Ridgewood’s Valentine Gallery boasts a not-so-whopping 550 square feet of programmable space—not counting its tiny “gift shop.” But what’s on display there is choice: well-chosen fare by local artists you wish someone would have the balls to show more often. Thanks to Fred Valentine—its owner, curator, and man-about-studio—the married artists Lawrence Swan and Lori Ellison got to display their individually impressive artistic oeuvres in unison (they’re a local couple no one had thought to exhibit together before); Mike Ballou got to stack his papier maché animal heads (“Bitey” the shark, “Rickey” the rat) up to the ceiling like some colorful, shamanistic totem; and later this month, painter Andrew Moszinski exhibits wallpaper of people in mid-coitus and paintings in gouache.

Valentine forged his curatorial program in the school of hard knocks by way of pure insight. The former co-founder of The Mustard Factory and Galapagos’ Curator, he came to Ridgewood in 1999 long before it was on the greater artworld’s mental map. (He came to W’burg in 1984.) Along the way he’s set up studios, raised a family, and found ways to give back to his artistic community. Valentine, at 464 Seneca Avenue, began in July of 2011.

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At the center of the Bogart Salon, toys and trash make up a sprawling model of two very different allegorical places, the “Art Scene” and “Hedge Fund City,” connected by choo-choo trains. The model was supposedly devised by a clandestine group of art collectors from the wealthy suburbs of Westchester County, New York, and Fairfield County,Connecticut. They call themselves the People’s Art Collective.

In the “Art Scene” section of the model, we find many familiar characters from across Brooklyn’s artsy enclaves—toy figures of bearded men, a deejay, laptop users in a coffee shop, and giant rats along the Gowanus Canal. There’s a box wallpapered in the visage of an artists’ loft called Heartbreak Hotel. And a “Volcano of Youthful Passions” made of empty beer bottles, crushed cigarette packs, foam peanuts, and Mickey Mouse souvenirs, wrapped in tape and painted blue. Crowded and dirty, the “Art Scene” encapsulates an outsider’s perspective of our fair borough, a disdainful view that is more-or-less accurate.

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Ground Control to Linda Griggs: The long flight back  from 90s “cyberspace”

By Sarah Schmerler

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I didn’t realize Professor Philip Gould was a few days away from turning 90 years old when I requested he meet me outside the Plaza Hotel. Were it me, I probably would have responded with something like “that’s quite a shlep for me, young lady.” But not Gould. He was cordial, vibrant, and more than happy to meet me on my own terms. After all, it was Gould who’d given the now infamously incarcerated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei his first-ever U.S. group show. To my reporter’s mind, interviewing him while sitting somewhere between the bronze rooster and bronze dog’s head of Ai Weiwei’s newest public sculpture seemed just the ticket.

Gould’s dossier is an impressive one: 33 years as a professor at Sarah Lawrence, along with teaching tenures at Columbia, Pratt, and Teachers College in Beijing; and a personal collection of some 6,000 objects from Africa and the East. I’d prepared some pretty generic and academic questions for him, but Gould wanted to stay on point. He was passionate about politics: the East and its love of ancestors and the West’s compulsion to topple cultural heroes as fast as we mint them. And he had more insights into Dada-ism’s reach than I’d previously imagined possible.

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How busy are you? I guarantee you that, no matter how much that may be, Brooklyn-based, new media artist, Mark Skwarek, is busier.

Not only does Skwarek teach 3-D gaming at NYU Polytech and pursue his own artistic career, the 33-year-old Bushwick native has also curated and participated in exhibitions across the globe that employ an amazing bleeding-edge technology called AR—augmented reality.