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Stephen TruaxStephen Truax (b. Glenview, IL. 1985) is a conceptual artist living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY. His work spans various media including painting, sculpture, installation and digital prints, and attempts to question the role and function of contemporary art. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2007. StephenTruax.com
 Artist and art blogger Sharon Butler in front of her work at a recent show at STOREFRONT gallery on Wilson Avenue. Click for more photos from this show>> — Photos by Stephen Truax. Hrag Vartanian, Brooklyn-based Armenian-Canadian art critic (born in Syria, raised in Toronto) co-founded Hyperallergic, a popular "blogazine" about emerging art, with his husband Veken Gueyikian in 2009 and currently serves as its editor. Last weekend, Vartanian switched roles from critic to curator for his debut curatorial project, On Display, presented by STOREFRONT gallery in Bushwick.
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 Opening reception for Foreign Object at Regina Rex. — Photo by Stephen Truax Located on the third floor of an enormous factory-cum-studio building at 1717 Troutman St., Regina Rex is a spotless exhibition space amongst a sea of artist studios. Accidental discovery of this space is unlikely, if not impossible. more »
It’s been a hot and well-attended Bushwick Open Studios so far, and in the Morgan area especially the throngs are out in force, accompanied by street vendors of all kinds and even live music. If you plan to stick to this area near the L stop, we recommend some must-see open studios and performances — several are not listed in the program. On a personal note, BOS10 so far has featured the best work I’ve ever seen in Bushwick to date.
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BushwickBK’s Art Editor Stephen Truax has some helpful tips on navigating this weekend’s explosion of art that will save you time and heat exhaustion.
Maximize the efficiency of your Bushwick Open Studios 2010 experience, and take it from me: you have to prioritize! Bushwick is enormous. Over 300 things happening over four square miles in two days can be too much. This critic’s recommendation is to hit the huge converted factory buildings that house 20 to 30 studios in the same building. 2 to 5 minutes per studio, and you can get in and out in half an hour and cover more ground. more »
 The scene at Bushwick Schlacht!, in which New York and Berlin artists “competed.” — Photo by Stephen Truax This past Saturday was Bushwick Schlacht!, a two-day-only pop-up show on Boerum Street. A quasi-unfinished glass-walled ground-floor condo that is presumably rented out for events — as much an open house as anything else — consists of one large, 30-foot-high empty white wall, from which protrudes an enormous black I-beam. Thirty or forty paintings were arranged around it, ignoring it, all the way up to the large heating pipes by the ceiling. The opening party was a crush of PBR-guzzling Brooklynites doing bumps off keys in the corner of the weird vacant and windowless basement.
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Creating a flurry of reaction that rippled through art blogs and gallerists’ and critics’ Facebook pages and garnered heavy — sometimes even heated — commentary from some of the more influential names in art criticism, Powhida and Townsend’s Hooverville, 2010, immortalizes Bushwick and some of our resident personalities in the outskirts of the drawing.
This art editor carefully sifted through the names and tiny faces in what Paddy Johnston rightly characterizes as a "Where’s Waldo-esque," piece to find: Famous Accountants, Kevin Regan, English Kills, Andrew Ohanesian, Brent Owens, and Andrew Hurst all idling in the upper left-hand corner of the drawing. In a slumlike shantyville they huddle in groups very near to the roaring fires on the horizon (representing Bushwick?)
In addition, in the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing, we find local Bushwick artist and landlord, Jules de Balincourt, demanding rent payment from a "groveling peasant," stating "This isn’t Bushwick." Finally, frequently seen and heard in Bushwick but no longer resident, the duo Hrag Vartanian and Veken Gueyikan, of the art magazine Hyperallergic, survey the whole situation from the very edge of the drawing.
Republishing gossip like this normally wouldn’t fly. But I feel that it’s particularly relevant that this drawing is making such a huge impression, causing even bigger ripples than Powhida’s Brooklyn Rail cover exposing the New Museum’s incestuous program, and that it includes Bushwick and local galleries and artists as important, if not distant, contributors to "Hooverville" (the art world.)
Follow the thread here, be sure to glance over the riotous comments:
William Powhida, "Hooverville Catastrofuck"
Paddy Johnston, "This Week in Comments Part Two: Powhida!"
Jerry Saltz, "William Powhida Is Making Fun of Me, and I Love It"
 You Can’t Do That On Television, curated by Joe Nanashe; pictured: David Greg Harth, What Ate That Black Man, 2007, DVD Video, 00:06:31.
Ingraham Street in Morgantown is filled with semis sitting eerily in open garages, garbage dumps, graffiti murals, vinyl siding, and brick factories. Like its pronunciation-unfriendly name — Ingram? Ing-ra-ham? — it isn’t tremendously welcoming to strollers. There was almost no signage announcing an exhibition, with the exception of the SITE Fest "YOU ARE HERE" poster and an 8 1/2 x 11 in. inkjet printout of the press release stapled to a small poster board on the sidewalk, which parenthetically instructs you that the show is (in the alley.)
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 Will they take the train out here? — Photo courtesy of Arts in Bushwick New York Art Week, where "60,000 visitors are expected to generate $44 million in revenue" in the city, is upon us. Local organization Arts in Bushwick (AiB) contributes to the din with SITE Fest, an interdisciplinary performance festival happening this weekend in Greater Bushwick.
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 A high view of Clopen Studio, a show by RISD alumni at 1100 Broadway. — Photo by Michael Assiff Friday night’s Clopen Studio at 1100 Broadway ended up somewhere in between an opening on W. 27th Street and a Providence house party. Everyone is aesthetically disheveled (think Jim Drain, formerly of Fort Thunder), chain-smoking, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) or Brown in the last five years. 1100 Broadway, a communal studio space for artists and one design team, was cleaned up and hung with about the same care as a school studio critique.
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It’s time yet again for another Arts in Bushwick event — the local arts non-profit issues an open call for artists of all varieties to get involved in this year’s SITE Fest. One of three annual AiB neighborhood-wide events, SITE places performance and music as its main focus. This event, more so than the others, is completely DIY; open meetings are scheduled for every Tuesday night from now until the Festival.
Chez Bushwick, Grace Exhibition Space and the 3rd Ward team up to lead SITE Fest 2010, and seek to exhibit the incredible variety of performance art being made in Greater Bushwick today, from loud screaming sweaty music venues to silent Allen Kaprow-esque "happenings."
SITE Festival is scheduled for March 6-7, 2010. Artist, volunteer, and space registration is open until February 5, 2010 — so get out there!
SITE Fest Open Meeting
1609 Dekalb Ave, #1D
Every Tuesday at 7:00 PM
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