FUN STUFF In Williamsburg | Featured alongside Time Out New York · Brooklyn Paper · Billboard | | This is the week I've been waiting for. NYCxDESIGN, New York's annual citywide design festival, officially kicks off Thursday and runs through May 20 — more than 250 exhibitions, open studios, talks, and parties across all five boroughs, with a focus on the city's design, architecture, fashion, and craft communities. The festival has historically been Manhattan-heavy, but a real slice of it sits in Williamsburg and Greenpoint this year, and I've pulled four of the strongest local picks into their own section below. Plus the Brooklyn Museum opens its Iris van Herpen retrospective Saturday and Sounds That Move takes a block in Bushwick from Friday through Sunday — two more anchors I would not want anyone to miss. | Do you know someone who'd appreciate this? FUN STUFF is a free weekly edit of the best art, design, maker, and music events in Brooklyn. I write for people who are interested in supporting the local community. If someone in your circle would appreciate it, forward this their way. Forward this issue → |
| Don't Miss | | | Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses at the Brooklyn MuseumOpens Sat May 16This is Van Herpen's first major US retrospective. More than a hundred couture pieces are shown alongside the fossils, deep-sea organisms, and natural objects that informed them, and the exhibition spans twenty years of work at the seam between fashion and sculpture, with 3D-printed dresses, biomimetic silhouettes, and garments engineered by hand. The show runs through December 6, but I'm going Saturday. The opening weekend is going to be busy, and that's the right kind of busy to be part of. | | Sounds That Move FestivalFri May 15 – Sun May 17Sounds That Move is a music festival and conference in Bushwick that brings together NYC's music lovers and creative community on one block to discover new artists through live concerts and DJ sets, and to engage in discussion about the future of creative industries through panels and workshops with industry leaders. The 'How Indie Venues Keep Live Music in NYC Alive' panel pulls operators from Elsewhere, Baby's All Right, Café Erzulie, SOBs, and Silo into one room, which is the rarest part of the weekend. The tagline is 'for Brooklyn by Brooklyn,' and it holds up. | NYCxDESIGN in Our Neighborhoods | | Four picks from the working studios and showrooms participating in the festival in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. The full guide with everything I tracked is linked at the bottom. | | Solmistudio x Twelve Chairs Gallery: Objects TrouvéOpening reception Thu May 14, 6–8pSolmistudio shows illuminated sculptures built from reclaimed Hudson Valley bricks, plus a new celestial lighting series, inside a gallery built around raw steel beams and salvaged kitchen equipment. The opening reception Thursday is where I'd start my festival week. The show runs through Wed May 20. | | Body Language at Bower StudiosTue May 19 – Sat Jun 27, 11a–6pBody Language is a group show at Bower Studios investigating how objects communicate through movement, gesture, and form, with work from more than fifteen artists and designers. The Bower x Mociun showroom on Driggs is one of the few Williamsburg spaces that programs working artists alongside its retail line. It opens during the festival and runs through June 27, so there is no rush. | | Sake & SENTIENT: Inside the WorkshopThu May 14 and Fri May 15, 2–7pSENTIENT opens its 25,000-square-foot Greenpoint workshop for two afternoons of sake, handcrafted furniture, and a private tour with creative director Nersi Nasseri. The workshop is usually closed to the public, and the scale of the space is the reason to go. RSVP required. | | Libraries as Learning Landscapes — SCAPE at Greenpoint LibraryThu May 14, 6–7:30pLandscape architects SCAPE walk through their library design work, then take the group outside for a tour of the Greenpoint Library's grounds. The neighborhood example is built into the talk, which makes this the rare design-week event with no abstraction problem. Free, RSVP required. | → Five more NYCxDESIGN events on the full guide | This Week | | | 1. Pick of the Day with Display Distribute at AmantWed May 13, 7–9pAmant's For Your Reference season closes with Display Distribute, the Hong-Kong–and–New York–based independent publisher I've been interested in since their newsstand at e-flux. They'll be joined by Bungee Space, Canal Street Research Association, Fei Liu, and Jen Liu. It's free, and the room is small, so go early. | | | 2. Awita Artist Market — Summer Series openerSat May 16 – Sun May 17, 12–6pThis is the first weekend of Awita's monthly summer market, with forty-plus artists, designers, and makers across indoor and outdoor stalls selling jewelry, prints, ceramics, and objects. Awita is the Williamsburg studio founded by Gulsum Keskinoglu in 2023, this week's featured creative below. I'm planning to walk over Saturday. The series runs again Jun 20–21, Jul 18–19, and Aug 15–16. | | | 3. Good Room: Eli Escobar all night, kels, Shawn DubFri May 15, 10pEli Escobar, one of the New York DJs who routinely turns a regular booking into something worth dressing for, takes the Good Room main room for an all-night Friday. Kels and Shawn Dub open. The Bad Room programs separately, so it's worth checking the calendar before you go. | | | 4. Matt Evans' Aquatic House — album release at RouletteFri May 15, 8pDrummer and composer Matt Evans premieres Aquatic House live at Roulette in Boerum Hill, with Chris Ryan Williams opening. Roulette is the experimental-music institution in Brooklyn, and Evans has been steadily building a body of work between the academic and the ambient. It's a sit-and-listen counterprogram to Good Room across town. | Oh and... | | CFGNY's Shop III opens at Amant Sunday afternoon — the Brooklyn collective's third pop-up retail edition, running alongside the For Your Reference season finale earlier in the week Mister Sunday returns to the Nowadays backyard every Sunday through October — Eamon Harkin and Conducta this week, with Sofia Kourtesis and Dave DK at The Nursery in Greenpoint at the same time, which is a real Sunday decision Heath Wae's Magnified at CARVALHO in East Williamsburg has been extended through May 30 after Artforum named it a Must See — orchid paintings that are quieter than the rest of the week's calendar | A BROOKLYN STORY | |  | Gulsum Keskinoglu | Gulsum Keskinoglu is the artist and curator behind Awita New York Studio, five blocks from my apartment in Williamsburg. She founded the space in 2023, trained as a sculptor in Bodrum, and has built it into one of the most consistent platforms for emerging and underrepresented artists I know in the neighborhood. She runs open calls and monthly programming, and she launched a print magazine last year. Her current group show, Practice of Persistence, marks the studio's third anniversary and runs through May 30. This weekend she opens the Summer Artist Market, the first weekend of a monthly run through August. Hope you can visit. | Worth sharing? Send it to a fellow creative. | | That's Issue 4. Got an event we should know about, or someone we should feature? Hit reply or write to hello@funstuffnyc.com. I read every email. See you out there,
-Sam
@fun.stuff.williamsburg | |
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