Participating Artists: Maya Meissner, Jackie Cantwell, Becky Chipkin, Alex Chipkin, Hazel Lee Santino, Kurt Steger, Caitlin Dutton, Margot Bird, Casey Velasquez, Taro Masushio, Yan Giguere, Annabelle Weatherly, Erin Anderson, Fanny Allie, Roberto Jamora, Adam Brazil, Patrick Berger, Cory Tamler, William Norton, Julia Rooney and Cynthia Tobar

[Click here for a PDF with a list of all participating artists and descriptions of their projects.]

For ArtHelix’s second summer season of The Lot at 16 Harrison Place, we will continue to investigate, through visual and creative means, new ideas of artistic community. Appalach-Wick is a light hearted play on the idea of a communal art space, here in Brooklyn, which both encourages and mimics the handcrafted art forms of rural appalachian America.

Like the culture of the Appalachian communities that found networks of independent craftspeople to support each other in hard times, Appalach-Wick is built on the premise that emerging artists will need to become far more locally self-sustaining and self-actualizing even as the wired world opens up the theoretical possibility of a universal community without borders.

Furthermore, we recognize the essential role community plays in the success of not only the artist but also the art form itself. In addition to displaying the work and its process, Appalach-Wick will serve as a sort of informal artisan’s guild, giving craftsmen the opportunity to share resources, materials and marketing opportunities with one another.

Over 6 weeks, The Lot at 16 Harrison Place will feature a group of like-minded local artists being asked to meet and create work in situ, but more importantly to talk to one another, sharing their own thoughts and fears, with the hope that new connections will arise and new models (and patterns) of behavior will emerge.

The event will host a dancer/choreographer, a sculptor, muralist, a poet, a photographer/blogger, and others who will create an experimental laboratory of 6 weekends from which a playful new concept of what “Bushwick” might mean someday will emerge.

Can artists be “forced” into meeting each other in a physical space in order to slowly reduce the alienation that comes from proximity, but no real contact?

For a photo gallery of all ongoing projects from Appalach-Wick participants, click here.

To join the Appalach-Wick discussion and get involved, check out our Facebook page.