Proteus Gowanus is closed for the summer. We will reopen in September.

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Library Show Catalog (opens as pdf)

Past Proteus Events (opens as pdf)

Past events
The 2007/8 yearlong “Play” theme:

VIDEO LOOP ARTISTS
March: William Lamson, Vital Capacity 2007
February: Jesse Stead, "Class of '98" (2008)

Toying with Forms
Sunday, March 2nd, 3:00 p.m. $5 admission
Karen Hewitt, toy designer, toy historian, and educator, will consider the relationship between toys and art with a particular focus on building toys and their historical and contemporary parallels in the art world.  This talk will include images, historical objects, and personal reflections related to art, toys and play.

Saturday, February 9th, 3 – 5:30
$20 per person, OuLiPo Three: Writing with Constraints.
OuLiPo, “the workshop of potential literature,” applies mathematical and other forms of patterning to verbal composition.  Its members (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews) chose to write within constraints because these allow you to say things you hadn’t expected to say in ways you would never have chosen.  For example, the lipogram limits the set of letters you can write with.  N+7 requires you to replace every noun in a text with the noun seven places after it in some dictionary.  In composing perverbs, you attach the first half of a common proverb to the second half of another and then write a story to illustrate the result. WENDY WALKER and TOM LA FARGE are writers who use and teach these and other practices, and they invite you to come explore them.

Mah Jongg lessons
Sunday, February 17th, 2 – 5 p.m., $20 per person
Sally Mara Sturman and Ellen J Greenfeld will teach the ancient Chinese/Jewish game of Mah Jongg. From the palaces of Beijing to the card tables of the Catskills, Mah Jongg took the Western world by storm in the 1950’s. Join us as we reveal the mysteries of “cracks, bams and dots!”   An integral part of the Mah Jongg experience is noshing. Please bring your favorite snack to share with at least 4 players.

Play Book Launch
Friday, February 22nd, 6 – 8 p.m.
Please join us for the launch of the Play Book, the initial publication of Proteotypes, periodic publications generated by exhibits and programs at Proteus Gowanus.

The Play Book grew out of the 2007/8 theme “Play” at Proteus Gowanus. Beyond a catalog, it is a limited edition book to be played with, a loose compilation of artist-designed games ready to cut, fold, paste and assemble; images of play past and present; pages of anagrams and palindromes; ponderings on the meaning of play; conundrums by Lewis Carroll; and a short play by Gertrude Stein. The book includes a match game, a word game, a word maze, a geometric puzzler, paper dolls, an automaton, a miniature card deck, a flipbook and a toy theater. Come play along!
Available until February 23rd at the pre-publication price of $30. $40 thereafter.

To order go to www.proteusgowanus.com and click on Play Book

January 12 – OuLiPo Two – Writing with Constraints
hosted by writers Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge (see below)

Sunday, December 16, 3:30 p.m.
Bing and Ruth, A Sunday afternoon improvisational concert.
Bing and Ruth, Brooklyn's resident "ambient orchestra," presents a special Sunday afternoon concert at Proteus Gowanus. The large, all acoustic band features some of Brooklyn's finest improvisers performing the compositions of Gowanus resident David Moore; compositions that rely heavily on interplay and spontaneous contribution. Clarinets dip and slide through a cello and piano, with the hum of a distant voice.

December 8th
OuLiPo One – Writing with Constraints.
OuLiPo, “the workshop of potential literature,” applies mathematical and other forms of patterning to verbal composition. Its members (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews) chose to write within constraints because these allow you to say things you hadn’t expected to say in ways you would never have chosen. For example, the lipogram limits the set of letters you can write with. N+7 requires you to replace every noun in a text with the noun seven places after it in some dictionary. In composing perverbs, you attach the first half of a common proverb to the second half of another and then write a story to illustrate the result. WENDY WALKER and TOM LA FARGE are writers who use and teach these and other practices, and they invite you to come explore them.

Sunday, December 2nd, 2 p.m. FREE to the public.
Bomb Magazine presents BOMBLive! at Proteus Gowanus:
“In the Open: Art in Public Spaces” Ellen Driscoll & Anita Glesta in conversation. The second in a series of staged interviews between architects, urban theoreticians, and artists working in the public realm. Off the page and onto the stage, BOMB Magazine presents an ongoing series of live conversations between artists and writers in a variety of settings throughout New York City. Link to article.

