Red Hook’s artist community is no stranger to life-altering disasters.
In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy’s deluge left the coastal Brooklyn enclave five feet underwater and without power for weeks, artists held benefit exhibitions of storm-damaged work. In its aftermath, several artists established an open studios event to celebrate their resilience.
Last month, weeks before the event’s 10th anniversary edition, a five-alarm fire ripped through a historic 19th-century warehouse, ravaging hundreds of artist studios and businesses. Some artists, whose studios were located in the bay where the fire started, lost decades of work. Others hoped their works could be saved from mold that had grown in the weeks after firefighters doused the building’s roof with seawater.
Community members scrambled to launch online fundraisers and relocated some of the artists displaced by the fire. But there was never any doubt the event would move forward.
“I never thought of not having it, not for a minute,” Deborah Ugoretz, who co-founded Red Hook Open Studios, told Hyperallergic. “We have over 40 other studios open and a sculpture garden to celebrate our anniversary.”
This weekend, October 11 and 12, crowds of art revelers brushed aside the soggy weather and threats of an offshore nor’easter to visit art spaces below the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
Much of the burned Van Brunt Street property, which had served as an Open Studios hub in previous years, has remained closed to the public while the fire department conducted its investigation into the cause of the blaze. In its absence, members of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition and Hot Wood Arts created a temporary exhibition with works by 50 artists at Swan Club, a new yoga studio on the second floor above Red Hook Cidery and Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie shop.
The show featured works assembled in people’s homes and other locations, since many of the works at their studios had been destroyed or were currently being treated for mold at Pier 11 by a group of volunteer art restorers.
Ethan Cornell, a resident artist with Hot Wood Arts, displayed a large oil painting entitled “Heroes.” He had been working late framing works for a show on the night the fire began when he heard squeaks and a popping noise from the carpentry studio above him. At 11:30 pm, he saw a curl of smoke and yelled “fire!” as he ran out of the building.
“It smelled like burning, but not like campfire smoke,” he said. “I had the presence of mind to grab my studio keys and nothing else.”
Carolyn Sheehan brought three mixed-media works of handmade paper dresses on canvases from her studio in Roscoe, New York, that were models for a larger work. She feared that she lost the full-sized versions she kept in Red Hook. “Paper dresses don’t do well in fire and water,” she said.
At other neighborhood art spots, the fire was on everyone’s mind. Leo Tecosky, a sculptor and glassblower, had moved his studio from Token furniture, which had a showroom in the Van Brunt Street building, into Pier Glass in April. He marveled at his luck after the building only lost power for several hours.
Further down the pier, Elaine Young’s studio had also avoided fire and water damage. The devastation left her “speechless, shocked, and so sad,” she said. Young had spent much of her weekend greeting visitors while adding words that had been banned by the Trump administration to black dress shirts she had fabricated in Midtown.
The festival’s presence helped increase attention to the plight of artists well beyond South Brooklyn. So far, the Red Hook Business Alliance, which represents the neighborhood’s businesses and independent artists, has raised over $186,000 while two other arts organizations have each collected about $40,000.
Megan Suttles, Hot Wood Arts founder and co-coordinator of Red Hook Open Studios, was still in shock over the scale of the destruction. She had lost two decades of art in the inferno and recently helped rescue artworks from the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition’s waterlogged exhibition space while wearing goggles, gloves, and a hazmat suit.
“I’m still in a weird place and not accepting what happened,” she said. “It’s so overwhelming. People have asked us to make some drawings, and I don’t even have pencils and paper. All our supplies are gone.”
