By Jen Hitchings
This post was created in collaboration with the blog of Arts in Bushwick
With Bushwick Open Studios pushing into its seventh year of existence, I decided to look into statistics a little bit and create a few drawings documenting the growth of the number of participants since its inception. While a more extensive history of BOS was published yesterday here, these drawings serve as a visual cue to how quickly this community-run project has become a staple in the Bushwick summer. With a whole lot of help from the BOS volunteer team, I approximated the number of registered shows for each event in years past. A “show” can be a registered gallery, studio building, or artist studio, so these estimated numbers do not necessarily represent how many individual artists have participated. That number is always significantly higher than what’s listed here. This year, now that registration is complete, 526 shows are on the map.
I should also mention that although 2006 is the earliest year represented in the drawings below, there was an event in 2005 called Bushwick Arts Project (BAP), which was a one-day, fully curated event, included “18+ hours of art installations, electronic music, indie rock, VJs, DJs, video art, film, dance, and street art occurring simultaneously in an industrial park located in Bushwick.” The term Bushwick Open Studios was coined for an event in October of 2006. And here’s a bit of trivia: How many of the BOS events have occurred when the L train was actually running?*
2006, approx. 73 shows
2007, approx. 150 shows
2008, approx 200 shows
2009, approx. 250 shows
2010, approx. 325 shows
2011, approx 380 shows
*The trivia answer: 50% of them.
Check out participating artists, venues, and events here and the many blog posts profiling artists and locations here.