Monday, November 17, 2008

Repetti moving from LIC to Greenpoint

...Repetti Gallery opened the final show at its pioneering art studio on 23rd Street in Long Island City last Saturday night.

With boyish good-looks and an affable manner reminding one of an outer-borough art world Jimmy Olsen, gallery director Sam Farnsworth plans to focus all his energies at Repetti’s new Greenpoint location.


One last hurrah for Repetti in Long Island City

Though he’s not sure what the landlords will do when Repetti vacates, Farnsworth is pretty sure the galleries will get subdivided into “studios,” a.k.a. office space. “And you can put anything in a studio,” griped artist Damien Crisp at last week’s opening.

When Farnsworth first found a rental notice taped to the front door of 44-02 23rd St. in 2002, this neighborhood just north of Court Square seemed like the jagged edge of the known universe.

Now dubbed the Long Island City Arts Center, the building’s lobby is packed on weekends with Manhattanites checking out Repetti, The Secret Theater, or any of the art shows going on in the hallway on the fifth floor. “We never felt like a part of all that,” Farnsworth said.

Making his way through Kerlin’s installation of sandboxes interspersed with images of the beach, Farnsworth was intent on not looking backward. His new space on Freeman Street in Greenpoint may be filled with rusty nails and mostly unfinished, but it holds plenty of possibilities.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope you can lost a little longer in Greenpoint.NYC is pretty much slowly eating itself like a tapeworm thanks in part to our current king mayor.

Anonymous said...

No dont get lost.Last longer in Greenpoint.Just dont breathe in too deep by the creek or by the sewage treatment plant.

Anonymous said...

Adios Repetti!

Your pseudo post-modern "art" was all a bit "Repetti-tive" for my tastes!

I'll see you in a few months at the BP gas station. Fill it with premium unleaded, please.

Queens Crapper said...

Miss Heather wrote to me to tell me that their new location has a stop work order on it...

Anonymous said...

Miss Heather wrote to me to tell me that their new location has a stop work order on it...

Probably a silver lining in the clouds. The art market has fallen off a cliff, witness the recent poor sales at the big auctions by Sotheby's, Christies, etc.

No one in this economic climate has much of an interest for Repetti-tive post-modern drivel.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the artists will now take the jobs that Americans don't want from the illegals.

Anonymous said...

In another topic, someone else mentioned the artists as normally being the trailblazers for the yuppie/gentrification overdevelopment crowd. It is ironic that these same trailblazers seem to be getting priced out of the very neighborhoods that they originally settled into because of their affordability at the time.

Anonymous said...

someone else mentioned the artists as normally being the trailblazers......It is ironic that these same trailblazers seem to be getting priced out of the very neighborhoods that they originally settled.....

Indeed, that is one of the ironic elements of gentrification. I've read that somewhere (can't remember who proposed it), the idea that the original vanguards of gentrification (usually gays are the original "shock troops"), are eventually priced out of the very neighborhoods they helped gentrify. Payback is a bitch, I suppose.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the artists will now take the jobs that Americans don't want from the illegals.

Maybe.Or maybe chairs will appear all over the streets and in Subway stations to the point of tripping people every 5 feet.Its good ..like. economics.

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