BAMart: Public - Cultural District Public Art Project
Overview:
Conceived and curated as a major year-long initiative, BAMart: Public was designed to animate the Brooklyn Academy of Music campus and its surrounding district through site-specific art commissions. Drawing over 100 international submissions from artists, architects, and collectives, the project sought to reimagine how visual art intersects with the everyday urban environment. By utilizing open plazas, exterior building facades, and utilitarian street fixtures across the BAM Cultural District—an area welcoming over 650,000 visitors annually—the initiative expanded the traditional gallery footprint into the open air to engage thousands of daily residents, commuters, and arts patrons.
Project Context & Curatorial Role
I spearheaded the selection process, site strategy, and organizational direction for the four winning proposals. The initiative focused on commissioning works that were not only visually compelling, but also conceptually engaged with themes of transience, memory, materiality, and community distribution.
Ed Purver – The Always Season
Location: 230 Ashland Place (BAM Harvey Theater exterior wall)Installed several stories above the plaza, Purver’s hyperrealistic digital rendering created the optical illusion of a large "puncture" in the theater’s massive concrete wall, revealing a vivid blue sky with shifting clouds behind the building's facade. The work played with themes of permeability and impermanence, offering passersby a moment of quiet connection and playful disruption within the dense urban architecture.
Timothy Hull and Future Expansion Architects – The Accelerated Ruin
Location: 653 Fulton StreetOccupying a paved lot adjacent to the Harvey Theater, this monumental sculpture consisted of three stepped, pyramid-like forms constructed from an eco-friendly, biodegradable foam material engineered over a lightweight aluminum framework. Built to gradually erode under the natural atmospheric conditions of the four seasons, the work engaged neighborhood regulars in a real-time observation of entropy, loss, and vulnerability as its underlying structure was slowly exposed.
Glen Baldridge – Sunset
Location: 651 Fulton Street (BAM Harvey Theater exterior façade)Realized in collaboration with 651 Arts, Baldridge applied custom perforated vinyl across the expansive windows and outer skin of the Harvey Theater. Functioning like a glowing, luminous layer, the street-side mural suggested an internal power source emanating from within the historic institution, capturing light to transform an everyday physical wall into a vibrant visual threshold.
Showpaper – Brooklyn Shelf Life
Location: Lafayette Avenue (between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street)Rethinking the utilitarian newsstand box, this multi-artist project commissioned five pairs of artists—including Swoon, Gaia, Faust, and UFO 907—to sculpt, melt, and visually redefine five street boxes. Curated by Andrew H. Shirley, with revolving independent print publications selected by Jesse Hlebo (Swill Children) in partnership with Printed Matter and Showpaper, the project turned public street fixtures into active, free distribution hubs for NYC's underground print culture.
“Utilizing open space allows for BAM to support artists and to infuse more life and creativity into the community,” says David Harper, BAMart curator. “This project’s goal is to inspire the collective public imagination.”
Role: Commissioner/Curator
Date: June 19, 2012—May 2013
Location: BAM Cultural District, Brooklyn, NY
Artists: Glen Baldridge, Timothy Hull with Future Expansion Architects, Ed Purver, Showpaper (Adam Void & Gaia, Cassius Fouler & Faust, Leon Reid IV & Noah Sparkes, Ryan C. Doyle & Swoon, and UFO 907 & William Thomas Porter)
