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Friends, I know I have reported back on a lot of the exciting SXSW events, but I decided it would be a shame to leave Austin without showing you some of the local color.
Okay, maybe these weren’t real, authentic Austinites, but they were some of the more enthusiastic participants in the shenanigans on 6th street, which served as party central for the music portion of SXSW.
There’s a sadness in the neighborhood today, an empty space; it used to be filled by a wonderful photographer and courageous person named Meredith Allen who passed away on March 17th.
"Sugar Tales #6 (ears)" 2000
You can’t help but be captivated by the sense of imagination and bravura use of color in her playful, soulful, funny/sad pictures.
New York artist Meredith Allen died of cancer yesterday, March 17. As an artist and chronicler, Allen was a familiar face on the Williamsburg art scene in the 1990s, with her longtime partner and fellow artist Carol Saft always at her side.
“Sugar Tales #10” 2000
My heart is terribly broken today, as I’ve learned that New York artist Meredith Allen lost her battle with cancer yesterday morning. Meredith had been nothing short of heroic in how she fought the disease over the past three years; brave, human, honest, and always, through it all, kinder than anyone dealing with such pain and fear could be expected to be. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her deepest love, Carol Saft, and their families.
Click here to read full blog post by Edward Winkleman.
Ward Shelley’s “Williamsburg Timeline Drawing,” 2002, serigraph.
Larry Walczak has seen a whole lotta changes in Williamsburg’s gallery scene since he arrived here in 1994. Eyewash—the gallery he ran with the late Annie Herron from 1998 to 2002 on Williamsburg’s Northside—gave first starts to a host of local talents: Bruce Pearson, Eric Heist, Angela Wyman, Adam Simon, Ward Shelley, Greg Stone, David Kramer, David Brody… Recognize them? If not, you ought.
They were the artists who lived and worked here in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s who laid the foundations of today’s bustling scene. This month he’s opening an ambitious and utterly subjective exhibition called “Williamsburg2000” in which he alternately waxes nostalgic and gets his inner activist on. On tap will be 50+ artists he’s worked with at eyewash over the years, first on North 7th Street, and later in places far and wide—after the Buildings Department closed eyewash and he transformed it into a “migratory gallery.”