brochure detailing ten plants indigenous to Brooklyn and how to cultivate them.
K. Haskell is an interdisciplinary visual artist, draftsperson, and illustrator. Originally from the Boston area, they moved to New York in 2001 to pursue a BA from Marymount Manhattan College in Graphic Design. Since graduating in 2005, Haskell has shown in a variety of venues throughout New York, including The Gershwin Hotel, Midoma Gallery, The Governors Island Art Fair, The Old Stone House and Trestle Gallery. Haskell recently completed their MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in the Boston Low Residency MFA Program, Summer 2020. Haskell’s Decomposed series seeks to reveal the beauty in decay, while their accompanying Flourished series focuses on the botanical and desirable elements of nature in various parts of the life cycle. Their delicately rendered pen and ink drawings on paper and translucent Mylar aim to reveal the aesthetic within sometimes disturbing subjects. Haskell’s Pronouns are They, Them, Theirs.
Jessica Dalrymple studied Fine Art at Hamilton College and trained as a painter at The Art Student’s League of New York. She has exhibited with many national and regional juried shows and has received numerous awards including the Fenimore Award which granted her a solo exhibit at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY. She is also earning her certificate in horticulture from Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, is a licensed city tree pruner through Trees New York. She instructs oil painting and contemporary botanical drawing for Trestle Workshops, Hamilton College, and The Old Stone House Brooklyn. She has also collaborated with local organizations to create art events that raise awareness about the local landscape and environmental justice issues such as; co-creating ArtLab Gowanus, a pop-up structure hosting landscape related art workshops taught by local artists, made possible by the Gowanus Public Art Grant, applied for in collaboration with The Gowanus Canal Conservancy (2015). In 2014 she created a Plein Air On The Canal event hosting organizations such as local chapters of The Urban Sketchers and Oil Painters of America on the banks of the canal to collectively capture the evolving landscape. Other events include a Spring Botanical Draw for the Gowanus Dredgers focusing on local vegetation, multiple Botanical Drawing events for The Old Stone House Brooklyn featuring their historic gardens, and a Botanical Drink N Drawing event to raise funds for The Human Impact Institute. Most recently she leads monthly Nature Journaling Hikes through Prospect Park, sketching the park’s flora and fauna.
About the Curator: Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Nature Contained is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Sun Seekers (Spring 2021)
Artwork by Amy Khoshbin & Jennifer Khoshbin
April 17, 2021 – May 10, 2021.
Opening Reception April 17, 2021, 2 pm – 5 pm.
Gallery hours by appointment Friday-Sunday, Noon – 3 pm.
Click here to take a virtual tour of the exhibition.
Watch the recording of our Zoom event with the artists and curator.
Sun Seekers featuring artists Amy and Jennifer Khoshbin, promotes re-connection with the physical realm as a form of healing. Amy and Jennifer, a sister duo in the arts collective House of Trees, present a new series of sculptures and drawings meant to dissolve the heavy weight surrounding us during the pandemic into a greater awareness of the body, dismembering and remembering mythologies around healing and somatics.
Sun Seekers references the artists’ science fiction-meets-reality narrative about a group of people who spend most of their time indoors on screens while consuming flowers and wearing absurd anti-anxiety analog objects to reconnect their bodies to the natural world. These ameliorative objects reflect natural light from the sun to undo the draining effect of blue screen light, help plants flourish in an inhospitable environment, and shine their light both inward and outward. The Sun Seekers travel around the city, finding shards of light to reflect and keep both themselves and those around them feeling human, warm and alive. The Sun Seekers mythology is inspired by the radical aesthetics and liberatory philosophies of Sun Ra and Audre Lorde that address the importance of healing, humor, creative resistance, and physical pleasure.
Amy’s sculptural series uses tactile materials like weighted blankets, pantyhose, felt, and eye masks to promote a sense of touch and intimacy. Sculptures like the Hugging Chair and Weighting to Exhale cape serve as artifacts from the world of the Sun Seekers while also intending to re-awaken the senses that are so often disregarded in our digital landscape. Jennifer’s intricate drawings, Pile Up #1 and #2, along with her botanical resin sculptures, evoke a return to the natural environment, and create a sense of surrealist nostalgia as an escape from our current world.
