Greater Brooklyn was conceived
as an exhibition focusing on unrepresented artists living and
working in Brooklyn and the surrounding boroughs.
Each summer hundreds of new artists, “fresh”
from art school in some form or another, find themselves amongst
their fellow classmates, cheap beer in hand in post-graduatory
spirit, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from the rooftops of
recently converted industrial buildings. Each year a little
more distant and each year a few stops further along the subway
lines. What was once dubbed “The City of Lost Souls”
by a certain visitor to the Yale graduate program has become
home, over the past few decades, to thousands of artists. A
perennial phenomenon of the aspiring defined by proximity and
necessity or by ambitions and a means toward them, ever growing
and perhaps now after some 30 years of settlement this vast
refuge of cultural producers is nearing something close to equity
in terms of supply and demand. Only recently, in a commercial
climate that seems to be constantly redefining the viability
of newer and often younger artists, does it seem that there
are fewer and fewer artists that can be called anything but
emerging or emerged for that matter. Still, as always, there
remain those that have yet to become noticed or “emergent”,
and those that, after many years of making art, could still
be called unknown by some notion of locality.
Greater Brooklyn seeks to find a different
means of surveying new work by artists in New York. Inspired
by a time when entire exhibitions are sold through emailed reproductions
of artwork, the selection process involved an open-call to artists
in the form of an email invitation distributed and redistributed
as an undeterminable form of chain-networking. This resulted
in hundreds of submitted applications and hundreds more digital
images of the applicant’s submitted work. No studio visits
were made. Instead the exhibition was curated entirely on the
basis of digital reproductions and submitted samples of writing.
30 artist’s works were selected that represented unique
and innovative approaches among largely unknown and unrepresented
artists.
Greater Brooklyn was curated by Alex Dodge and
Glen Baldridge.
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