“It’s changed so much,” says Jude Tallichet, a sculptor of modest renown who moved to Ridgewood some twenty-five years ago. Tallichet had been among the first wave of artists to find themselves suddenly located in this quiet, corner neighborhood, just outside northern Brooklyn. Rent prices had gotten her “kicked out of Williamsburg,” she says. On a recent weekend, Tallichet could be found standing on a nondescript corner of the steadily gentrifying neighborhood, outside a recently-opened bakery, constantly adjusting a collection of papier-mâché rats, rat-sized. Her muse remained New York, New York.
Tallichet was among the handful of artists, mostly local, who found themselves conscripted into a small DIY art project, with the somewhat pompous name called “Fallow Frames Biennial 2024,” started earlier this year by Alexa Hoyer and Alexander Zev, Ridgewood enthusiasts of a more recent vintage.
Hoyer, a photographer who spoke in a buoyant german accent, had lived in Greenpoint until a few years ago. “Initially, cheap rent!” she says about Ridgewood’s appeal. Zev, who has lived in the neighborhood a few years longer, testifies that “the density of artists here is remarkable.”
“Some people have been here for twenty years, some people have just moved here,” says Zev. The pair had not met here however, but instead in the Bed-Stuy gallery Tomato Mouse, when they were both showing at a 2022 group exhibition. Zev, who primarily makes work out of pieces of reused wood, has since moved on the Stephen Street Gallery, which he helps run, and which was featured prominently in a Hyperallergic blog on a different arts event in the neighborhood.
“There’s not a lot of people focused on activating the neighborhood itself,” says Zev. “There’s a lot of culture commuting to do art world stuff in other, more built-up neighborhoods, like in Manhattan.”
The theme for this concept was filling various empty tree beds in Ridgewood over the course of a weekend and then telling passerby that this was happening around them. A moderately enthusiastic Pratt student was tasked with monitoring this spread (“my professor told me about this”), and making sure all momentary curious passersby were handed a pamphlet containing an extensive map, various names and a QR code.
Hoyer says this idea was an extension of a project she did earlier this year for a brief show at PS122, a small gallery in the East Village. Called “Fallow Frames,” that series focused on photos she took of various abandoned tree beds she found in the neighborhood, an apparently recurring source of inspiration. A complimentary write-up, again in Hyperallergic, quotes Hoyer comparing these to “readymades” in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp or Robert Rauschenberg. Underlining this commitment to the bit is her move in this latest show to insert a replica of those photos into a small gumball machine, which she planted outside the doors of the new-ish Stone Circle Theatre. The machine had been refurbished by Andrew Moeller, who stands outside and gives out temporary tattoos that read “Fallow Frames Biennial 2024.” Online, Hoyer’s website calls this bit “an alternative miniature exhibition space” made “to encourage artists and curators to create small exhibits within the machine’s top gallery section.”
Zev’s own contribution to the weekend exhibition was somehow just as self-referential; holed up on an empty tree bed down the street and called “Badland with Stump,” it was a fictional tree stump Zev made from reused woodwork refuse, an idea that struck me as pointedly Frankenstein-like. But the great outdoors complicates even the most committed DIY gallerist; Zev’s body shakes when he talks about checking the piece overnight to brush away ants.
“I can always barely afford to live in New York, housing is weird, so I always get nervous when things change,” says Beca Acosta, who showed up that weekend next to a light installation made entirely, she said, of trash she had found in the tree bed. “I like it here and I want to stay.”
Before he was elected mayor, Eric Adams was fond of telling Brooklyn newcomers to “go back to Iowa.” Acosta says it’s not so simple.
“I feel weird because I’ve not lived at home for a while, and the place where I’m from is gentrifying too. So, if I move back I would also be gentrifying it,” she says. She grew up in the Oak Cliff part of Dallas, the subject just last year of a U.S. News and World Report story headlined “A Gentrified Dallas Neighborhood Faces an Uncertain Future.” She also points out that her father is “from New York too,” so it’s hard for her to really say why this isn’t her ancestral home, in some vague way.