Sun Seekers builds upon our previous exhibition Against DOOM TV, a collaboration between Amy Khoshbin and Macon Reed that also tapped into the history of artists using the absurd and play to make imagining a just future more fun and radical. Responding to the tumultuous 2020 election season, the exhibition brought artists, activists, and candidates into experimental dialogue. Sun Seekers continues this exploration, containing some of Amy’s collages and dioramas from the previous exhibition that critique contemporary power structures, but encourages turning inward and activating imagination as essential to the restorative process post-election.
About the Artists:
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist, activist, and educator. Her practice, as an artist and pedagogue, builds bridges between disparate communities to counteract fear with a collective sense of empowered radical acceptance. She pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster progressive social change through performance, social practice, video, rap music, installation, tattooing, teaching and writing. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, VOLTA Art Fair, Leila Heller Gallery, Arsenal Contemporary, National Sawdust, BRIC Arts, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She has received residencies at spaces such as The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Project for Empty Space, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She has received a Franklin Furnace Fund and a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant. Khoshbin received an MA from New York University in Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Film and Media Studies at University of Texas at Austin. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, House of Trees, Tina Barney, and poets Anne Carson and Bob Currie among others.
Jennifer Khoshbin is a San Antonio artist and curator. Her work often aims to present some fragment or detail of the story of human diversity and community, and the strength of the work comes from great attention to pictorial detail, which can be readily seen in her drawings, murals and installations. Jennifer’s work is meant for viewing at close range and explores ideas often through the lens of modern illustration. Khoshbin’s artistic practice interprets both personal and public identities through different forms of collaborative storytelling. The guiding inspiration in all her artwork is twofold: the public self and the private self. Her public works are created with a respect to the specific history of the site and its communities of settlers and wayfarers, past and present, human, plant, animal, and mineral. Whether creating intricate personal drawings or large-scale public art pieces, there exists a simple phrase, idea, or intricate story worth Telling. Jennifer has exhibited works in galleries and museums throughout the United States: Southwest School of Art and Craft, TX; Blue Star Contemporary, TX; Artpace, TX; The Watermill Center, NY; Rose and Radish Gallery, SF; Bellevue Arts Museum, WA; 360SEE, Chicago; and Tinlark Gallery in LA, among others. Her work has been published and written about widely and has appeared in Newsweek, Readymade, House Beautiful, Glamour, and in numerous art and craft books.
About the Curator: Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Sun Seekers is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Against Doom TV (Fall 2020-Winter 2021)
A project by Amy Khoshbin & Macon Reed
October 25, 2020 – January 31, 2021. Gallery hours by appointment Friday-Sunday, Noon – 3 pm.
View a virtual tour of the Exhibition.
Stay tuned for events planned throughout the run of the Exhibition.
Against Doom TV is an interactive variety show bringing together artists, organizers, and candidates to make dismantling harmful systems and imagining the future we want more fun and radical. Artists Amy Khoshbin and Macon Reed explore the potential of collaborative performative and video practices to promote both activism and healing during this tumultuous time leading up to and in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Flipping the script on the drudgery of online platforms and passive TV watching, they tap into the history of artists using the absurd and play.
In the first episode, “Against DOOM TV: Abolitionism + Electoral Politics,” the artists tackle abolition and electoral politics as harm reduction. What does abolition mean? How can we use art, direct action, and policy making to create a world without prisons, punishment, and other forms of control? And how do we use abolitionist art making and direct action to bring people to the polls and help us envision a world beyond the current electoral systems? Speaking with a City Council candidate and abolitionist organizers, Khoshbin and Reed uncover answers with a live online audience through interviews, dating shows and more. Additional virtual and outdoor programming will respond to the outcome of the November 3 election and to Inauguration Day in January, with the goal of an ongoing series.
The exhibition includes video, sets and objects from the TV episode; and related artworks, including outdoor banners. Through these works both artists investigate corporate control, American idealism, and constructed ideas of success. They sometimes meditate on death to call for more active engagement with the present and a rejection of past mythologies.
