Brucennial 2010: Miseducation in Soho New York
Sure, you’ve put in an appearance at the Biennial, the Whitney Museum’s every-other-year exhibition of the best (as defined by the curators) in contemporary American art. And it’s a good show this year, we thought: lean, engaging, with a fairly high percentage of interesting pieces. But if you’re in the mood for something a bit messier, a bit more downtown, a bit more rogue, you should definitely check out the mostly compelling, mostly entertaining Brucennial 2010, on display now in Soho, for only one more week.
Put together by the five-artist collective Bruce High Quality Foundation and now in its third year (and first in Manhattan), the Brucennial 2010: Miseducation crams in dozens (and dozens) of pieces by who-knows-how-many artists in all manner of media, blanketing the walls and nearly all the floorspace of this 5,000-square-foot gallery on Soho’s West Broadway. The Brucennial selection process is refreshingly slapdash. Basically: whoever wants to show their stuff, can, until they run out of space. Yes, the Bruce High Quality Foundation sends out invitations to a select group of their peers, but news of the Brucennial’s where and when spreads pretty quickly, and many artists simply show up and install or hang their work.
The result of all this is, unsurprisingly, a little mixed. But we loved the energy the Brucennial brings to this season’s art exhibitions–the show’s “motto” is “Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger.”–and the quality of work is remarkably high. For every effort that falls a little flat, there are three or four more pieces that surprised and/or delighted us. Not a destination art show, perhaps, as it won’t take you more than a half an hour, if that, to take it all in. But if you’re in Soho sometime this week, we highly recommend stopping by and walking through, if only to see what else is going on with the Bruce High Quality Foundation and up-to-the-minute-contemporary art.
The Brucennial 2010: Miseducation Details
The Brucennial 2010 is currently on display at 350 West Broadway, between Broome and Grand Streets. The exhibition space is open this Wednesday and Thursday, April 7th and 8th, from 12:00 until 6:00 p.m., and on Friday and Saturday, April 9th and 10th, from 11:00 a.m. until 6:00. For more information and a complete list of artists in the Brucennial 2010, please see the Bruce High Quality Foundation website.
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