A.I.R. Gallery, June 2022
Visiting A.I.R. Gallery in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn.
We found ourselves today in the Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass (DUMBO) neighborhood of Brooklyn with its eclectic shops, galleries, and restaurants. There was a flea market right under the bridge as well as big crowds enjoying the sunny, crisp day. A.I.R. (Artists in Residence) is the first, all female non-profit cooperative in the United States, founded in 1972 to give female artists a permanent professional gallery to exhibit their art, at a time where commercial galleries were dominated by male artists.
A.I.R. Gallery, New York City, NY
A.I.R. Gallery is an artist-run non-profit arts organization and exhibition space founded in 1972. A.I.R. supports the open exchange of ideas and risk-taking by women and non-binary artists in order to provide support and visibility. A self-directed governing body, the organization is an alternative to mainstream institutions and thrives on the network of active participants.
Searching For Peace by Yvette Drury Dubinsky was the first exhibition we saw. Inspired by the displacement of the war in Ukraine, Dubinsky uses mixed media to depict the horrors of war and the trauma inflicted in refugees.
We stood for quite a while in front of her 2013 installation ‘From Aleppo to Damascus’, and it felt so familiar. Reading her notes about comparing the situation in Syria to Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, I suddenly realized why it felt so familiar. I had sat in front of Picasso’s masterpiece at the Museo Reina Sofia just before the COVID epidemic; I recognized the similarities in the method and the parallels in the historical inspiration.
© Yvette Drury Dubinsky ‘From Aleppo to Damascus’, courtesy of the artist and A.I.R. Gallery
Zazu Swistel was the second artist exhibited. She is an artist, architectural designer and activist. We were captivated by the structure of her pastel ‘portraits’. The exhibition is called In A Vulgar Language: When Your Childhood Wasn’t Invited’. I interpreted her work as a depiction of her childhood memories in the form of interior spaces; where the space is an interpretation of feelings of loneliness, rites of passage, and possibly disillusionment.