About the Artists:
Macon Reed is a queer multidisciplinary artist who creates objects that are activated through performance and public participation, creating rituals and discourse around social and political issues. Her work is guided by a set of central concerns around power, collective consciousness and belonging, providing an inclusive platform for exchange. Using simple and accessible materials, working with a consistent palette of unapologetically bright colors, which allow the inconsistencies of her hand to show. Her work has been exhibited in New York at venues such as PULSE NYC Special Projects, BRIC Media Arts, ABC No Rio, and Abrons Art Center. Nationally, at San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), and Every Woman Biennial (Los Angeles). Internationally, at Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), Five Years Gallery (London), Athens Museum of Queer Arts (Greece), Palazzina Liberty (Bologna), and Royal Academy of Arts Schools (London), and the University of New South Wales Gallery (Sydney). Reed completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. She has completed many residencies and fellowship programs including at the Royal Academy of Arts (London), Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology, A.I.R. gallery, Amherst College, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has received mention in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artnet News, Huffington Post, ArtFCity, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, BK Reader, The Gothamist, Art F City, Huffington Post, Arte TV France, and Arte TV Germany, among others.
Amy Khoshbin is an Iranian-American Brooklyn-based artist, activist, and educator. Her practice, as an artist and pedagogue, builds bridges between disparate communities to counteract fear with a collective sense of empowered radical acceptance. She pushes the formal and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to foster progressive social change through performance, social practice, video, rap music, installation, tattooing, teaching and writing. She has shown at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Times Square Arts, Artpace, The High Line, Socrates Sculpture Park, VOLTA Art Fair, Leila Heller Gallery, Arsenal Contemporary, National Sawdust, BRIC Arts, and festivals such as River to River and South by Southwest. She has received residencies at spaces such as The Watermill Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Project for Empty Space, Anderson Ranch, and Banff Centre for the Arts. She has received a Franklin Furnace Fund and a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant. Khoshbin received an MA from New York University in Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Film and Media Studies at University of Texas at Austin. She has collaborated with Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, House of Trees, Tina Barney, and poets Anne Carson and Bob Currie among others.
About the Curator: Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Against Doom TV is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Brooklyn Utopias: 2020 (Summer 2020)
Online exhibition launches August 20. Opening reception on Instagram Live @oldstonehousebklyn August 20 6 pm. Gallery hours by appointment; please call 718-768-3195 Friday-Sunday, Noon – 3 pm.
We hope you will join us for our free public events hosted by participating artists.
Utopia: An ideal place or state, usually imaginary; any visionary system of political, social, environmental, or moral perfection
Brooklyn Utopias: 2020 addresses Brooklyn’s past, present and future by inviting artists to consider differing visions of an ideal Brooklyn. Participating artists also explore how Brooklyn has continued to change over the past decade, and if/how it can serve as a model for urban and American living on a national scale as we navigate a global pandemic in a time of unprecedented social, political and environmental turmoil. Brooklyn Utopias also implies the possibilities (or limitations) of art in creating a better world.
In 2020, in the midst of a tense national election season, COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd and others have brought heightened attention and urgency to the need to address Brooklyn’s persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities. Brooklyn Utopias: 2020 responds to our current moment with artworks that implicitly or explicitly suggest that a Brooklyn Utopia, especially in the COVID era, must involve not only a safe, healthy and affordable physical environment that nurtures the borough’s diverse communities and landmarks. It also demands a greater collective spirit and the rejection of “unhealthy levels of independence,” in the words of artist Jody Wood, who has created a virtual Independence Treatment Center to mitigate this condition. Diane Exavier’s Every Body Remains a Miracle installation and book-making workshop asks, “How do we care for our neighbors when the amenities of new construction seduce tenants into exceedingly more private life?” (and when those with the means may choose to abandon Brooklyn for suburban and rural alternatives?)
Together, these and other artworks investigate complex topics such as gentrification and environmental justice and experiment with creative ways to engage with and care for local communities, even with current social distancing measures. Many of the projects include online or outdoor components that can be experienced by a wide audience. We invite the public to submit photos of their own Brooklyn Utopias with the hashtag #BrooklynUtopias2020 and by tagging @oldstonehousebklyn. Visit our online exhibition to learn more about the artists and events.
Brooklyn Utopias: 2020 corresponds with the 10-year anniversary of the original Brooklyn Utopias? exhibitions series developed by curator Katherine Gressel and presented at both OSH and Brooklyn Historical Society in 2009-2010.
Participating Artists: Asha Boston, Elan Cadiz, Fontaine Capel, Nate Dorr and Nathan Kensinger, Diane Exavier, Tamara Gayer, Amir Hariri, Human Impacts Institute, Anna Lise Jensen, David Kutz, Robin Michals and Lynn Neuman, Jan Mun, Iviva Olenick, Rochelle Shicoff, Jody Wood, Ezra Wube, Betty Yu.