Sunday, November 11, 3:00 – 5:00, $40 per person (includes supplies). A workshop in making pop-up books taught by artist Maddy Rosenberg. Expand those flat books and cards into the 3-D with simple pop-ups and moveable elements. In this introduction to basic pop-up structures, learn the endless possibilities and variations of simple cuts and additions. From the fun to the dramatic, these additions open up limitless possibilities. Limited enrollment. Suitable for teenagers, beginners, and the more advanced alike.

Sunday, November 18, 2:00 – 5:00, $20 per person. Mah Jongg lessons.
Sally Mara Sturman and Ellen J Greenfeld will teach the ancient Chinese/Jewish game of Mah Jongg. From the palaces of Beijing to the card tables of the Catskills, Mah Jongg took the Western world by storm in the 1950’s. Join us as we reveal the mysteries of “cracks, bams and dots!” An integral part of the Mah Jongg experience is noshing. Please bring your favorite snack to share with at least 4 players.

Friday, November 16, 7:30 p.m.
$5 per person. A reading by Steve Katz from KISSSSSSS: A Miscellany.
A deliriously playful stylist and incisive chronicler, Steve Katz is the novelist “most likely to keep our hearts and minds in good working order” (W.C. Bamberger). Come wonder and laugh as Katz reads from his latest book and work in progress. Steve Katz, a founder of the Fiction Collective, is the author of seventeen books, including Antonello’s Lion (Green Integer), Saw (FC2), 43Fictions (Sun and Moon), Creamy and Delicious (Random House) and The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (Holt). He lives digitally at stevekatzwrites.com.

Sue Share Show and Tell – A workshop and performance, Friday, October 26th, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. Performance and workshop $25 adults, $15 children under 16. Performance only $10 adults, $5 children under 16.
Susan Joy Share will show some of her animated books, reveal their contents and talk about how they are made. She will be joined by Richard Lewis of the Touchstone Center for Children for part of this presentation. Immediately
following her performance, Share will teach a workshop on how to make a Jacob’s Ladder toy. $25 adults, $15 children under 16, materials included. Space is limited, email reservations to info@proteusgowanus.com or call 718-243-1572.

Artist, performer and book conservator, Share has exhibited her uniquesculptural books nationally and internationally, and received grants fromthe Alaska State Council on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. Share worked as a book conservator at the The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and taught at many noted institutions including the Center for Book Arts, NYC; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Penland School of Crafts, NC; and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, ME. Link

September 14 – Opening of the 2007/8 yearlong Play exhibit

Bing and Ruth: a Sunday afternoon improvisational concert
Bing and Ruth, Brooklyn's resident "ambient orchestra," presents a special Sunday afternoon concert at Proteus Gowanus. The large, all acoustic band features some of Brooklyn's finest improvisers performing the compositions of Gowanus resident David Moore; compositions that rely heavily on interplay and spontaneous contribution. Clarinets dip and slide through a cello and piano, with the hum of a distant voice. Sunday, September 30th,  3:30 p.m.

Nina Katchadourian and Rick Moody: A Powerpoint Presentation in Song on Diverse Subjects Arrived at According to Chance Procedures.
A multi-media performance. Nina Katchadourian is a visual artist and musician. She is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco. She has received grants and awards from The New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Rick Moody is the author of four novels, three collections of stories, and a memoir. His most recent work is a collection of novellas, RIGHT LIVELIHOODS, to be published in June by Little, Brown. He is the recipient of the Addison Metcalf Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Martha Albrand Prize for excellence in the memoir, from PEN; and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Saturday, June 10, 7:30 p.m.

