Flowering trees, bird songs and longer-lingering evenings usher in springtime and another exciting new season at The Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition. It’s their 24th Annual Spring Pier Show, and the iron gates of their historic pier gallery in Red Hook open on Saturday, May 7, 2016 with three distinctively different exhibits: Roode Hoek, Wide Open 7, and Recycle.
The adventure awaiting you is an artistic one inside the
25,000 square foot Civil War-era gallery. Show chair, Anna Annus Hagen, has called almost 200 of BWAC’s exhibiting artists to the task of creating unique “mindscape images” that tell the story of one of America’s oldest neighborhoods.
The opening reception on May 7th features a live performance by jazz singer Paula Jeanine and The Spring is Here Quartet. And there will be a really exciting collaborative art project where participants will be invited to help build and play a giant re-use xylophone made out of the kinds of reusable materials distributed by Materials for the Arts. Everyone can tie objects such as plastic bottles, hardware, and more into a large frame and then proceed to play on it using available drumsticks, joining in a collaborative reuse orchestra.
Other special events are planned for every day of the show – including the Sunday acoustic performance series, UnPlugged in Red Hook, and Saturday reading series, The Word Cabaret – which aims to celebrate and savor the wondrous variety of Brooklyn-based wordsmiths--storytellers, playwrights, essayists, novelists, comics, spoken word artists, and poets. On Saturday, June 11 to complement Recycle, SIMS Municipal Recycling in Sunset Park is again sponsoring a special film – Trash Dance, an inspiring affecting documentary about dance, creativity and dirty work.
Come see the vista that has inspired so many BWAC artists. Go inside and marvel at the variety that a show of almost 400 artists has to offer. The BWAC Spring Shows open May 7 and run until June 12th, weekends only from 1-6PM. Take the free IKEA ferry from Wall Street, and biking is a breeze!