GOWANUS — A neighborhood teeming with artists is about to get a new space to showcase creative work.
An art gallery called Show Room Gowanus is slated to open September 14 next door to the popular wedding and events venue The Green Building on Union Street near Bond Street.
The gallery is a new iteration of Show Room 170, which shuttered its old location on Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side earlier this summer.
Gallery manager Jeff Sanford said he and partner Jeannie Weissglass were drawn to Gowanus because it's still home to a thriving community of artists.
"A neighborhood like this is what the Lower East Side was 20 years ago, with younger artists and studios [nearby]," Sanford said. Indeed, the new gallery is just down the block from the arts organization Proteus Gowanus, and the Claireware ceramics studio.
Like Show Room 170, the new Show Room Gowanus will favor work by mid-career artists who are under-appreciated, and new, undiscovered talents, Sanford said. The Lower East Side location showed work by 2007 Rhode Island School of Design graduate Eric Wendel, post-minimalist Thomas Kovachevich, and abstract painter and sculptor James Hyde, who lives in Gowanus, Sanford said.
Show Room Gowanus' debut show on September 14 will feature photographs by Maryse Alberti, a cinematographer for films including "The Wrestler" and "We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks."
To mark the arrival of Show Room Gowanus, the gallery asked artist Anne Deleporte, whose work was shown at its Lower East Side location, to paint a mural on a 140-foot concrete wall on Union Street.
Deleporte, who does painting, photography and video, has created murals in New Orleans and Dallas. Her Gowanus piece consists of random images clipped from newspapers and glued to a field of sky blue paint.
The arrival of Show Room Gowanus is part of a block-long transformation on Union Street spearheaded by Akiva Reich, the owner of The Green Building.
Reich recently launched an arts performance space inside the sprawling, 93-year-old brick Green Building. He's also about to open 501 Union, a new rental venue and private social club, on that same block.
