Brooklyn’s Amant arts centre — urban rawness, refined

Some of the businesses around East Williamsburg between Grand and Maujer streets are visible — like the big self-storage warehouses, meatpacking warehouses, building-supply stores and the tyre and auto-repair shops. Others, the recording studios and the rehearsal spaces for strippers and pole dancers, are a little less conspicuous. And most inconspicuous of all is the slow colonisation of these grimy but roomy industrial buildings by artists looking for cheap(er) studios.

The game is given away by a couple of cool cafés, an artful dive bar and the occasional warehouse gallery but, for the moment, a kind of equilibrium exists between culture and industry, the pre-gentrification buzz that gives artists the impression they are in the real city rather than a simulacrum and in which zoning still supports the dirty workshops and backyard functions the city needs to maintain within its limits in order to continue to work.

Amant, a new arts foundation and gallery space, threads a neat, clean stitch through this grimy fabric, elegantly skirting the process of urban change with a language of industrial material handled with a finesse that allows it both to sit comfortably and to gently shine. It is a kind of clean cultural cut through the neighbourhood at the moment encompassing a block and a half section (with a road through it).

Amant is funded by art collector Lonti Ebers (who is married to Bruce Flatt, chief executive of Brookfield Asset Management). Ebers told me she was trying “to create a cultural community, for art practitioners — and to do it in a more welcoming and opening way”.

There is none of the faux-industrial heaviness or the self-conscious minimalism that form the poles of art space

Architect Florian Idenburg of SO-IL has employed the material language of the locale to enclose a series of galleries, studios, communal spaces and courtyards that echo the porousness and complexity of these urban blocks and the richness of content and use they conceal. From the slender steel bars of a gate to tough corrugated concrete via an almost textile-like surface of end-on brick woven into a wall, the exterior is enigmatic enough to draw your gaze but robust enough to slot right in. A glimpse through the bars reveals a tantalising world of tailored brick and highly finished concrete, a gourmet version of the local vernacular.

Walking in, however, feels like entering a world apart. Lush green courtyards framed in pale grey concrete and creamy brick, café terraces, sculpture gardens and the art visible through plate glass give this the impression of a chichi gallery in São Paulo or Mexico City. There is none of the faux-industrial heaviness or the self-conscious minimalism that form the poles of art space, rather a more refined world of compression and release, blue skies brought down into the heart of the deep blocks and framed in delicately wrought brick (so exquisitely done it feels right to give credit to the masonry subcontractor, Vertical Spaces, which clearly collaborated intimately with the architects).

Rather than starting again, the architects used and adapted the found space, though it is difficult to tell which elements are new and what has been retained. The tall central gallery (a repurposed industrial space) is crisply illuminated by the minimal slot of a clerestory window; another gallery space is lit by six scoops cut into the ceiling. Although the gallery spaces are fairly conventional white cubes lined in drywall, there is enough articulation between them (in changing materials), above them (in their modes of natural light) and in the subtly shifting patterns and finishes underfoot to distinguish them and impart a sense of change and movement, unlike in most commercial galleries.

There is also a space for artists’ studios upstairs (they are given studios and a stipend to live in the city) and a convivial communal room for dining and meeting. A café is already buzzing with locals and a bookshop laden with fashionable tracts was about to open when I visited.

So this is a complex based on the needs of artists — those working and exhibiting here and the local cultural community who have few places to congregate. The art is edgy; Ebers and director Ruth Estévez are giving space to marginalised voices from the US and way beyond, exhibiting less accessible work and giving artists space to experiment. One gallery is devoted to performance art and video (“always the poor relation”, says Ebers). Accessible and free, Amant (its name derives from Ebers’ mother’s maiden name) manages to do what a lot of public institutions don’t: create a sheltered but open embrace of complex art exploring difficult issues that feels accessible, neither too sacred nor too precious nor at all commercial.

There are a few small missteps: the architects’ apparent homage to Lina Bo Bardi in the amoeboid window cut-outs in the concrete are clunkily literal, for one. There is perhaps something a little too precious in its creamy cardboard palette, set among the pop vibrancy that makes this neighbourhood so vivid, the garish signs, the supergraphics, the banana-yellow of the self-storage lock-ups and the colour-spattered paint shops. Is it patronising to adopt the robust materials of the industrial city and refine them until they become almost too beautiful?

But if that is the harshest critique, Amant is doing something right. Which is good as it has acquired other sites close by and, in the manner of a friendly bacterium, will be colonising the interiors of other plots soon. The trick will be to continue creating space of this quality without squeezing out the nature of this rough remnant of a piece of real, working urbanity.

amant.org

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