Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition

Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition is a nonprofit arts organization founded in DUMBO, Brooklyn in 1978 that supports and exhibits work by local artists.

In 1978, sixteen artists in DUMBO needed a wall to hang work on. They formed BWAC, and kept moving (pop-up shows in breweries, on barges in the East River) until landing in a Civil War-era warehouse on the Red Hook waterfront in the early 1990s. From that 25,000-square-foot space at 481 Van Brunt Street, with its wide-plank floors and a sight line across the harbor to the Statue of Liberty, BWAC grew into Brooklyn's largest artist-run organization: over 400 members, annual juried and member shows, an outdoor sculpture series, a waterfront performance program, workshops with the Brooklyn Public Library and Pioneer Works. On September 17, 2025, a five-alarm fire tore through the warehouse. The organization lost its gallery. The work it has always done (getting emerging artists on walls, keeping the experience of art free or cheap, building the kind of community that survives Sandy and pandemics) is what it's now rebuilding around.