Brooklyn College Library presents "It's all about the Book," a day of presentations by the Brooklyn College Library, Proteus Gowanus, The Brooklyn Museum, METRO, Institute for the Future of the Book, and Booklyn Artists Alliance. For more information and to make reservations click here
Wednesday, June 6th, 9:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m. (at Brooklyn College)

Writer Shelley Jackson will do a presentation on her project, The Interstitial Library’s Circulating Collection.
Located at no fixed site, the library’s vast holdings are dispersed throughout private collections, used bookstores, other libraries, thrift stores, garbage dumps, attics, garages, hollow trees, sunken ships, the bottom desk-drawers of writers, the imaginations of non-writers, the pages of other books, the possible future, and the inaccessible past. Co-Founder Shelley Jackson will reveal the project’s history and circulatory system, exhibit highlights of the collection, and distribute handouts to aspiring librarians. The project is a collaboration with artist Christine Hill. Shelley Jackson is the author of Half Life, the Melancholy of Anatomy, and SKIN, a story published in tattoos on the skin of 2095 volunteers. $5 per person, Saturday, May 19th, 7:30 p.m.

A talk and powerpoint presentation about Walt Whitman in Brooklyn by Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian and Curator of Books at the Brooklyn Museum, who will focus on Whitman’s interest in the arts in Brooklyn. Whitman was the librarian of the Brooklyn Apprentices Library which later became the Brooklyn Museum. $5 per person. Sunday, May 13th, 3 p.m. (Mothers Day)

Libraries and Danger - A talking tour and slide show of bombed, burned, chained, rejected, and rotting libraries around the world by Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge, novelists and Proteus Gowanus Library Correspondents.
The "tour" will encompass libraries endangered by war, politics, thieves, natural disasters, colonial incursions and more idiosyncratic agents of destruction, such as collectors of title pages.  We will visit the Library of Alexandria, the Warburg Library, the Holland House Library, the Cotton Library, the Islamic libraries of Timbuktu, Tamegroute, Baghdad, and many more.  Also to be discussed are the ways in which libraries are perceived to be dangerous (under the terms of the Patriot Act and local ordinances banning books), and the ways in which that danger has been reified, as in the medieval custom of chaining books. Wendy Walker has created a collection of contemporary “chained books” that are on exhibit and for sale at Proteus Gowanus. Sunday, December 3rd, 6:00 p.m.

ARLIS – Art Libraries Society of North America, New York meeting and presentation at Proteus Gowanus, November 16.

A Screening by David Gatten - Filmmaker and Guggenheim Fellowship Artist.
Secret History of the Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts, a series of films using the library of William Byrd as a point of departure.
At once ghost story, historical romance, and meditation on books, letters, race, land, and labor, Gatten’s project, included in the recent Whitney Biennial, uses the largest library of the American Colonies to chronicle the partitioning of landscape, the categorization of knowledge, and the function of libraries as sites of collection and dissemination. Much of William Byrd's library was bought by Thomas Jefferson, who in turn gave his books to the U.S. to form the Library of Congress. Sunday, November 12, 7:00 p.m.

A screening of films from “The Celestial Library” by artist and filmmaker Jeanne Liotta.
Jeanne Liotta will screen a selection of made and found slim volumes in 16MM and video on the subjects of landscape, science, and natural philosophy: “hymns to the void, the stars in their courses, the earth under your feet wobbles and drifts.” This film series was included in the last Whitney Biennial. Sunday, October 29, 7:00 p.m.,

A talk and slide show by Deirdre Lawrence, Principal Librarian at the Brooklyn Museum Library. Deirdre Lawrence will discuss the early history of the Brooklyn Museum Library and the 19th century collectors who built its research collections. The presentation will highlight books, photographs, and prints from the collection, and will touch on Walt Whitman’s early involvement with the library, and fascination with Egyptian artifacts that became part of the museum collection. Friday, October 27, 7:00 p.m.
 
 A slide show and presentation by Rick Prelinger & Megan Shaw Prelingerof the Prelinger Library: To Build a Library: An Analog Landscape in Eight Squares, September 5th. Founded by Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger, and based in San Francisco, the Prelinger Library is an access-oriented, image-rich experimental research library of books, printed ephemera, and over 600 periodical titles. It serves readers, artists, scholars and other iconoclastic thinkers and is centered on histories of U.S. regions, culture, industry, landscape, natural history, media, and politics. Link

Screenings from the Donnell Media Center of the New York Public Library, programmed by filmmaker Jeanne Liotta.
The screenings are a celebration of the public library, and The Donnell Media Center's incredible circulating 16mm film collection:

Sunday, May 20th, 8 p.m. May Movies: Muzak, Money, Marx, Magic, Murder.
$3 suggested donation.