Artist Selection Committee: Heather Bhandari, independent curator and co-founder of the Remix Project and the Art World Conference; Desiree Gordon, Director of Programs and Strategy, Brooklyn Arts Council; Katherine Gressel, Contemporary Curator, Old Stone House & Washington Park; Kim Maier, Executive Director, Old Stone House & Washington Park; Maggie Weber, Director of Education, Old Stone House & Washington Park; and Harry Weil, Director of Public Programs & Special Projects, Green-Wood.
About the Curator: Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Brooklyn Utopias: 2020 is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Image credit: Ezra Wube.
Online Project, Digital Programming, & Future Gallery Exhibition
Regeneration in Place
Projects by the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) & Gowanus Swim Society (GSS)
Online Project & Digital Programming Launches April, 2020
Gowanus Swim Society Exhibit Component Postponed to 2021
Regeneration in Place is the Old Stone House & Washington Park (OSH)’s newest contemporary art programming, featuring the artist collectives Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) and Gowanus Swim Society (GSS). Originally scheduled for Spring 2020, the format for the exhibition has shifted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent mandated social distancing. We are pleased to announce the launch of the participatory online project by the EPA, as well as a series of digital programs with GSS. Our exhibition component Nature Contained with Gowanus Swim Society will be postponed to 2021.
Each artist group encourages deeper engagement with specific places that support plant life, from the Old Stone House garden to our own windows and backyards, to catalyze individual and collective rejuvenation. The term Regeneration suggests repairing what is lost or damaged, or a process of renewal and growth in organisms or ecosystems that makes them resilient to both natural cycles and events that cause disturbances. In the midst of a global pandemic, national election, and climate crisis that all threaten to permanently change life as we know it, these artists aim to help us find solace in the cyclical beauty of nature and look critically at our relationships with our environment and each other. We hope this perspective can inform our observance of Earth Day on April 22 as we continue to shelter in place. Regeneration in Place is curated by Katherine Gressel.
Online Project & Digital Programming:
Click here to participate in the Multispecies Care Survey, an interactive feature project by EPA.
GSS artist Jessica Dalrymple will host a virtual Botanical Drink ‘n’ Draw on Friday, April 24 at 7 pm on Zoom. Click here to register.
GSS members Suzy Kopf and Mary Negro will host a virtual workshop for artists based on their article “Put Your Anxious Energy to Work for You: 9 Art Admin Tasks You Can Do Right Now” , on Saturday, April 25 at 1 pm on Zoom. Click here for full details and Zoom information.
Over the next two months, EPA members will host online Multispecies Community Care Circles, dates TBD.
More programming to be announced.
About Nature Contained & Gowanus Swim Society:
For their future exhibition at OSH, Nature Contained, Gowanus Swim Society member artists K. Haskell, Suzy Kopf and Jessica Dalrymple respond to growth and death in the Old Stone House garden. Inspired by visits the artists made to the garden in summer and fall of 2019, a series of new mixed media pieces represent the artists’ first time merging their signature styles together to make a body of work. They ask viewers to contemplate all aspects of the flora of an urban garden, including the high season of full color and bloom as well as the low season where the potential for rebirth resides below ground. In high contrast to the surrounding neighborhood, OSH and its grounds harken back to an older Brooklyn where people subsisted, at least in part, on food they could grow and forage themselves. During this time of social distancing, the public can experience in-progress images of the new work online, and virtual workshops with the artists.
About Multispecies Care Survey & The Environmental Performance Agency:
The Multispecies Care Survey was created by EPA members Catherine Grau, Christopher Kennedy, Andrea Haenggi, Ellie Irons. The survey is a public engagement and data gathering initiative meant to provoke and articulate forms of environmental agency that de-center human supremacy and facilitate the co-generation of embodied, localized plant-human care practices. This continues the EPA’s work in response to the dismantling of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the 2016-2020 presidential administration. With this project, the collective asks for public input: In a time of pandemic crisis, how do we re-value what care means for all living beings? An online survey and series of protocols, as well as facilitated Multispecies Community Care Circles (online and, when possible, in person), will integrate the need for social distancing with the encouragement of new discoveries, connections and understanding of diverse nonhuman life along the margins. With the data gathered through this survey, EPA will ultimately work towards drafting a new piece of policy, The Multispecies Act. This Act aims to offer a set of embodied, actionable principles for centering spontaneous urban plant life as one means (among many) of contending with the failure of our environmental regulatory apparatus to deliver policy that protects and values life both human and non-human.
