pierogi 2000 press: current undercurrent

current undercurrent:
working in brooklyn

the brooklyn museum of art
24 july 1997 - 25 january 1988

The Village Voice

'Current Undercurrent: Working in Brooklyn'
Brooklyn Museum of Art

Consider the simple beauty of the flat file. Oversize shallow drawers efficiently preserve fragile works on paper and photographs until their owners decide to frame them or they are sold and framed on someone else's dime. The ubiquitous but unseen gallery backroom furnishings moved front and center in 1995 at Williamsburg's Pierogi 2000. Joe Amrhein, Pierogi's owner (although the term makes him sound more businessman than creative facilitator, his real role), opened the file to anyone who had relatively inexpensive work that fit into the drawers.

It proved to be a perfect catalyst to make the manic creativity of the Brooklyn art world visible to the powers-that-be across the river in Manhattan. Formerly Brooklyn-phobic collectors, critics, and curators were lined up on Sunday afternoons to enjoy the time-consuming experience of perusing the files.

It's not exactly hot news that Manhattan is rarely where culture is built. Manhattan rents drove artists to the many different nearby shores, but Long Island City, Astoria, Hoboken, and Jersey City never achieved critical mass. Similarly in Brooklyn, DUMBO (District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, and South Slope all have durable scenes of sorts. But Williamsburg has been a raucous boho party for well over a decade.

What's exciting about Williamsburg isn't that there is some new style, some historic sea-change emerging there, but rather the sheer mass of creative people tinkering away within a few blocks. Instead of a new movement, you have everything all at once, crap and genius side by side. Artists good, bad, indifferent, and lapsed all ate at Kasia and Oznots, partied, fucked and feuded, and talked art and career stratagems. I can't prove it, but in terms of sheer numbers and diversity, the Williamsburg scene may be the biggest tribal gathering of visual artists in the history of the world. That was why the flat file was such genius. Established artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Lothar Baumgarten offered multiples and drawings alongside others still in school and those who had toiled in the studio for decades without showing.

The Brooklyn Museum has acknowledged its borough's contributions in a series of "Working in Brooklyn" shows that systematically surveyed different media: sculpture in 1985, painting in 1987, and, most memorably, installation in 1990. The series lapsed and resumed only last year with a Glenn Ligon solo show, which, while fine in its way, didn't really showcase Brooklyn's diverse energies. For that we had to wait for "Current Undercurrent," which focuses on Brooklyn's homegrown showcases and is cocurated by Charlotta Kotik, the museum's curator of contemporary art, and Armhein. The commercial gallery Arena, the always-in-flux Four Walls, and the not-for-profit Momenta Art (which cocurated October's video art program) were also involved in the project, though I am sure some of the more exciting occasional spaces like Sauce, 57 Hope, Everything is Everything, Salon 75, and Unfinished must feel overlooked. Unlike previous years, it is not important that the artists on view live or work in Brooklyn, merely that they have shown in its galleries.

Arena, formerly in Soho, is located far from industrial Williamsburg on a tree-lined block in residential Cobble Hill. It generally shows luscious and genteel small works, many by artists with other Manhattan affiliations. In the context of the museum, gallerist Reneé Riccardo can't demonstrate what has made Arena a crucial art destination. On Sundays, during the gallery's public hours, she creates a salon ambiance in an old-fashioned drawing room, and makes the most of the domestic setting's built-in surrealism. There are always several people sitting around drinking wine and cider and talking art, music, and movies. No one leaves without at least one cookie and a quip. The absence of Arena's contextual charms leaves Riccardo's artists, like Karen Arm with her subtly gorgeous paintings, looking fine but oddly stranded.

And that points to the problem with the show in general. While we shouldn't carp too much about a financially troubled museum nobly doing what it can to give exposure to emerging artists, "Current Undercurrent" is less than comfortable here. Presented in a corridor tucked behind the lobby, it's a long, skinny room full of small, lesser stuff by fair to great artists. The show resembles nothing so much as a benefit-auction preview.

After the last, dispirited Grammercy Art Fair it's clear that seeing mounds of isolated small works is not very fulfilling or persuasive. Sean Mellyn's giant little-girl's face with plastic-daisy eyes is startling enough to break through the static, as is James Esber's busty Japanese animation babe made out of brightly hued modeling clay squashed directly on the wall. Roxy Paine's magic-mushrooms terrarium, Rico Gatson's manic blackface video head trapped in a toy house, and 20 other pieces were worth making note of, but my memory is of an undifferentiated wall-o-art, and that's not good.

