At Gowanus Open Studios' 30th Edition, Artists Paint a Neighborhood Before It Disappears

By Tom Whitfield

Gowanus Open Studios marked its 30th iteration on Saturday, and more than 100 participating sites opened their doors across one of Brooklyn's most contested post-industrial neighborhoods. A visitor who spent six hours walking the district on Saturday afternoon reported covering barely a tenth of them.

The venues were scattered through what our correspondent on the ground described as a "post-industrial labyrinth of stairwells, hallways, and nondescriptive entrances" — a fitting setting for an event that doubles as a documentary record of a neighborhood changing faster than its artists can paint it.

The work on view, in many cases, was explicitly about disappearance. The reporter noted "a fair bit of plein air work spotlighting water remediation efforts on the canal and documenting familiar street corners before they change in the blink of an eye, as the entire neighborhood has done in the last five years alone."

What does 30 years of change look like from one studio?

Elizabeth O'Reilly, a landscape artist with a large studio at 543 Union Street, has watched the full arc. She has maintained a studio on the same block as the Union Street Bridge since 1992 — two years before the first Gowanus Open Studios — and she displayed paintings and collages of the canal and neighborhood this weekend.

Asked about witnessing the area's transformation from a site of industrial abuse to one of luxury high-rises, she was blunt.

"It makes me a bit sad," O'Reilly said.

The sadness has a concrete backdrop. The correspondent observed "glimmering, luxury high-rises in various states of completion near the canal, which admittedly still smells quite a bit and floods with raw sewage when it rains." The new buildings rise; the water underneath them has not caught up. That gap — between real estate and remediation — is the quiet subject of much of the art.

O'Reilly's work channeled, in the correspondent's words, "the area's architectural angularities and the canal's reclamation of them through scattered reflections on its oily surface." Most of the pieces she had on display dated from the late 2000s and early 2010s — the period when the Environmental Protection Agency designated the polluted canal a Superfund site and it entered its second phase of development.

In other words, she was showing paintings of the neighborhood from the moment the federal government officially acknowledged what everyone there already knew: the water was toxic.

What does this change for Gowanus?

For the artists, the event functions less as a market than as an archive. The reporter characterized the weekend as "a love letter to the notorious canal and the creative community formed along its banks, capturing the neighborhood's past and present as it hurtles toward its future as a shiny waterfront development."

That word — "hurtles" — carries the weight. A 30-year-old open studios event in a neighborhood that has remade itself twice over in the past five years is, by definition, racing against its own subject matter.

There are caveats worth attaching to any celebration here. The source account is one visitor's six-hour sample of a tenth of the programming; it does not claim to survey the full range of work across the 100-plus sites. The sewage flooding and the canal's odor are noted in passing, not documented in detail. And the Superfund cleanup's timeline — what "second phase of development" has delivered, and for whom — goes unexamined in the account.

What the report does establish is narrower and more durable: a 30-year-old artist community, still working, still on the canal's banks, still painting the water while the water is still not clean. Whether the studios themselves survive the waterfront development that surrounds them is the question the next 30 editions will answer.