About the Curator:
Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Regeneration in Place is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
Presence (Spring 2020)
The Artwork of Alicia Grullón
Presence is an exhibition curated by Katherine Gressel which explores the evolution of artist Alicia Grullón’s socially-engaged work over 15+ years.
Grullón describes her performances, both live or for photography or video, as “critiques of the politics of presence – an argument for the inclusion of disenfranchised communities in political and social spheres.” By inserting her own body in spaces “that have historically not been meant for [her] or designed so [she has] little control over how [she is] represented in them,” Grullón aims to disrupt mainstream historical and cultural narratives. This includes collecting and performing the stories of individuals whose voices might otherwise be absent. Her interventions have included public spaces, cultural and academic institutions, the dominant history of the United States, government policy, environmentalism, feminism, the United Nations, and the mass media.
In the tradition of deconstructionist philosophy, Grullón’s work challenges traditional binaries between past and present, and presence and its typical opposite, “absence.” In her photographs, “what is alluded to within the frame is largely informed by what is not in the frame.” In addition to evoking missing narratives from past, current, and future events, the work selected for this exhibition focuses on Grullón’s use of costumes, props and other methods of obscuring her own identity (leading to the absence of a uniform artist figure throughout the work), sometimes to augment the voices of others. In her essay “The Missing Body: Performance in the Absence of the Artist” Cindy Baker argues that through this type of physical obfuscation, “risk, transgression, and a false illusion of distance are taken on by both artist and audience member, expanding a capacity for intimacy between artist/art and audience that few artworks can.” Through inhabiting a world of her own creation, Grullon also subverts a traditional European, male gaze.
In keeping with OSH’s mission to make local history relevant, Presence is comprised mainly of works rooted in Grullón’s native New York City and that address such topics as gentrification, immigration and community preservation. Several works on view were inspired by OSH itself and its Dutch Colonial and Revolutionary War past.
Presence is the first in a series of four 2020 OSH exhibitions exploring how contemporary artists encourage participation and civic engagement.
About the Artist:
Alicia Grullón’s work has been shown at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, BRIC Arts, Spring/Break Art Show, and Performa 11, among others. Grullón is also a contributing author to Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts: But How Does it Work?, ed. Nicola Mann and Charlotte Bonham-Carter (Palgrave Macmillan, London) and Bridging Communities Through Socially Engaged Art, ed. Alice Wexler and Vida Sabbaghi (Routledge, New York). Grullón is an Artist in Residence at The Hemispheric Institute of Performance And Politics at New York University. Other Recent activities include the Shandaken Project inaugural artist residency on Governors Island and the Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Alum program at 80 White Street. Grullón is the recipient of the inaugural Colene Brown Art Prize for 2019. Grullón is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts and City University of New York (CUNY). She is from and based in New York City.
About the Curator:
Katherine Gressel, the Old Stone House & Washington Park’s Contemporary Art Curator, is a New York‐based curator, artist, and writer focused on site‐specific art. She earned her BA in art from Yale and MA in arts administration from Columbia. Katherine’s previous exhibits dealing with such topics as income inequality, urban agriculture, and parks have been recognized by the New York Times, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, News 12 Brooklyn, and DNAInfo. In addition to organizing eleven major exhibitions to date at the Old Stone House, Katherine has curated for FIGMENT, No Longer Empty, St. Francis College, and Brooklyn Historical Society, and was the 2016 NARS Foundation emerging curator. She was selected for the 2015 Independent Curators International (ICI) Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Katherine has written and presented on public and community art issues for Createquity, Americans for the Arts, and Public Art Dialogue, among others. Katherine also served as Programs Manager at Smack Mellon Gallery from 2010-2014, and has worked and consulted for diverse nonprofits.
Presence is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
SALLY (Winter 2019/2020)
Curated by JoAnne McFarland and Sasha Chavchavadze, SALLY was a collaborative project which brought together artists, writers, and performers intrigued by the narratives of women, like Sally Hemings, whose destinies are inextricably interwoven with those they knew, and whose lives have often been erased or forgotten.
At this critical juncture, with women’s autonomy once again under siege, another meaning of sally seems particularly relevant: a sudden charge out of a besieged place. SALLY showed how artists, through their methodologies, confront myriad issues of agency, and use community and collaboration to undercut the status quo, and construct lives of integrity and purpose.
