Though I spent six hours sauntering through the neighborhood for the 30th iteration of Gowanus Open Studios (GOS) on Saturday afternoon, I barely covered a tenth of the over 100 participating sites. Scattered throughout GOS' post-industrial labyrinth of stairwells, hallways, and nondescript entrances was a love letter to the notorious canal and the creative community formed along its banks, capturing the neighborhood's past and present as it hurtles toward its future as a shiny waterfront development.
In the literal sense, I encountered a fair bit of plein air work spotlighting water remediation efforts on the canal and documenting familiar street corners before they change in the blink of an eye, as the entire neighborhood has done in the last five years alone.
“It makes me a bit sad,” Elizabeth O'Reilly, a landscape artist with a large studio at 543 Union Street, told me when I asked her about her experience witnessing Gowanus's full 180-degree turn from a site of profound industrial abuse and infrastructural neglect to a place housing glimmering, luxury high-rises in various states of completion near the canal, which admittedly still smells quite a bit and floods with raw sewage when it rains.
O'Reilly has maintained a studio on the same block as the Union Street Bridge since 1992, and displayed myriad paintings and collages of the canal and neighborhood. The works channeled the area's architectural angularities and the canal's reclamation of them through scattered reflections on its oily surface. Most of the work she had out was from the late 2000s and early 2010s — right as the polluted canal was designated a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency and entered its second phase of development