For years, Ridgewood’s art scene was treated as Bushwick’s overflow, the cheaper blocks one stop further out on the L. A new feminist group show on Cypress Avenue is a small, concrete sign that the overflow has become its own scene.
The exhibition, Icing, curated by Katie Cercone at the cia gallery on Cypress Avenue, is a multimedia show built around networks of sisterhood, queer ecologies of the imagination, and an aim to reclaim feminine aesthetics, elevating the glittery, girly forms that the art world has historically dismissed as unserious. Cercone, a feminist-art professor at the School of Visual Arts who once led a 400-woman action at the Whitney in 2014, is not a fringe figure parachuting in.
The venue is the tell. The cia gallery is an artist-run space that opened in Ridgewood in December, one of a cluster of new rooms that has pushed the count of art spaces in the neighborhood to about a dozen. That is the part that matters beyond any single show: galleries do not open where a scene is dying.
And the scene-shift is now documented, not just felt. Ridgewood’s art world has been described as stepping out of Bushwick’s shadow into a distinct identity of its own, the same migration story Bushwick once told about itself relative to Williamsburg, and Williamsburg told about Manhattan. The art chases the rent, and the rent keeps moving east.
For Ridgewood, that is a double-edged win. A thriving gallery district is a cultural asset and an early marker of exactly the price pressure that eventually pushes artists to the next neighborhood out. A feminist show in a six-month-old space is both the arrival and the warning shot.
If you want to see the scene while it is still affordable enough to exist, the cia gallery on Cypress Avenue is open to the public, and the cluster of new Ridgewood spaces around it is the map; go before the same story that emptied Williamsburg’s lofts writes its next chapter here.
Featured image: Bushwick Daily