Sunday, September 17, 7:30 pm, Titles screened reflect the changing attitudes towards the library mission of free culture, access and use in several PSA films produced by libraries themselves in a range of styles representing several decades of the 20th century:
Library Services on Staten Island (1940), The Impressionable Years (1953), Seven Readers in Search of an Author (1966), Houston Public Library Commercial (1973), Syntax (1974), A Boy and His Boa (1975)

December 10, Poto and Cabengo, Poto and Cabengo, Director Jean-Pierre Gorin, USA/Germany 1979. 
A documentary about the six year old twins, Gracie and Ginny Kennedy, who appear to be speaking their own language. Linguists and the media are excited and the girls become stars, until it is revealed that their own language is a pidgin mix of their father's English and their mother's German. Gorin's investigative presence, acting as a counter-balance to the news coverage, gives the film its edge. He presents an unflinching portrait of a fragmented American dream.

Opening Reception, The Yearlong Interdisciplinary Library Exhibit, Friday, October 13th , 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.

The 2005/6 year-long travel theme:

A Reading: Federico Garcia Lorca, presented by Recrossing Brooklyn Ferry/Ad Astra and Le Studio Dramatique M.I.C.S., Thursday, July 27.
Dominique Borel and Suzanne Khuri will read, in English, from the poetry, plays and biographies of Federico Garcia Lorca, with Ian Banks on guitar.

Alfred Tredway White Day, A look at changing currents along the Gowanus Canal, Sunday, May 7, 3:30 p.m.
Using the work of the nineteenth century social visionary, Alfred Tredway White, as a jumping off point, an interdisciplinary group of speakers will look at the area along the Gowanus Canal through a broad cultural lens: historic preservationist Lisa Ackerman, biologist Amy Lesen; author Phillip Lopate; poet Vijay Seshadri; low income housing expert Benjamin Warnke; settlement house fundraiser Sally Yarmolinsky, and composer Ben Yarmolinsky, followed by an oyster and beer bar (a nod to the succulent Gowanus oyster, Brooklyn’s first export, enjoyed by Dutch Settlers in the 17th century) and an interdisciplinary exhibit and sale of Gowanus related art, artifacts, and books. Proceeds to benefit Brooklyn Community Housing Services.

Crochet the hyperbolic plane at Proteus Gowanus! Saturday, March 4, 4 – 6 p.m.
Margaret Wertheim, of the Institute For Figuring, a non-profit organization that studies mathematical figurations, will offer a workshop in crocheting the hyperbolic plane, as described in the New York Times, and in numerous other articles. Link. The crochet models were first developed by Cornell mathematician, Daina Taimina, to demonstrate a concept of non-Euclidean space that had stumped mathematicians for centuries. Several of the visually appealing crochet models are on exhibit and for sale at Proteus Gowanus.

Escape your winter doldrums and travel the world! Proteus Gowanus invites you to an afternoon of travel-related performances by artists participating in our yearlong Interdisciplinary Travel Exhibit, Saturday, January 28, 12:00 – 6:00. Ernst Benkert will stamp and hand out travel tickets from his installation, The Ernst Benkert Travel Desk; have your photograph taken by Matt Freedman, in his recreation of The Worst Airplane Ever Invented, the Lockhead XFV-1, as seen in Cabinet Magazine issue #11; travel through molecular space with Spencer Finch, as you view his light installation based on the molecular structure of the color black; Nina Katchadourian will present a multi-media performance about cultural artifacts that were sent into space; Charles Goldman, will perform a live version of American Poem, consisting of all of the place names read at random from a standard AAA road map of the U.S.A. adapted from his 2004 sound recording of the same title; Sasha Chavchavadze, will take you on a historical journey through her one-room Cold War museum, The Museum of Matches, an ongoing project at Proteus Gowanus; travel to Cambodia and Laos with Lance Rutledge, as you hear his stories and see his artifacts from his frequent travels to Southeast Asia.

Proteus Gowanus Grand Opening, November 12, 2005.