The wall works function best as teasers, sending the museum-goer into the flat files plunked in the center of the room. Lucky DeBellevue's pipe-cleaner bubbles on the wall will hopefully lead you to his exploded diagrammatic drawings, or Rachel Harrison's weird combination of a fake boulder and a framed snapshot of nuns to her shapshot-triggered free-associative drawings—each further explaining the other.

True, the file only contains more small stuff, but each portfolio is a world in itself, with multiple works by one artist and a résumé to help you remember where you might have seen them before. It's sheer pleasure to be intimately touching the art, feeling it in your fingers (through the requisite white gloves), pulling it to within an inch of your nose or shifting it to change the way the light falls on the surface. While the subtle work on the walls is almost irredeemably lost, in your hands the quieter material fares best, drawing you in and slowing you down like private love letters. That this handling contradicts all the norms of museum behavior—and suggests that the institution had to significantly stretch its rules—makes it all the more thrilling.

There's work by big names here, like Thomas Nozkowski's wonderfully clunky abstractions and Nicole Eisenman's witty cartoony drawings. Some, like Hanneke Van Velzen, have found ways to include 3-D work in the drawers; you can install her tiny photographic folding screens with pictures of naked guys or empty dresses on each fold atop the file. Few will get through the files in one sitting, but it would be fun to try. Arbitrarily open any drawer and continue until your fingers hurt. Guaranteed: no matter which folder you have in your hands, the one your neighboring peruser just opened will always look more interesting.

In October, the files in "Current Undercurrent" will all be rotated, giving everyone the opportunity to return and see entirely new work. (Note this is actually not the only Pierogi file—it's been editioned. Artists were asked to make three portfolios, one for the museum, one back at Pierogi, and a third for an upcoming show at the Gasworks in London.) Novice visual junkies beware, while intensely pleasurable, spending a few hours with the files could kill a beginner. But as an interactive microcosm of culture-world Brooklyn, or a simulation of those giant studio buildings, the file may be the most invigorating sculpture on view this year.

BILL ARNING
August 26, 1977

Time Out New York

Last exit to Brooklyn
The BMA tries using local currency

Conceived as a showcase for local contemporary artists, the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Working in Brooklyn" program has been going on for 12 years - if only in fits and starts. The series' last offering was Glenn Ligon's text-inspired meditations on black male rage in 1996; but the show that immediately preceded it took place in 1990. Since "Working in Brooklyn" began in 1985, the art market inflated and went bust, the East Village came and went as an art precinct, Soho's galleries became overshadowed by Chelsea's, and young artists from everywhere started flocking to Brooklyn in search of cheap housing.

Brooklyn's art scene today is more complicated than the one originally envisioned by the folks behind "Working in Brooklyn," and bigger, maybe, than even the curators at the borough's premier institution have the strength to tackle. Still, you have to hand it to them for trying. For this ost recent effort, the BMA's Charlotta Kotik and co-curator Joe Amrhein of Pierogi 2000 have squeezed a substantial offering of Brooklyn artists into a pitifully small space: Although it features some 304 artists, the show is limited to a part of the lobby not much wider than a corridor. It fills the area salon-style, with many works pinned directly to the wall. There are no distracting (or for that matter, informative) wall labels; viewers must consult a checklist if they want to know what thy're seeing. The effect is very much like walking into one of Williamsburg's microgalleries. Indeed, what's on view is some of the tamer fare from three of Brooklyn's strongest contemporary spaces - Williamsburg's edgy Pierogi 2000 and Momenta Art, and Cobble Hill's brownstone-homey ARENA. Still, there are surprises to be found, particularly in the show's presentation.

Rising star Fred Tomaselli's resin-coated Brain With Flowers, made of antacids, Tylenol, LSD and hemp leaves, among other things, is wittily placed below Brian Conley's anatomical model of a shark brain. Nearby, Roxy Paine's psilocybin mushrooms made of various polymers, lacquers and fake dirt comes complete with its own museum-perfect vitrine; it sustains the biological theme of the other works while effectively ocking its surroundings.