SALLY Participants:
Lauren Frances Adams, Meredith Bergmann, Deborah Castillo, Sasha Chavchavadze, Maureen Connor, Katya Grokhovsky, Robin Holder, Jee Hwang, Tatiana Istomina, Fabiola Jean–Louis, Carole Kunstadt, Paula Lalala, Nancy Lunsford, Jennifer Mack–Watkins, JoAnne McFarland, Elizabeth Moran, Amanda Nedham, Ann Shostrom, Marisa Williamson, Philemona Williamson, Hong Chun Zhang.
No More Water (Fall 2019)
Curated by Katherine Gressel, this exhibit brought together emerging artists Tahir Carl Karmali and Justin Sterling to respond to the Old Stone House’s unique space. Both artists use reclaimed and abstracted vernacular materials––including used cell phone batteries and broken windows––to symbolize local and global policies that contribute to inequality and displacement. The title “No More Water” also implies our current climate emergency (characterized by increased floods, wildfires, and water contamination) and an urgent call for action.
The artists chose “No More Water” to reference James Baldwin’s 1963 publication “The Fire Next Time,” which begins and ends with the line, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”, quoting the spiritual “Mary Don’t you Weep” and alluding to the Old Testament story of God flooding a corrupt earth. “The Fire Next Time” is considered a galvanizing text for the American Civil Rights movement in its examination of racial injustice and its call for all people of “consciousness” to “change the history of the world.”
Funding for No More Water is made possible, in part, by the Puffin Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments (Spring 2019)
Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments, curated by Katie Fuller, questioned the relationship between historical memory and historical monuments and the implications of the histories that remain absent. Through drawings, quilts, interactive sculptural pieces, public art and paintings artists Kimberly Becoat, Alex Callender, Maureen Connor/Institute for Wishful Thinking, DARN Studio, Damien Davis, Rose Desiano, Ayasha Guerin, Zaq Landsberg, Jennifer Mack Watkins, Maureen McNeill, Lyra Monteiro, Sal Muñoz, Marilyn Nance, Emmaline Payette, Chip Thomas and Kamau Ware were concerned less with erecting massive symbols that define a limited perspective than they were in creating inclusive, dimensional histories. Their works addressed the often debated controversies around such figures as Christopher Columbus, George Washington and J. Marion Sims, and also offered insight into how collective thinking has shaped New York’s story, confronting not only what we remember and memorialize, but how. Katie Fuller was an educator for eleven years before curating her first show, Race and Revolution: Exploring Human Injustices through Art, in the summer/fall of 2016. Her second show, Still Separate – Still Unequal, opened at Smack Mellon in summer 2017 and will finish a two-year tour at the August Wilson Cultural Center in Pittsburgh in summer 2019. She has another project titled Unbroken by Bars that addresses justice-involved women face and overcome.
Artist selection committee: Eva Maybahal Davis; Gallery and Studio Programs Manager; Smack Mellon; Katie Fuller, Independent Curator and Community Organizer; Katherine Gressel, Contemporary Curator, Old Stone House & Washington Park; Kendal Henry, Director, Percent for Art, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs.
Funding for Race & Revolution: Reimagining Monuments has been made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Puffin Foundation.
Processing (2018)
“Processing” is defined as “a series of changes taking place in a definite manner,” including the “systematic organization, treatment or preparation of materials.” The artists in Processing all manipulate art materials through intentional, systematic procedures that sometimes incorporate chance. The resulting work teeters between representation and abstraction – teasing recognizable forms out of abstract ones or abstracting recognizable elements through stripping down or layering/obscuring. Specific works were selected for the exhibition that can trace the evolution of most artists’ work processes.
