Bushwick Galleries

"If you think about the old days, this is how galleries used to work," says Jason Andrew, who runs a gallery out of his apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, reports Cara Buckley in the New York Times (3/7/09). Jason Irwin also runs a gallery, called Privateer, out of his apartment. "I never set out to do this for commercial gain, so I’m not dealing with the same kind of commercial pressure as Manhattan," he says, adding, "It’s more of a grass-roots kind of thing, of getting back to the basics, of finding good work and putting it up, without the ulterior agenda of selling it."

Ad DeVille and Ali Ha used to run a gallery out of their living room, but last June moved it to an old bodega in a building they bought after their old place was converted into condos. Ad is happy to report that business at his new place, which is called Factory Fresh, hasn’t been affected much by the recession. "We never really sold that much stuff before, and we’re not selling that much stuff now," he says. "People always brag about selling art. To us, that doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment."

Austin Thomas prefers to run her gallery, Pocket Utopia, out of an old storefront, but her attitude is similarly contrarian where art is concerned. The marketplace wasn’t about artists, it was about the money," she says. Some are comparing Bushwick to "the sort of vibrant and scruffy artist community that SoHo and the East Village were in decades past." Bushwick residents — both old and new — meanwhile are "already wary of what gentrification and further development portend." And Jason Andrew is worried that the spirit of the thing could get lost in its own sauce. "We’re not into the whole hype," he says. "We do it for ourselves." ~ Tim Manners, editor.