The real sense of discovery here isn't so much in the sort of artists on display (many are in fact well-known names from Soho and Chelsea), but in the way they are shown. Pierogi 2000 has hauled in a bunch of flat files and plunked them down in the center of the room. There, viewers can don white gloves and paw through some 250 small works under the watchful eyes of a museum guard. You'll be treated to quirky altered photographs by Rochelle Feinstein and some great little obsessive drawings on mylar by Lucky DeBellevue, plus strong paintings on paper by Liza Phillips that look like magnified camouflage gear. There are ceramic pieces sandwiched between layers of bubble wrap in Joyce Robins' file. And in Greg Stone's file you'll find "drawings" made of ripped paper and asphalt; open up his folder and out wafts the smell of a fresh, two-lane blacktop.

There's a great hands-on feeling to this show, but you also feel the museum is still working out a sense of what Brooklyn's contemporary scene really has to offer. At times, the work in "Current Undercurrent" seems caught in BMA's institutional undertow. But what washes up sparkles just the same. (july 1997)

SARAH SCHMERLER

The New York Times

Current Undercurrent
Working in Brooklyn
Brooklyn Museum of Art

This exhibition is [co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Pierogi 2000 in cooperation with Momenta Art and ARENA]. Not surprisingly it has the relaxed, ecumenical feeling of a gallery group show, which can seem strange in this context, and may be new to many members of the museum audience.

Paintings, sculptures and photograhs by nearly 60 artists line the gallery's walls. Many of the names are known in Manhattan, including Chris Martin, Joanne Greenbaum, James Hyde, Mike Ballou, Jim Torok, Fred Tomaselli, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, Margaret Curtis and Lucky DeBellevue. Works on paper by 180 more artists are available for viewing in Pierogi 2000's famous, peripatetic flat files (white gloves are provided). Browsing through the files' folders conveys a truly hands-on sense of the thriving Brooklyn art scene. After Oct. 26, a new set of files, and thus scores of different artists, will replace the currrent ones. (10/10/97)

ROBERTA SMITH

New York Post

Destination: Brooklyn

The Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Working in Brooklyn" program has been going on for the last 12 years, but it was only after the art arket went bust in the early '90s, and SoHo looked particularly unpromising, that the real exodus of artists - from Manhattan to Brooklyn - began. Ever in search of the "affordable loft," hundreds migrated across the river to neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg and what has resulted is a borough that is a pressure cooker of creativity and innovation.

The Brooklyn Museum's show "Current Undercurrent," suggests no reigning trends. Works range from the abstract to the figurative and include painting, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. There is, however, a definite undercurrent of whimsy. Perhaps it has to do with coping with the obstacle of having no money.

Here, artists do much more than make do with cheap materials like chewing gum, modeling clay, string and glass beads. They truly expand the uses of the medium, as in Roxy Paine's biologically inspired tray of psilocybin mushrooms or Larry Krone's "drawings," which delicated wrestle a single strand of hair into the words "leave me if you need to," and are affixed to tracing paper.

The overriding success of the show, however, is not found on the walls. It is contained in a flatfile that has been rolled into the center of the gallery like a chef's butcher-block island. White collton gloves are provided, like condiments, for patrons to slowly pick through the numbered drawers, which contain nearly 100 artists' portfolios.

Inside each labeled gray folder is a new world of images - and of course, resumes . . . Brooklyn is still New York! - which become familiar in the handling. There's everything from Mark Saltz's simple sepia-line drawings to Greg Stone's paper, tar and asphalt collages, which feel and smell like pieces of the road.

The flatfile system, utilized by Williamsburg's Pierogi 2000 - one of three hot galleries this show culls works together from (the other two are Momenta Art and ARENA in Cobble Hill) - provides a new way of looking at art.

This kind of participation is not only relevant, in such an interactive world, but the experience of touching the art creates a kind of intimacy, a connection to an object that can't be attained by merely looking at it.

Obviously, it is very nusual for an institution with as much clout as the Brooklyn Museum to show so many unknowns. This show is the kind of pure experimentation a museum would usually turn its back on.