Participating Artists: Jessica Dalrymple, John Fisk, Natalie Fisk, Abigail Groff Hernandez, Kristen Haskell, Melissa Johnson, Suzy Kopf, Mary Negro
For Which it Stands (2018)
For Which it Stands offered a fresh take on the flags of the American Revolution and today, including the contradictions inherent in their symbolism. Participating Artists: Simone Bailey, Christina Barrera, Andrew Demirjian, Stephan Jahanshahi, Vandana Jain, Katarina Jerinic, Jeff Kasper & Christopher Spinozzi, Josh MacPhee & Jesse Purcell, Sal Muñoz, Iviva Olenick, Manju Shandler, Athena Soules-NYC Light Brigade
Image: Athena Soules/NYC Light Brigade by Nara Garber
Made possible, in part, by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Home Front (2018)
Six women artists explored public and private acts of strength and resistance by women in times of social or political upheaval— inspired by their own family and community histories as well as craft and other work traditionally associated with the home. Featuring Lauren Frances Adams, Golnar Adili, Aisha Cousins, Maya Jeffereis, Lorena Molina, Katherine Toukhy
Icons In Their Own Right (2018)
Icons in their Own Right seeks to remedy historic erasure, champion cultural representation, and reinforce identity and pride. Makeba Rainey’s artistry is heavily influenced by hip-hop culture and Black consciousness. She carefully chooses each photograph to reflect confidence and power; then selects an African-themed design that best contextualizes each figure’s attitude, creating an exchange of multiple layers and emotions. Co-Curated by Monica O. Montgomery, Founding Director, Museum of Impact and Katherine Gressel, Curator, Old Stone House & Washington Park.
Being Well: In Search of Utopia? (2017)
A contemporary art exhibit curated by Katherine Gressel, exploring artists’ role in defining and facilitating community health and wellness featuring work by Zoey Hart, Leslie Kerby, Anthony Heinz May, Carolyn Monastra, Shana Moulton, Carmen Papalia, Shervone Neckles, Jenna Spevack, Tattfoo Tan, and Jody Wood
Made possible with support from the Puffin Foundation, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Multilocational (2017)
A contemporary art exhibit curated by Katherine Gressel, considering how our immigrant nation has historically accommodated multiple peoples and perspectives–and the role of artists and art institutions in presenting and preserving their stories, featuring the work of artists Cecile Chong and Natalia Nakazawa.
This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with City Councilmember David Greenfield.
Domesticated (2016)
A contemporary art exhibition curated by Abby Subak Exhibiting Artists: Liza Cassidy; Paul Gagnier; Sara Jones; Tara Kopp; Susan Newmark; Abby Subak and Jessica Weiss, challenging assumptions about gender roles and how these assumptions impact our views of ourselves and our partnerships.
Appropriating Revolution (2016)
A contemporary art exhibition curated by Katherine Gressel, featuring artists Lauren Frances Adams, Jim Costanzo [Aaron Burr Society], Gen Howe, Robert Gould, Alicia Grullon, and Nsenga Knight exploring how artists are incorporating (and sometimes reinterpreting) the symbols of past revolutions to inform their current socially-engaged work.
Common Ground Gowanus (2015)
Common Ground Gowanus celebrated the creativity nurtured in the neighborhoods around the Gowanus Canal.
In Search of One City: Sensing (In)equality (2015)
In Search of One City explored artists’ role in investigating, navigating, and mitigating income inequality, with a focus on New York City. Check out one of the exhibit’s public programs: Creating for Hire: Supporting a Thriving Artistic Practice through Commissions a BK Brainstorm courtesey of BRICartsmedia.
Gowanus Public Art Initiative (2014)
Gowanus Public Art Initiative presented several eleven-month-long public art installations in the Gowanus neighborhood.
Brooklyn Utopias: In TRANSITion (2013)
In TRANSITion (2013) brought together 19 artists and arts groups responding to differing visions of ideal urban transportation systems or proposing their own.
Brooklyn Utopias: Park Space, Play Space (2012)
Park Space, Play Space brought together 19 artists and arts groups to address the ideal design, planning and use of public parks.
Permanent Exhibit
The Old Stone House: Witness to War – An Exhibit Exploring Conflict from Kieft’s War through the Battle of Brooklyn and the Occupation, 1643-1783
Old Stone House: Witness to War is a self-directed exhibit that takes visitors on a journey from the Lenape village of Marechkawick through Dutch colonization and the Revolutionary War era in Brooklyn. Ten themed areas allow visitors to explore this history and consider how war and displacement impacted the community, what choices people had to make at the time, battle strategies, and what makes these issues relevant in today’s world.
Historians
Patricia Bonomi
Edwin Burrows
Barnet Schecter
Dylan Yeats
Content Development
Ellen Snyder Grenier
Janet Rassweiler
Dylan Yeats
Exhibit Designers & Fabricators
May & Watkins
Interactives
Moey Inc.
Panoramic Studios
Supporters
