Stout Projects
New York is unsentimental. It pushes and pulls, attracts and repels. The only constant is change.
BUSHWICK CHRONICLE: Photography by Meryl Meisler, Writing by James Panero, an exhibition at Stout Projects opening over Bushwick Open Studios and on view through October 2016, recognizes Bushwick as a historically significant artistic community now in need of documentation.
Over the summer of 2016 through a series of open calls, Meryl and James invited the artists, gallerists, journalists, and organizers ofBushwick to gather for group portraits inspired by Nina Leen’s1950 portrait of the Abstract Expressionists in “The Irascibles,”TimothyGreenfield-Sanders’s 1985 series on “The New Irascibles,” and Art Kane’s 1958portrait of Jazz Musicians in “A Great Day in Harlem.” These photographs were taken with a medium format camera using black-and-white film, returning Meryl to her analogue roots and printing in the dark-room. The exhibition of these new photographs is now paired with Meryl’s illustrative painted photographs of Bushwick from the 1980s on, and James’s writing on the neighborhood.
New York is unsentimental. It pushes and pulls, attracts and repels. The only constant is change. For artists these dynamics can be particularly extreme, both inspiring and challenging. For a short timei n the long history of this neighborhood, Bushwick, Brooklyn became a place for artists to live, work, and exhibit together. Emerging after the 2008 recession on the periphery of the city’s cultural center, the arts of Bushwick came to be identified with self-creation: a sudden flowering nurtured by a network of self-madei nstitutions, from apartment galleries to non-profit collaborations. Just as in Montparnasse a century ago, no one style dominated the neighborhood’s artistic scene. Instead, a spirit of collaboration and DIY experimentation defined it.
As with other historical arts neighborhoods,from Montmartre to Tenth Street, Bushwick will one day cease to be a place ofartistic relevance—not necessarily as artists are pushed out, but asnon-artists push in. History is often lost in such transitions, which is why the Bushwick community now rightly regards documentation as among its important, lasting self-creations