This leap of faith on the part of the Museum not only echoes the job of artists in our community, it produces a very positive result. It lets us know that we are surrounded by more creative minds, and talent than we knew. It lets us know that art is more the rule than the exception. (09/08/97)

WHITNEY SCOTT

P I E R O G I 2 0 0 0
177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144
noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment
pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york

	current undercurrent: working in brooklyn the brooklyn museum of art 24 july 1997 - 25 january 1988 The Village Voice 'Current Undercurrent: Working in Brooklyn' Brooklyn Museum of Art Consider the simple beauty of the flat file. Oversize shallow drawers efficiently preserve fragile works on paper and photographs until their owners decide to frame them or they are sold and framed on someone else's dime. The ubiquitous but unseen gallery backroom furnishings moved front and center in 1995 at Williamsburg's Pierogi 2000. Joe Amrhein, Pierogi's owner (although the term makes him sound more businessman than creative facilitator, his real role), opened the file to anyone who had relatively inexpensive work that fit into the drawers. It proved to be a perfect catalyst to make the manic creativity of the Brooklyn art world visible to the powers-that-be across the river in Manhattan. Formerly Brooklyn-phobic collectors, critics, and curators were lined up on Sunday afternoons to enjoy the time-consuming experience of perusing the files. It's not exactly hot news that Manhattan is rarely where culture is built. Manhattan rents drove artists to the many different nearby shores, but Long Island City, Astoria, Hoboken, and Jersey City never achieved critical mass. Similarly in Brooklyn, DUMBO (District Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, Bed-Stuy, Red Hook, and South Slope all have durable scenes of sorts. But Williamsburg has been a raucous boho party for well over a decade. What's exciting about Williamsburg isn't that there is some new style, some historic sea-change emerging there, but rather the sheer mass of creative people tinkering away within a few blocks. Instead of a new movement, you have everything all at once, crap and genius side by side. Artists good, bad, indifferent, and lapsed all ate at Kasia and Oznots, partied, fucked and feuded, and talked art and career stratagems. I can't prove it, but in terms of sheer numbers and diversity, the Williamsburg scene may be the biggest tribal gathering of visual artists in the history of the world. That was why the flat file was such genius. Established artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Lothar Baumgarten offered multiples and drawings alongside others still in school and those who had toiled in the studio for decades without showing. The Brooklyn Museum has acknowledged its borough's contributions in a series of "Working in Brooklyn" shows that systematically surveyed different media: sculpture in 1985, painting in 1987, and, most memorably, installation in 1990. The series lapsed and resumed only last year with a Glenn Ligon solo show, which, while fine in its way, didn't really showcase Brooklyn's diverse energies. For that we had to wait for "Current Undercurrent," which focuses on Brooklyn's homegrown showcases and is cocurated by Charlotta Kotik, the museum's curator of contemporary art, and Armhein. The commercial gallery Arena, the always-in-flux Four Walls, and the not-for-profit Momenta Art (which cocurated October's video art program) were also involved in the project, though I am sure some of the more exciting occasional spaces like Sauce, 57 Hope, Everything is Everything, Salon 75, and Unfinished must feel overlooked. Unlike previous years, it is not important that the artists on view live or work in Brooklyn, merely that they have shown in its galleries. Arena, formerly in Soho, is located far from industrial Williamsburg on a tree-lined block in residential Cobble Hill. It generally shows luscious and genteel small works, many by artists with other Manhattan affiliations. In the context of the museum, gallerist Reneé Riccardo can't demonstrate what has made Arena a crucial art destination. On Sundays, during the gallery's public hours, she creates a salon ambiance in an old-fashioned drawing room, and makes the most of the domestic setting's built-in surrealism. There are always several people sitting around drinking wine and cider and talking art, music, and movies. No one leaves without at least one cookie and a quip. The absence of Arena's contextual charms leaves Riccardo's artists, like Karen Arm with her subtly gorgeous paintings, looking fine but oddly stranded. And that points to the problem with the show in general. While we shouldn't carp too much about a financially troubled museum nobly doing what it can to give exposure to emerging artists, "Current Undercurrent" is less than comfortable here. Presented in a corridor tucked behind the lobby, it's a long, skinny room full of small, lesser stuff by fair to great artists. The show resembles nothing so much as a benefit-auction preview. After the last, dispirited Grammercy Art Fair it's clear that seeing mounds of isolated small works is not very fulfilling or persuasive. Sean