On the sunny morning of Sunday, October 6, Therese Urban glided through the airy second floor of a Civil War-era warehouse with a label stuck to her finger just before Red Hook Open Studios opened for the day.
Urban, a volunteer with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC), helped install a vast group show, cheekily entitled Salon des Refusés 2024 and featuring works by 219 artists who were rejected from the Brooklyn Museum’s open-call exhibition of borough-based artists. The nonprofit organization received so many submissions that they are considering mounting another show.
“It’s really in conjunction with theirs. It’s not a mean comment, there’s just so much talent in the city,” Urban said. “We may put a second one up because we have 300 people on a waiting list.”
Enough of that talent has settled in Red Hook, a former industrial hub jutting into New York Harbor that still maintains a container terminal offloading millions of pounds of tropical fruit each week. These days New Yorkers may be more familiar with its destination-worthy barbecue and lobster rolls, relationship-crushing trips to Ikea, and unsightly diesel-spewing passenger cruise ships.
Unlike other parts of Brooklyn, Red Hook attracts certain kinds of artists who are comfortable with industrial materials and need a lot of space, despite the threat of storm surges during hurricane season. Some artists moved away after Hurricane Sandy flooded streets with six feet of water. While most buildings lost electricity for weeks, BWAC’s headquarters, which were spared, served food to volunteers and National Guard members.
But new artists returned to the area, too. Elaine Young, a fashion and jewelry designer with a bioethics background, moved into her Van Brunt Street studio in 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when she craved the area’s comparative isolation.
“Red Hook artists like to keep to themselves, and these are pretty great views,” she said, pointing to the Statue of Liberty, which she can see from her studio.
The festival’s most popular destinations were inside the Beard Street Warehouses, Civil War-era brick buildings that once stored grain and other commodities and now contain a warren of craft and mixed-media artists. A spacious ground-floor studio housed two glassmaking operations, Pier Glass and Scanlan Glass. On Sunday, acclaimed glass maker Kevin Scanlan shaped molten glass through a long blowpipe as gawkers took photos of the action.
On the third floor of a Van Brunt Street warehouse, artist and designer Rebecca Spivack uses three different rooms in her studio to layer polymer-based plaster over cotton lace patterns, creating a fossil-like image for fireplaces and other interiors.
“It’s a beautiful art form that you find in nature where sealife is ubiquitous,” she said.
Across the hall, installation artist Yeon Ji Yoo created a few dozen doll houses out of recycled Amazon cardboard boxes to resemble Korean ancestral homes that she hung on her wall. In the middle of her studio was a mini-television she had cast and affixed with hundreds of squirts of purple hot glue. “I’m a maniac,” she said. “It soothes me to do it.”
Festival co-organizer Deborah Ugoretz was pleased to see so many new faces and asked visitors what brought them to Red Hook. She moved into the neighborhood in September 2011, a year before Hurricane Sandy, but her mind was on the anniversary of October 7, and she held a print of a burnt tree entitled “The World is Upside Down.” “It’s a symbol of life and it’s a symbol of endless war,” she said.
Some of the most striking exhibitions this weekend were scattered among the half-dozen galleries along Van Brunt Street. Pioneer Works, which reopened in August after it was closed for several months for renovations, featured Alejandro García Contreras’s vivid installation with concrete pillars of ornamental sculptures that resembled an excavation of an unknown civilization. Around the corner, Basin Gallery included a mix of works including robots in love and mosaics from artists who attended a monthly mosaic workshop in the back of the gallery.
Artist Liz Galvin proudly showed off a panel with an image of red lips and thin strips of colored glass that took her 20 hours to make. She had trouble letting go of the piece, but decided to put it in the show. “I don’t want to look at my own art,” she said, “so I put it out in the world.”
