*ARTMAGEDDON RETURNS*
GREATER FLATBUSH • SUNDAY JUNE 12 • 180+ ARTISTS & BANDS
On June 12, more than 180 artists and bands will take over the porches, stoops, and gardens of Ditmas Park, Prospect Park South and Kensington in Flatbush, Brooklyn for NYC’s largest, most vibrant, community-run outdoor art gallery and performance event: Artmageddon III.
What: NYC’s extraordinary artists and musicians will share their work in a festival organized and hosted by neighbors and community members. Musicians and bands spanning a range of ages and genres will perform at dozens of locations throughout the day, spanning over several square miles. Painters, illustrators, ceramicists, photographers, sculptors, designers and artists working in multiple media will show and sell their works in person on front porches-turned-galleries.
More than 5,000 visitors are expected to experience homegrown art and music, explore blocks and gardens radiating out from Prospect Park, and get informed about how to host community-led environmental and arts actions throughout Brooklyn’s neighborhoods.
When: Sunday • June 12, 2022 • 12:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Rain or Shine
Where: More than 60 locations in Ditmas Park, Prospect Park South, Kensington and Greater Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY.
Artmageddon Welcome Centers and Activity Stations will offer maps to all gallery and performance locations. Map Distribution Centers are at the Flatbush Food Coop (1415 Cortelyou Road) and at the Artmageddon Welcome Center 461 E. 16 Street in Ditmas Park.
All are invited to make art in a Community Climate Art Project at these locations: 2919 Fort Hamilton Parkway in Kensington, 2681 Bedford Avenue in Flatbush and 461 E. 16 Street in Ditmas Park.
Artists and Musicians: Performers and artists include jazz legends Art Baron and Roy Nathanson, Opera on Tap, the all-women Batalá New York, and fiddler Melody Allegra, virtuoso Jazz pianist and activist composer Albert Marqués and improvisational vocalist and pianist Yoon Sun Choi.
Partners include Flatbush Development Corporation, 5 P.M. Porch Concerts, Operation Gig!, Oye Studios, Flatbush Artists and Cortelyou Road Merchants Association.
Artmageddon was founded in 2020 by teacher, artist and activist Robert Elstein who also founded its parent organization, Beautify Brooklyn, a nonprofit organization committed to presenting free public arts programs and neighbor-led beautification and environmental projects.
Kid and Family Events: Families are encouraged to particpate in our Community Climate Art Project at three locations: 2919 Fort Hamilton Parkway in Kensington, 2681 Bedford Avenue in Flatbush and 461 E. 16 Street in Ditmas Park.
Activities will include turning trash to treasure, activist art, chalk painting, branch painting with acrylics and upcycled fabric weaving. Artmageddon’s own coloring books, featuring the original work of more than 20 Artmageddon artists, will also be available. Many artists will also have individual coloring book pages available at their galleries.
[Brooklyn, NY] – Artmageddon, a free festival of music and art that brought more than 5,000 visitors on a Sunday afternoon to tour the porches and gardens of Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park neighborhood, is returning bigger and better with an even more diverse array of creative talents participating in Artmageddon III.
The festival, happening on Sunday, June 12 from noon to 8 PM, is branching out from where it began amidst the lush greenery and wrap-around porches of Ditmas Park (on the Q/B line south of Prospect Park) to other neighborhoods equally populated by growing ranks of performers, writers, and artists. This year the festival is expanding north to the streets of Prospect Park South and Prospect-Le erts Gardens and west to Kensington.
More than 150 locally-based artists will display their works in person and interact with visitors at more than 60 locations throughout these neighborhoods. Bands will perform on multiple “stages” throughout the day.
Community members will be stationed throughout the neighborhoods to provide festival maps to visitors who might be exploring these Brooklyn neighborhoods, hotbeds of creative talent and community activism, for the first time.
All events are free and open to the public. Visitors are invited to join in the Community Climate Art Project that will happen simultaneously in Ditmas Park, Flatbush and Kensington. Artists will be selling their works and contributions to performing musicians are encouraged.
To see a list of participating artists and performers, with their locations speci ed, visit Beautify Brooklyn. To RSVP, visit the ARTMAGEDDON III event page.
The original Artmageddon was born as a way to establish Flatbush as an arts hub in a post-Covid world, for local artists and performers to break out of isolation and safely share their art with neighbors and admirers on outdoor porch galleries and pop-up stages after the pandemic had shut down their usual venues.
Local creatives who had seen the success and felt the impact of the 5 P.M. Porch Concerts that jazz artist Roy Nathanson began to offer every afternoon during early Covid, quickly joined founder Robert Elstein, a local artist and teacher, who inspired them to recruit artists to show and additional neighbors to host.
“The idea came very naturally,” Elstein said. “Here is New York City’s most beautiful neighborhood, filled with lush gardens and colorful Victorian mansions and loaded with artists and musicians. After the success of multiple free public concert series happening all around me, I imagined a larger event that could do for visual artists what the concerts had done for bands.”
Since the onset of the pandemic, new organizations have taken root and neighborhood activism has grown.
5 P.M. Porch Concerts has transformed into a free, intergenerational music school for kids from around the borough.
Operation Gig!, an organization that originally formed as a way for performers to find paying gigs during early Covid, has expanded to host two or more concerts somewhere outdoors every spring and summer weekend in Ditmas Park.
Beautify Brooklyn, Artmageddon’s parent nonprofit, has organized numerous successful community-driven events around Brooklyn including several neighborhood clean-ups followed immediately by “trash to treasure” art workshops that incorporated some of the trash that was just collected, this past Earth Day in April.
What started as a quickly-mounted event where community members could gather and escape the fear and darkness of Covid has grown into a network that connects arts and civic organizations, makers and musicians, and citizens organizing to beautify and celebrate art in their communities.
Larry Sackler, a musician who performed at Artmageddon II this past October remarked, “Our neighborhood is a magical Brigadoon, and [on Artmageddon] Sunday we cast an unforgettable spell upon the entire community and beyond.”
Artmageddon visitors are drawn out of their houses to commune on every street corner; visitors come from every borough and Long Island, New Jersey and states beyond, to patronize previously unknown artists and performers as well as established masters of their craft.
The volunteer organizers and community partners behind Artmageddon III have set themselves an ambitious goal: to expand Artmageddon IV to every neighborhood in Brooklyn on Sunday October 9, 2022, establishing “Brooklyn Art Day,” the first free art and music festival showcasing art-makers from every corner of the borough and potentially, on every corner. Artists and collaborators interested in participating in “Artmageddon IV: Brooklyn Art Day” are invited to apply via a questionnaire.
Although it is free, the value of Artmageddon is immeasurable. “Artmageddon’s impact reaches way beyond the day itself,” Elstein said. “The art that is experienced, created and purchased will continue to enrich our community for years. The music that fills our souls somehow fills us even more when we are close to home, free from the limitations of mainstream media, amongst friends and neighbors old and new.”
