Kingsland Wildflowers rooftop, the starting point for Saturday’s tour.
Local artist Martynka Wawrzyniak‘s site-specific sculpture, Ziemia, will take the form of a ceramic sphere atop a meadow garden in McGolrick Park, and she’s having the local community help create it. Ziemia, which means Earth in Polish, will celebrate our neighborhood’s many cultures, become a locus for community programming, and carry personal significance for the participants who help shape it.
Ziemia site in McGolrick Park, via Ziemia on Instagram
McGolrick Sculpture Installation & Walking Tour With Greenpoint Historian When: Saturday, September 30, 3pm – 5pm Where: Kingsland Wildflowers Green Roof | 520 Kingsland Avenue Who: Greenpoint artist, Martynka Wawrzyniak & Greenpoint historian, Geoff Cobb $15 donation (proceeds go to the Ziemia art project), RSVP
Anti-Nazi Rally in McGolrick Park. Photo by Julia Moak
After White Supremacist Neo-Nazis carried out terror and violence in Charlottesville, Va. last weekend, the nation has been grappling with the pervasive reality, and deeply real threat, of White Supremacy. On August 14, such hate hit close to home, right here in Greenpoint. BKLYNER reported that a Greenpoint resident found a business card advertising the neo-Nazi hate group, New Order, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, near McGolrick Park. The fascist organization also recently left their card at a bus-stop near Graham and Driggs Avenues.
Marc was the first in a lineup of speakers to open the event. In his speech, he drew a distinction between aggression and self-defense, stressed the right of civil disobedience, and had a message for hate groups: “haters who would come here, or plan to borough in here, hear us. Every time you plant a seed of hate, we will dig it up with our bare hands, and remove it from Brooklyn grounds. And when you plant another, we will band together, and dig together, and together, we will remove the next one…and when we are done, and you are gone, we will clean our soiled hands, and extend them to each other, and get back to the Brooklyn business of empathy, dignity, compassion, and enlightenment and solidarity, and equality and love.”Continue reading →
The refurbished McGolrick Park dog run, almost ready to re-open. Photo: Stephanie Valente
A quick walk along the southwest corner of McGolrick Park in the last few weeks reveals it has been getting something of a facelift.
At some point in early July, a sign appeared on the fencing outside of the McGolrick Park dog run, announcing renovation and that the run would be closed from July 12th – Aug. 1st. It came as somewhat of a surprise to the dog owners who frequented the park. Soon, enough secondhand information (and in some cases third and fourth) began to filter its way down from parks department employees; there would be a transition from dirt to gravel, that the trees would be preserved, and there would be a pavilion to provide shade for owners.
The talk, coupled with the sign, elicited a chorus of mixed replies: some owners praised the idea of gravel, noting it would clean their dog’s paws and possibly help with the endless amounts of broken glass that seemed to rise, Poltergeist-like, out of the mud after every heavy rain. Others were more wary, saying the mulched and dirt-y run provided pets a little relief from the concrete of the city, and the switch to gravel would take that cushioning away. Also, there was speculation about dust—an oft-heard complaint about the newer dog runs in Cooper Park and Bushwick Inlet. Continue reading →
With dog parks in both McGolrick and McCarren Park, lots of canine-conscious businesses that leave water bowls out for pups, and many great dog owners, Greenpoint is a pretty sweet place to be a dog. In celebration of man’s best friend, this week’s photo story is on our noble four-legged friends, because without them, our days would definitely be a little longer!
Snow is a female Westie mix. She loves the McGolrick dog park and is very playful!Meet Huey Lewis, who loves Transmitter Park and the power of love.Chewy is a mix. He can be a little bit of a grumpy old man, but he loves walks in McGolrick.Nina is a female rescue pup all the way from Georgia. She can entertain herself for hours chasing a ball.Haru is a year-old Pomeranian. Her name in Japanese means “little bit of sunshine”.Ari is a husky! She is sweet, strong willed and loves the outdoors. Transmitter Park is her favorite!Meet Olive. She’s a French Bulldog and she is definitely aware of how cute she is.Bazie is a Beagle. She LOVES smelling things.Lily is a seven year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. She loves the McGolrick dog park.Eloise is a nine year old French Bulldog. She likes to sing along when her owner plays harmonica!
Snitches is a seven year old rescue pup. According to his owner, he is “part deer, part squirrel, part everything.” He always walks in Transmitter Park as part of his routine!
Conceptual artist Martynka Wawrzyniak will create Ziemia, a public art project created in collaboration with all Greenpointers.
Martynka Wawrzyniak has always been a conceptual artist. She thinks deeply about her relationship to the world and comes up with self-portraits that are inimitable and brilliantly unique. These ideas often utilize unusual substances and require her to collaborate with specialists in an eclectic range of fields.
For example, in her 2012 project, Smell Me, she spent two years working with Hunter College Professor Donna McGregor and a team of chemistry research students to create an olfactory-based self-portrait utilizing the extracted essence of her sweat, tears and hair.
In another project, Feed, she collected a year’s worth of her used cloth dinner napkins in order to create a suspended double spiral where viewers walked through her life in the self-described “stains of my existence”.
Oh, to be a kid again: warm summer days romping through McGolrick Park, in between being immersed in my own imagination and bringing my ideas to life by experimenting with a wide variety of materials, long before my creativity was blocked by all the challenges of adulthood. Don’t miss this special opportunity to nurture your own child’s creative genius by sending them to Tumbleweeds Art Campthis summer. Continue reading →
