The First Bushwick Biennial Mayumi Hirano

The Bushwick Sketchbook Biennial was held at our apartment two days ago - Mother's Day. We were uncertain what kind of crowd we would get, but it turned out to be a nice number of friendly people. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, and I personally had a lot of fun.

I had been a bit worried about the installation because I thought our apartment didn’t have enough space for showing 15 artist's works - even if they were just showing sketches. But it looks like I was wrong. After stuffing the closets with all our junk we had enough space. I was just happy that nobody complained about the hanging.

I didn’t get to do a studio visit with everybody, but the ones I got to do I enjoyed. I asked for sketches, and I ended up with everything from drawing to collage, photographs to sound work. The variety was a nice surprise.

As a part of the show we have built a web portal to show the artists’ other kinds of work. We thought it would be nice to send that out over the web. Take a look when you get a chance: www.januaryblog.com/bushwick.html.

The images at the top of this post were shown at the Biennial and are by Emily Mae Smith.