Mellyn's giant little-girl's face with plastic-daisy eyes is startling enough to break through the static, as is James Esber's busty Japanese animation babe made out of brightly hued modeling clay squashed directly on the wall. Roxy Paine's magic-mushrooms terrarium, Rico Gatson's manic blackface video head trapped in a toy house, and 20 other pieces were worth making note of, but my memory is of an undifferentiated wall-o-art, and that's not good. The wall works function best as teasers, sending the museum-goer into the flat files plunked in the center of the room. Lucky DeBellevue's pipe-cleaner bubbles on the wall will hopefully lead you to his exploded diagrammatic drawings, or Rachel Harrison's weird combination of a fake boulder and a framed snapshot of nuns to her shapshot-triggered free-associative drawings—each further explaining the other. True, the file only contains more small stuff, but each portfolio is a world in itself, with multiple works by one artist and a résumé to help you remember where you might have seen them before. It's sheer pleasure to be intimately touching the art, feeling it in your fingers (through the requisite white gloves), pulling it to within an inch of your nose or shifting it to change the way the light falls on the surface. While the subtle work on the walls is almost irredeemably lost, in your hands the quieter material fares best, drawing you in and slowing you down like private love letters. That this handling contradicts all the norms of museum behavior—and suggests that the institution had to significantly stretch its rules—makes it all the more thrilling. There's work by big names here, like Thomas Nozkowski's wonderfully clunky abstractions and Nicole Eisenman's witty cartoony drawings. Some, like Hanneke Van Velzen, have found ways to include 3-D work in the drawers; you can install her tiny photographic folding screens with pictures of naked guys or empty dresses on each fold atop the file. Few will get through the files in one sitting, but it would be fun to try. Arbitrarily open any drawer and continue until your fingers hurt. Guaranteed: no matter which folder you have in your hands, the one your neighboring peruser just opened will always look more interesting. In October, the files in "Current Undercurrent" will all be rotated, giving everyone the opportunity to return and see entirely new work. (Note this is actually not the only Pierogi file—it's been editioned. Artists were asked to make three portfolios, one for the museum, one back at Pierogi, and a third for an upcoming show at the Gasworks in London.) Novice visual junkies beware, while intensely pleasurable, spending a few hours with the files could kill a beginner. But as an interactive microcosm of culture-world Brooklyn, or a simulation of those giant studio buildings, the file may be the most invigorating sculpture on view this year. BILL ARNING August 26, 1977 Time Out New York Last exit to Brooklyn The BMA tries using local currency Conceived as a showcase for local contemporary artists, the Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Working in Brooklyn" program has been going on for 12 years - if only in fits and starts. The series' last offering was Glenn Ligon's text-inspired meditations on black male rage in 1996; but the show that immediately preceded it took place in 1990. Since "Working in Brooklyn" began in 1985, the art market inflated and went bust, the East Village came and went as an art precinct, Soho's galleries became overshadowed by Chelsea's, and young artists from everywhere started flocking to Brooklyn in search of cheap housing. Brooklyn's art scene today is more complicated than the one originally envisioned by the folks behind "Working in Brooklyn," and bigger, maybe, than even the curators at the borough's premier institution have the strength to tackle. Still, you have to hand it to them for trying. For this ost recent effort, the BMA's Charlotta Kotik and co-curator Joe Amrhein of Pierogi 2000 have squeezed a substantial offering of Brooklyn artists into a pitifully small space: Although it features some 304 artists, the show is limited to a part of the lobby not much wider than a corridor. It fills the area salon-style, with many works pinned directly to the wall. There are no distracting (or for that matter, informative) wall labels; viewers must consult a checklist if they want to know what thy're seeing. The effect is very much like walking into one of Williamsburg's microgalleries. Indeed, what's on view is some of the tamer fare from three of Brooklyn's strongest contemporary spaces - Williamsburg's edgy Pierogi 2000 and Momenta Art, and Cobble Hill's brownstone-homey ARENA. Still, there are surprises to be found, particularly in the show's presentation. Rising star Fred Tomaselli's resin-coated Brain With Flowers, made of antacids, Tylenol, LSD and hemp leaves, among other things, is wittily placed below Brian Conley's anatomical model of a shark brain. Nearby, Roxy Paine's psilocybin mushrooms made of various polymers, lacquers and fake dirt comes complete with its own museum-perfect vitrine; it sustains the biological theme of the other works while effectively ocking its surroundings. The real sense of discovery here isn't so much in the sort of artists on display (many are