'Nomad Mixer' At Proteus Gowanus This Saturday

 What better way for Proteus Gowanus than to end their year of Migration-themed exhibits and events with "Nomad Mixer" to benefit  the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room housed in an 1900 box factory along the canal   Looks like lots of fun.  Check it out.

Nomad Mixer At Proteus Gowanus

Saturday, June 2, 7-10 pm

(RAIN OR SHINE!)

543 Union Street

Brooklyn

718.243.1572

Free Wine, Beer and Nomad Food

Music, performance, film, seed-sowing, seduction, sleeping and fortune-telling:

(Joy and happiness if you come, sorrow and sad regrets if you miss out!)

You can still buy your ticket online and support Proteus Gowanus

Free Wine, Beer and Nomad Food
*Buy Your Tickets Here!*

Your support will ensure that our protean projects continue to unfold as we enter our 8th year!

F E A T U R I N G

The runaway-train sounds of the Union Street Preservation Society Band

Intimate encounters with the literary Gypsies of The Poetry Brothel

Uncanny Tarot card readings

A nomadic performance by Paul Benney

Katya Redpath sings Russian and English gypsy folk songs

Holus Bolus transformation of our alleyway into a Nomad Spectacle

The incredible steam-punk Seed Machine

A transformative Map Your Life workshop

Writing challenges courtesy of the Writhing Society

Shift Beds for transients and would-be horizontals

and a

Live Auction of Extra-Ordinary Experiences!

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Films On Solitary Migration At Proteus Gowanus

Here is another great event at Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room at 543 Union Street. I love this place.  If you have never been, check it out.

The Wayfarers: Films on Solitary Migration

Tuesday, March 6, 8pm

543 Union Street

Join us for The Wayfarers, an evening of films that will take you places. Filmmakers Bill Brown (who will join us for discussion after the films are aired), Vanessa Renwick, and Kevin Gallagher each undertook solo journeys across vast distances within the United States. The films they made documenting their experiences shows an American landscape that has changed dramatically, both physically and culturally, over the past decade.
The Evening’s Films:

Green Tunnel (2011)
Kevin Gallagher
4.5 minutes
A trek over the entire 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, shot in time-lapse photography and then condensed into four minutes.

Crowdog (1998)
Vanessa Renwick
7 minutes
A barefoot hitchhike out to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, documented on Super 8 mm film.

The Other Side (2003)
Bill Brown
40 minutes
Documenting a trip along the entire 2,000 mile border between the U.S. and Mexico, this film ponders the post-9/11 anxiety prevalent to the region. Bill Brown will be in attendance to present his work on 16mm film.

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The Start Of The Year At Proteus Gowanus

Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room at 543 Union Street in Gowanus is starting off the New Year with some great events. 

This, from their upcoming schedule:

*Monday, January 9, 7:30pm to 10pm, the first of six classes in Vanitas Drawing with classically trained artist Lado Pochkhua, presented in partnership with Morbid Anatomy Library. Admission: $110 (classes can also be taken individually on a drop-in basis for $20 per class). Vanitas is a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures, exhorting the viewer to consider mortality and to repent. For more details, click here.                                                                                                             *Thursday, January 12, 7pm - Please join us for wine and conversation as they launch the second exhibition of our Migration year, Object Migrations, examining the things of the world whose stories intersect with and re-orient our own migrations. 

*And, as the New Year begins, we invite you to join Study Hall if you need a quiet place to work in community with others. Openings are available now at $50/month, weekdays from 10am-6pm.

To check out more great events at Proteus Gowanus, click here.

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Broom Making And Other Great October Events At Proteus Gowanus

Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery at 543 Union Street, always comes up with incredibly creative events.  Check out their October schedule and mark your calendar.

Rather Unusual Autumnal Activities for the Family (or Just for You)

From week to week, Proteus Gowanus offers a range of activities that can be done once, twice or repeatedly. Some are active, some are quiet, some practical, some intriguing. Here are some highlights: 

The Gowanus Shadow-Walk 
Viv Corringham, British sound artist and vocalist, has created an audio accompaniment for visitors to listen to as they walk the Gowanus. Visitors borrow a CD player and earphones, pick up a map, and set off, accompanied by the sounds of local residents describing their own Gowanus walks, interspersed with ambient  sound and Viv's improvisational songs.  

Migrate from Proteus to the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives
As an off-site collaboration with the Migration year at Proteus, the Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives has created a small Migration library of its own books, on view in the Brooklyn Museum Library Reading Room. The Migration library contains some of the Museum’s books on birds and migration. To see a bibliography of the books selected for the Museum’s Migration library, click here. To see the books, go to the Museum and get acquainted with its archival treasures. The Library’s Reading Room is open to the public Wednesdays through Fridays 11-4:30.
Be Studious this Fall and Join Study Hall  
Proteus Gowanus invites you to join Study Hall, a place for contemplation, study and work. Members use the art- and book-filled Proteus galleries and reading rooms to work in quiet community with others. Free coffee and small cubbies for supplies are included. Monday-Fridays, 10am-6pm. Membership is $50/mo. or $125/three months.

Bring Your Broken Thing to the Fixers Collective
The Fixers’ Collective is a social experiment in improvisational fixing and mending. This month it will meet onMonday, October 10, 7-10 pm. Thereafter it will meet the third Thursday of every month. Bring a broken object and join the fix. 

Also coming soon:

A Free Broom-making Workshop, Saturday, October 15th, 5-7pm
Learn how to make a broom with a Master Broomsquire from the foothills of the Catskills. Brooms will be fashioned from a crop of broomcorn raised right here on the banks of the Gowanus by the collaborative Husk.  

