From the editors of  

You may have experienced it at a newsstand, on a friend’s bookshelf, or through a chance encounter at a local coffee shop, but no matter what the venue, there’s a new-found energy in the world of indie art publishing, and North Brooklyn is its hub. From small-press runs of art publications and handmade artist books to DIY zines and a menagerie of other visual projects, we’re in the midst of a minirenaissance of art publishing. If you don’t know the names of Pen15 Press, Wild Isle, For the Birds Collective, Birdsong Collective, Burn Books, and Brooklyn Art Press yet, welcome to their invention.

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People like to dwell on an artist’s untimely death. Somehow, asking unanswerable questions like “why” are easier than looking at the “what”—the work that’s survived them—and figuring out what it means to us now, what its legacy is.

Enter Pierogi Gallery today, however, and you’ll find that some strong (and heartfelt) curatorial light is being shed, on the late Mark Lombardi’s work, on Mark Lombardi the man, and the incredible and amazing (optimistic!) vibe his legacy has in store.

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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.
 

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.
 

Click here to read on in Art in America.

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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.”

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