Please join us for opening reception of Battle Ground, the third and last exhibit of our yearlong Battle theme. Battle Ground will explore the pathos of the Battle of Brooklyn, stimulating our collective memory, evoking parallels between past and present, while focusing on the complexity, moral ambiguity, and devastation of this important Revolutionary confrontation. Historical imagery, rendered meaningless by over-use and political manipulation, will be revived in new forms.

The word “revolution” circles around us, forming the early consciousness of our country. History, also cyclical, repeats itself, and when it is forgotten, it haunts us, lying dormant in our collective memories. In 1776 one such haunting unfolded across a wide swath of what is now Brooklyn. Perhaps the battle is often forgotten (relative to others) because it was, in the words of Walt Whitman, a “resolute defeat.”

The battle-haunting still rages around us at Proteus Gowanus. Its culminating events took place just feet from our gallery location, along what was then the Gowanus Creek. The fields and marshes of 1776 are now a post-industrial urban landscape, and the Gowanus Canal is a hotly contested Federal Superfund and development site.

Maryland Willow, Robert Gould

Battle Ground is curated by Sasha Chavchavadze with help from Robert Gould, Angela Kramer and Eva Melas.

Battle Ground participants include artists, educators, urban planners and writers:

Paul Benney, Peter Bonner, Sasha Chavchavadze, Eymund Diegel, Robert Gould, Katarina Jerinic, Andrew Keating, Christina Kelly, V. Komar & A. Melamid, Angela Kramer, Robyn Love, Eva Melas, Duke Riley, Robert Sullivan.

*Special thanks to the restaurant and bakery, Runner & Stone, which takes its name from tide mills that operated along the Gowanus Creek in the 18th century.

Please join us for an evening of broom-making with a Master Broomsquire from the foothills of the Catskills.  David of Catskill Mountain Broomworks, will create two very special brooms fashioned from a locally raised crop of broomcorn grown this summer on the banks of the Gowanus Canal.

The Gowanus brooms are the culmination of the project “SWEEP” by the collaborative Husk with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and with support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and FEAST Brooklyn.

This May, Husk planted broomcorn seed along a terraced garden just above the high tide zone of the Gowanus. Broomcorn is a type of Sorghum that was once commonly used to make brooms. Brooklyn was once home to a small broom-making industry but with the introduction of synthetic materials broomcorn cultivation declined and the broom-making industry left Brooklyn. The Gowanus Canal is currently a US Superfund Clean Up site and the garden was only steps away from a caution sign marking a combined sewage output. The Gowanus brooms are meant to draw attention to efforts being made to clean and restore the area around the canal. This evening, Husk celebrates the rare heritage craft of broom-making and invites you to watch the transformation of the Gowanus broomcorn into the Gowanus Brooms.

Come enjoy music, photographs of the garden, and beer donated by Six Point Brewery.

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Husk is a collaborative project of Christina Kelly and Jeffrey Hutchison.

The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is a steward for the preservation, restoration and green development of the Gowanus Canal