Drew Hamilton’s miniature “Street-Corner Project” is part of inaugural “Housewarming” show at BRIC House in Brooklyn (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
BRIC Arts | Media House
647 Fulton St.
Through December 15, free, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm
718-683-5600
www.bricartsmedia.org
There’s an artistic revolution going on in downtown Brooklyn on the other side of the LIRR station from where the Barclays Center now resides. BAM has added the Fisher to the Howard Gilman Opera House and Harvey Theater, right near the Mark Morris Dance Center, and down the street is Theatre for a New Audience’s dazzling new Polonsky Shakespeare Center, which is currently presenting its first production, Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another new entry in this growing community is the gorgeously revamped BRIC House, a multidisciplinary arts center that opened in its old digs at the corner of Rockwell and Fulton Sts. in October. Sunday is the last day to see its inaugural art exhibition, the appropriately titled “Housewarming: Notions of Home from the Center of the Universe.” Curated by BRIC director of contemporary art Elizabeth Ferrer, the display features works by twelve Brooklyn-based artists, including eight pieces specifically commissioned for this show, in the downstairs three-thousand-square-foot gallery. Keisha Scarville’s photographs from her “I am here” series offer dark, quiet contemplation of objects that recall home. Garry Nichols’s café mural and weather vanes evoke his Tasmanian birthplace. Abraham McNally’s small-scale wall sculptures contain fragments of a physically broken home. Margaret Reid Boyer’s “Household Objects” photos consists of domestic interiors in which something is often not quite right. Vargas-Suarez Universal’s “Star Chamber” can be seen on the building’s facade. Drew Hamilton re-creates the scene he used to see from his second-floor window at Graham Ave. and Merserole St. in Bushwick in the miniature replica “Street-Corner Project.” There are also works by Njideka Akunyili, Sonya Blesofsky, Esperanza Mayobre, Katarina Jerinic and Chad Stayrook, and Nathan Wasserbauer. It all makes for a tender welcome home to BRIC, which in the next few weeks is also hosting free dance classes with Ronald K. Brown / Evidence and Samita Sinha’s work-in-progress, Cipher, with David Levine, Christian Hawkey, and Joe Diebes’s “Wow” scheduled for January.