in fact well-known names from Soho and Chelsea), but in the way they are shown. Pierogi 2000 has hauled in a bunch of flat files and plunked them down in the center of the room. There, viewers can don white gloves and paw through some 250 small works under the watchful eyes of a museum guard. You'll be treated to quirky altered photographs by Rochelle Feinstein and some great little obsessive drawings on mylar by Lucky DeBellevue, plus strong paintings on paper by Liza Phillips that look like magnified camouflage gear. There are ceramic pieces sandwiched between layers of bubble wrap in Joyce Robins' file. And in Greg Stone's file you'll find "drawings" made of ripped paper and asphalt; open up his folder and out wafts the smell of a fresh, two-lane blacktop. There's a great hands-on feeling to this show, but you also feel the museum is still working out a sense of what Brooklyn's contemporary scene really has to offer. At times, the work in "Current Undercurrent" seems caught in BMA's institutional undertow. But what washes up sparkles just the same. (july 1997) SARAH SCHMERLER The New York Times Current Undercurrent Working in Brooklyn Brooklyn Museum of Art This exhibition is [co-organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Pierogi 2000 in cooperation with Momenta Art and ARENA]. Not surprisingly it has the relaxed, ecumenical feeling of a gallery group show, which can seem strange in this context, and may be new to many members of the museum audience. Paintings, sculptures and photograhs by nearly 60 artists line the gallery's walls. Many of the names are known in Manhattan, including Chris Martin, Joanne Greenbaum, James Hyde, Mike Ballou, Jim Torok, Fred Tomaselli, Amy Sillman, Rachel Harrison, Margaret Curtis and Lucky DeBellevue. Works on paper by 180 more artists are available for viewing in Pierogi 2000's famous, peripatetic flat files (white gloves are provided). Browsing through the files' folders conveys a truly hands-on sense of the thriving Brooklyn art scene. After Oct. 26, a new set of files, and thus scores of different artists, will replace the currrent ones. (10/10/97) ROBERTA SMITH New York Post Destination: Brooklyn The Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Working in Brooklyn" program has been going on for the last 12 years, but it was only after the art arket went bust in the early '90s, and SoHo looked particularly unpromising, that the real exodus of artists - from Manhattan to Brooklyn - began. Ever in search of the "affordable loft," hundreds migrated across the river to neighborhoods like Greenpoint and Williamsburg and what has resulted is a borough that is a pressure cooker of creativity and innovation. The Brooklyn Museum's show "Current Undercurrent," suggests no reigning trends. Works range from the abstract to the figurative and include painting, photography, video, installation, and sculpture. There is, however, a definite undercurrent of whimsy. Perhaps it has to do with coping with the obstacle of having no money. Here, artists do much more than make do with cheap materials like chewing gum, modeling clay, string and glass beads. They truly expand the uses of the medium, as in Roxy Paine's biologically inspired tray of psilocybin mushrooms or Larry Krone's "drawings," which delicated wrestle a single strand of hair into the words "leave me if you need to," and are affixed to tracing paper. The overriding success of the show, however, is not found on the walls. It is contained in a flatfile that has been rolled into the center of the gallery like a chef's butcher-block island. White collton gloves are provided, like condiments, for patrons to slowly pick through the numbered drawers, which contain nearly 100 artists' portfolios. Inside each labeled gray folder is a new world of images - and of course, resumes . . . Brooklyn is still New York! - which become familiar in the handling. There's everything from Mark Saltz's simple sepia-line drawings to Greg Stone's paper, tar and asphalt collages, which feel and smell like pieces of the road. The flatfile system, utilized by Williamsburg's Pierogi 2000 - one of three hot galleries this show culls works together from (the other two are Momenta Art and ARENA in Cobble Hill) - provides a new way of looking at art. This kind of participation is not only relevant, in such an interactive world, but the experience of touching the art creates a kind of intimacy, a connection to an object that can't be attained by merely looking at it. Obviously, it is very nusual for an institution with as much clout as the Brooklyn Museum to show so many unknowns. This show is the kind of pure experimentation a museum would usually turn its back on. This leap of faith on the part of the Museum not only echoes the job of artists in our community, it produces a very positive result. It lets us know that we are surrounded by more creative minds, and talent than we knew. It lets us know that art is more the rule than the exception. (09/08/97) WHITNEY SCOTT



	P I E R O G I 2 0 0 0 177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144 noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york

current undercurrent: working in brooklyn

The Village Voice

Time Out New York

The New York Times

New York Post

current undercurrent:
working in brooklyn