Community

In 2001, Sue Kessler was looking for a space to rehearse a play she was producing in Manhattan.

 

She searched all over the city—Red Hook, Williamsburg, the Lower East Side—for a space big enough to rehearse the 25-person cast.

 

One morning, as she was walking to the subway on Starr Street in Bushwick, where she lived, she saw a “For Rent” sign scrawled on a piece of cardboard outside an industrial building.

 

“I had been looking everywhere but under my nose,“ she said recently. When she saw the big open space, she rented it immediately. “It was an ‘Hallelujah’ moment.”

 

Six years later, Kessler still runs the space, which she calls Bushwick Starr, and has turned it into a performance venue where she and her partner, Noel Allain, host plays, dance performances and concerts.

 

In fact, the space has become a cornerstone of one of New York’s fastest growing art scenes in one of New York’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Last June, a loosely organized group of volunteers, called Arts in Bushwick, presented the Bushwick Open Studios and Arts Festival, a three-day event that showcased the work of around 400 artists in more than 100 spaces, including the Bushwick Starr.

 

These artists, however, aren’t satisfied serving as what they call “shock troopers of gentrification,” and are instead reaching out to existing Bushwick residents in an effort to integrate into the neighborhood and keep it affordable.

 

Instead of focusing solely on artist promotion, the group also wants to work with local community organizations. Artists are a well-known first step in the economic influx that often leads to higher rents, unaffordable to the neighborhood’s many longtime low-income residents.

 

“We recognize very explicitly that in New York City in the past 50 years, artists have been the harbingers of neighborhood change and gentrification,” said Laura Braslow, a member of Arts in Bushwick who led a panel on the issue during the Open Studios festival and has since met with local non-profit groups. “We’re interested in cultural understanding and bridge building.”

 

The beginnings of the Bushwick arts scene can be traced to back to when spaces like the Bushwick Starr and Chez Bushwick, an art gallery, first started. Kessler moved from Williamsburg in 2001. In less than a year, she found the industrial space that she intended to use to rehearse Fovea Floods, a theater group she was involved in.

 

She fought to hold on to the space despite apprehension from friends about Bushwick, a neighborhood that was better known for urban blight than art. “I had a lot of friends pshawing the whole thing,” she said. “But we dug our heels in.”

 

In 2004, she began noticing other artists living in the neighborhood when Northeast Kingdom, a restaurant, opened. “It was like a breadcrumb at a picnic that all the ants came to,” she said.

 

Last year, those “ants” formed a colony, coming together under the Arts in Bushwick banner for the Open Studios Festival. “Anyone who wants to do stuff is welcome,” said Maggie Pounds, a ceramics artist who serves as the group’s press contact. “We do it because we love it.” Many in the group have day jobs; Pounds is a receptionist.

 

Braslow, an independent consultant and researcher, reached out to local non-profits like the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council and Make the Road by Walking to take part in a panel during the festival about the local implications of the growing artist community.

 

Afterward, Ridgewood Bushwick contacted Braslow after the festival and asked if she would make a presentation at a monthly meeting for community leaders.

 

Since then, Arts in Bushwick has partnered with Ridgewood Bushwick and is working on several projects including one to survey the newer residents of the neighborhood so local merchants can stock items they will buy.

 

Eventually she hopes the group can have a member on the community board. “You can’t stop gentrification,” she said. “Sustainability means making things better for as long as possible.”

 

Like that of many newer artist neighborhoods, Bushwick art is characterized by experimentation and a disregard for convention and commerce. “It has become a laboratory for new ideas,” said Hrag Vartanian, a Bushwick resident who writes about arts and culture on his blog, hragvartanian.com. “It’s still relatively cheap and allows artists to live and work in decent places in a community of like-minded individuals.”

 

Noel Allain, Kessler’s partner at the Bushwick Starr, said artists in Bushwick feel comfortable working outside the Manhattan mainstream. “Manhattan is becoming less and less accessible,” he said, adding that the process of succeeding in the arts there can be, “awful, noxious and disgusting.”

 

While the Bushwick Starr has hosted artists from Manhattan at its space, like the dance group Catch, artists from the neighborhood have made little dent in the Manhattan art world, although that may change as more exposure comes. “It’s not to say that many Bushwick artists don’t exhibit in Chelsea or Williamsburg,” said Vartanian. “But no one has been able to market Bushwick artists yet.”

 

The organizers of Arts in Bushwick seem unconcerned. Next week, they will hold a smaller event called Open Spaces to try to maintain interest until next summer, when they hope to organize another festival.

 

While they continue to try to promote their work, they have other motives in mind as well. “Our purpose isn’t to serve the market,” said Graham Coreil-Allen, a member of Arts in Bushwick who organized a 150-person parade during the Open Studios Festival. “It’s to build an arts community that’s sustainable and have a good time.”