By Sean Alday
With regards to Factory Fresh, it was among the first wave of galleries that opened in Bushwick. They focused on street art with a vengeance and featured among others Sweet Toof, Skewville, and have a Jim Avignon mural that spans a block. It seems that the mural will run until sometime in 2012.
Now that there is a sign on the door advertising a commercial space for lease one would be safe in assuming that the gallery is defunct as a physical entity. At least for the moment, and at least in Bushwick.
This lead us at Bushwick Daily to assume that the gallery is closed. Pair that with a website announcement that the gallery is closed, it makes for a fairly solid lead. We reported as such, and saw a twitter conversation in which it was stated that we were in the wrong about the state of the gallery. We reached out to Ali Ha stating that if she would like to correct our article, we’d be happy to update it. A few lambasting emails later and we learned that the gallery is continuing in some form, perhaps as an online gallery, or perhaps in a different area. However, we can’t confirm either of those details as Ali Ha no longer wishes to communicate with Bushwick Daily.
So let me lay down the metric by which Factory Fresh was included in the original article about closed galleries:
If you are a gallerist with a shuttered gallery as I am now (author was a gallery director at 950 Hart, a loft gallery that recently closed down due to loft law and other difficulties), no matter how temporary it may seem to the purveyors of said gallery, then you are a former gallerist. Furthermore, if you don’t have a gallery in the greater Bushwick area (for sake of argument, let’s go with the Bushwick Open Studios map), then you are a former Bushwick Gallerist.
Speaking as a former gallerist, I plan to curate shows, sell art work, and represent artists to the best of my ability. These things make me an independent curator, an art dealer, and some form of an artist agent, respectively.
The mob mentality on display in the series of emails that we received from Ali Ha suggests that she believes that it is possible to threaten writers and bloggers into not disseminating the writing on the wall.
To the new curators and gallerists in the neighborhood: There is no such thing as bad press and you do not dictate the terms by which the press depicts you. You can send corrections, which are always welcome. We too are artists and are slaves to the truth.
Regardless, you are responsible for your own actions. We were perfectly willing to correct any mistakes that we made in that article and any future articles. Bushwick, by and large, is a community that is perfectly willing to be supportive in most efforts and endeavors that each of us takes on.
So let’s play devil’s advocate here: What if I wrote to any of you reading this and told you what a fuck up you were? That you were responsible for my business folding?
What if I took the burden of responsibility off of my own shoulders and put that on yours?
Would you then want to be a part of my community? Would you want me to be a part of yours?
The main point of this article is to remind those with hubristic delusions of grandeur that you don’t tell me or any contributer at Bushwick Daily (or any other publication) what or how to write. Inspiration comes from the spirit. If you take issue with the tone of an article, let us know. If we got a fact wrong, let us know. If we need to know about a new development in a story, let us know.
But don’t ever think that we can be intimidated into towing your party’s line. We wish you the best in your future endeavors and hope that Factory Fresh reopens with the same vigor they had on Flushing Avenue.
One final note, if you do decide to tell your friends to say and write nasty things about us. Just remember that you heard it here first.
Good luck.