by Alexander Bernhardt Bloom | alex@queensledger.com

 

All Day, Every Day, the thematic name ascribed to the open air art exhibition on view in Park Slope since June 1st, a part of the programming for the month put on by the organization Brooklyn Pride, invites interpretation on several levels.

Most literally, the title can be understood as a reference to the expo’s public nature. Its some one-hundred included works are presented on banners on display outdoors until the end of August on the exterior fences of the Washington and Old Stone House Park. They don’t come down with the waning daylight. Neither rain nor the extreme summer heat New Yorkers have become accustomed to will restrict passersby from surveying the banners as they do. The show is constant.

But a closer look at the artworks on display reveals a meaning for the show’s title, also the overall theme for Brooklyn Pride celebrations this month, more conceptual than practical.

The prompt for the artists whose works were selected from the curators open call – what does ‘pride’ mean to you? – returned a great variety of responses. 

Some lionize heroic or historically significant figures, others honor monuments in locales important for the community or particular moments in their collective story. There were portraits and self-portraits of couples and individuals and whole families, some captured in buoyant, esteemed poses, others in quiet moments of intimacy.

There were images of recognizable local venues with dazzling rainbows superimposed upon them. There were images of the future with hopeful distinctions to show their difference from the past or the now we live in.

All of these subjects were depicted on uniform vinyl canvases, square with white backgrounds, hung from simple plastic ties affixed directly to the park fence. 

Few perused them purposefully on a weekday afternoon last week, but they were nevertheless noticed, and colored the mood of the park, which on a hot day in late June, was teeming with children in various states of play. Just beyond the hanging artwork they dangled from swingsets; kids with super soakers chased one another and toddlers pursued floating bubbles with their handlers in tow. There was a certain harmony in catching them in the same view.

“These are really weird,” said one member of a group of passing high schoolers, too cool for the playground as they strutted down 3rd street and observed the canvases, “but they’re also beautiful.”

Part of the strength of an open air exhibit is that it is continually on view right in the middle of the goings-on of the streets and neighborhood around it, explains Emily Chiavelli, Program Director at Gowanus Arts and one of the organizers of the expo at Old Stone Park this summer.

The open access and busy location of this particular show gives it a special prominence, she said, and Chiavelli estimates tens of thousands of people will see it before the summer is out.

That means a lot to the artists whose works were selected from an open call for the exhibit, which was a great success last year and inspired Brooklyn Pride to collaborate with the arts organization for a second time. Their included pieces are up for sale through Gowanus Arts, and Chiavelli expects also that many receive direct inquiries through their social media accounts because of their exposure in the show.

More importantly, the exhibition amplifies voices that have so often gone underrepresented, and in a broader way, which, for Chiavelli, ties into the goals of Pride celebrations as a whole: “bringing attention to the experience of Queer people living in society.” 

It is the complexity of that experience that can come through in the gathering of artists’ work this way, she added: the joy and the sorrow and otherwise; the mundane parts of the lives of members of the LGBTQ+ community as well as their triumphs, or the trials they have been made to live through. 

This attention has been historically withheld, that part of our broader community left unseen or hidden away, and so an insistent call in this case is only called for – all day, every day.