Proteus Gowanus

543 Union Street

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"Utopian Strategies: Artists Anticipate Their Audiences" At Proteus Gowanus

Proteus Gowanus, a gallery and reading room located in the Gowanus area, consistently adds impressive exhibits, programs and conversations to their lineup of events. This coming Saturday, join Proteus for another interesting evening.

Utopian Strategies: Artists Anticipate Their Audiences

Join Carol Becker in conversation with Janine Antoni, Ernesto Pujol and Paul Ramirez Jonas

At Proteus Gowanus

Saturday, March 26,

7 pm

at 543 Union Street (down the alley off Nevins)

Seats are limited.

Please RSVP to info@proteusgowanus.com

Admission: $5

Artists are increasingly engaged in dialogues about how artworks, performances, interventions, and events relate to their audiences and how their audiences interact with their work.
In this intimate conversation with Janine Antoni, Ernesto Pujol, and Paul Ramirez Jonas,
all of whom engage the public sphere in different and unique ways, writer and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts Carol Becker will ask these artists to discuss their practice--what influences their endeavors, what is their thinking before they begin to make the work, what do they imagine their audiences will experience as they participate, where does the work end, and what micro-utopian moments do they hope to spark in the intentional and unintentional communities the work creates?

Carol Becker is a Professor and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia. She is the author of several books. Her latest is THINKING IN PLACE: ART, ACTION AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION.

Janine Antoni is a visual artist whose artwork engages the viewer on a profoundly physical level often using her own body in relationship to extreme process and unusual materials.
She engages the body as it is culturally defined, often in terms of gender and identity.

Paul Ramirez Jonas is a contemporary artist whose work currently explores the potential between artist, artwork and public. Except for a 3 year hiatus, he has always worked within sight of the Gowanus canal.

Ernesto Pujol works as a site-specific performance artist and social choreographer. Pujol is interested in taking durational group performances as public art to culturally underserved communities, particularly in the Midwest and the West, creating portraits of peoples, places, and their issues. The artist is teaching at Parsons The New School this spring. He is the founder and director of The Field School Project and the UteHaus performance interdisciplinary group.

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'The Cruise' Shown And Discussed At Proteus Gowanus This Sunday

The 1998 Emmy Award Winning Documentary The Cruise by Bennett Miller on NYC tour guide Timothy 'Cruise" Levitch, will be shown at Proteus Gowanus this Sunday. Just watching the trailer makes one realize how much our city has changed since the movie was made thirteen years ago. Read on:

Please join Proteus Gowanus in partnership with

the online discussion space, The New Inquiry,

for a film screening and discussion of:

The Cruise, a documentary film

Sunday, March 13, 2011, 5-7pm

Admission: $5

Please RSVP to info@proteusgowanus.com

543 Union Street down the alley off Nevins.

Kicking off our new collaboration, Proteus Gowanus and The New Inquiry present a screening of the documentary film, The Cruise, by Bennett Miller. The film follows Timothy "Speed" Levitch on his unorthodox Gray Linedouble-decker bus tours, designed not just to inform but to transform as he takes passengers into the shifting heart of our city, one moment a paradise, the next an inferno.

Made in 1998, the film still resonates with the awe that New York inspires as Levitch narrates both the common history as well as his own idiosyncratic relationship with Manhattan; his relationship is an on-and-off romance, abusive, cathartic and ultimately a solitary voyage.

Part of the dark side of Levitch's obsession is his prescient sense that "this cannot last", expressed through his own manic trajectory as much as by the city itself. On a visit to the Twin Towers, he observes that if you spin around enough and then look up, they appear to be falling --and the viewer feels the disquiet at the heart of the film, a sensation starkly highlighted for the post-9/11 viewer.

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Need A Quiet Place To Work Away From Home? Check Out Proteus Gowanus' Study Hall

Proteus Gowanus, the wonderful gallery and reading room located in the Gowanus Canal area, is opening its door to all those freelancers in the community. Their Study Hall is a wonderful, reasonably priced alternative to your own apartment or nearest coffee shop. Check it out.

The New Year festivities have come and gone and now we must get back to work. If you can no longer bear the sight of your own apartment, if being alone is more conducive to steam-cleaning your knick-knacks than it is to finishing your dissertation, if your kids need you only when you're in front of the computer, perhaps it's time to come to Study Hall and put an end to the dissipations of solitude. Here you can work in a quiet community with other dedicated ruminators.

Study Hall at Proteus Gowanus offers our various gallery and library spaces to readers and writers.In addition to numerous tables and chairs, we provide free WiFi and free coffee, and encourage the smuggling in of snacks and treats for the general benefit of all.

The cost is $50 per month or $125 for three months. The hours are Monday through Friday, 10am - 5 pm. If you would like to join, please contact Proteus Gowanus at info@proteusgowanus.com.

Proteus Gowanus

543 Union Street, Brooklyn

718.243.1572

info@proteusgowanus.com

wanus.com

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Opening Reception For 'Hall Of The Gowanus' At Proteus

My friend Rick just made me aware of the opening reception of the new Hall Of The Gowanus, "the only exhibition space in New York City dedicated to the Gowanus Canal and its environs" at Proteus Gowanus.

Rick writes:

Eymund Diegel, an urban planner/GIS specialist/map maker, assembled historic maps of Gowanus creek, connected mill ponds, and the canal dating from the 1600’s to the present, and overlaid the historic ones with the street grid so it shows what was where relative to the present. It’s amazing to see the developments over the centuries. His maps, as well as other people’s projects, will be featured at the opening.

Thanks, Rick. Sounds incredible. I certainly will have to drop by to see the new space and the exhibit.

January 17, 2010
at 6 PM
At Proteus Gowanus
543 Union Street

For Home Page, click Pardon Me For Asking

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