“Sometimes people don’t notice it when it’s only on your skin,” says Cecilia André, a Brazilian textilist who lives around the corner and now works in “immersive sculptures” that she makes using “vinyl film.” She hung up one of these, a kind of mesh parachute, over a corner of a nearby sidewalk and has called this one “Raising the Rainbow Sky.” She offers passerby blank white ponchos to put on so they can watch the colorful twisting and turnings of the light.
At another corner sits Peloloca, a Brooklyn sculptor who put up a rendition of “Handala,” a 1969 illustration by the cartoonist Naji al-Ali that’s become a popular symbol for Palestinian nationalists. She hands out flyers, printed on bright green paper that contain a poem about Handala, in both English and Arabic, and explains that “Handala” can only be photographed from the same angle as the cartoon, as she has not illustrated the other half of the sculpture because “Palestine is not free,” she says. At another tree bed, a Tokyo artist named Chihiro Ito put up a flag he had designed as part of a project called a “New Flag for New People,” which, according to his website, imagines “a bright future with a flag waving for everyone.”
Some of the pieces speak for themselves, like a massive, paper mache set of elephant tusks (called “White Elephant“), assembled by painter Rebecca Bird and Salamata Bah, which “began as a set piece for a production of The Lion King” at a Bed-Stuy elementary school. Now, for just one weekend, it is here, “with the hope of providing an element of surprise and curiosity in the midst of daily life.” Others require some nuance, like a collection of homemade maracas assembled by Tim Spelios, called “Shake It,” or a collection of painted eggs that Florencia Alvarado told me she designed with Midjourney, the text-to-image AI program, and has called “Eggs (Hybrid Bodies).” She says she’s lived around Ridgewood and Bushwick for the last three of four years, while working in the real estate industry.
“I work for a reality trust, so I help them market these spaces for sales,” says Alvarado, who prefers to “create new bodies through technology” when she has the time.
Responses from the rest of neighborhood have been somewhat mixed. Zev told me that he’s tried “to get permission from the people that live adjacent to these tree beds” and didn’t “want it to be a form of tension within the community.”
At least two of the pieces had been ejected from their initial homes overnight. These included an effort by an artist named Katarina Jerinic to create a garden out of some choice pieces of trash, an endeavor “to transform these bits of the sidewalk landscape and the garbage ordinarily found there into gardens” by stamping the names of various plants (“Weeping Willow” etc) on pieces of garbage and then arranging them deliberately, not unlike something one imagines that Virgil Abloh would do if he were a DIY artist in Ridgewood.
“What was funny was that they didn’t clean any of the trash around my garden,” says Jerinic, who later repurposed the bed on a different street.
“He said this was the property of the building and it’s not,” complains Hoyer. “It’s city property and, also, you know, you live in New York City.”
Sam Effler, who lives down the street, sports a thick mustache and says he ones worked as a fry cook at Rolo’s. He was more sanguine about discovering his larger-than-life garden gnome in a trash can. A momentous monument to kitsch, it was an acquired taste, he admitted.
People around here do everything; that’s the common refrain regarding what all these John Wilson-types are suddenly doing here, but seeing so much of it laid out like this made something a coherent portrait of the neighborhood’s current post-DIY creative landscape; post-art grants and post-thrift store chic. In some sense it is, persisting, literally and beautifully out of its own trash, waiting to be found. It’s all very self-aware, making itself the constant subject of it’s own ceaseless intellectualizing. Never, perhaps, has a neighborhood ever been so thoughtfully gentrified.
Hoyer told me the project’s singular permanent installation was put up near the Bushwick border by Jeff Feld, a former adjunct at Parsons who now runs a small “unpredictably, periodic exhibition and event space” at St Nicholas Avenue. Outside of this, Feld has assembled a small, pastel-colored, bird house, where it now totters comfortably in front of a looming tower of unbuilt condos and an unopened Target. Online, he’s called this “The Institute of well-being for birds of flight,” and a placard next to the tree reads this, in both English and Spanish. As I pass it by, someone asks me anyone is going to be able to refill it. It’s so high up there.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.
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