Bwog Staffers Zoe Metcalfe and Jenny Zhu trekked to Tribeca to check out the art and culture there on, you guessed it, Tribeca Art+Culture Night, an annual celebration for artists ranging from local to international. With over two dozen venues featured, there’s something for everyone. Read on to hear about their experience. 

Worth the long 1 train trip downtown, Tribeca holds some seriously incredible artwork and art exhibitions, many of which are currently open for free public viewing. While we hopped the Tribeca art galleries during the Tribeca Art+Culture night on Thursday, we highly recommend grabbing a couple of friends and visiting the upscale neighborhood for some quality viewing experiences during the weekend. If you do take our advice (as you should) and even if you don’t, read through our account of our experiences at the Tribeca Art+Culture night to get a peek of the Tribeca art scene.

Cheryl Hazan Gallery, 35 N. Moore Street

This one was the first gallery we went too, and it was extremely intimidating! There were NO snacks, and it was filled with a bunch of white, middle-aged men in a non-airconditioned room, milling around with glasses of lukewarm cabernet in their hands and they looked at extremely expensive art – which, to be fair, was very cool art.

Our favorite pieces included a large, abstract picture with yellow and blue, which we decided looked like a anthropomorphized moth, or a female deity (preferably both), and a silver sculpture hanging on the wall, which we deemed as representing a piece of satin in motion, or perhaps a soft car crash.

Soho Photo Gallery, 15 White Street

Our second stop on our whirlwind Tribeca art tour and the only photography-based gallery we visited, the Soho Photo Gallery got us decidedly in a more comfortable, artsy mood with its thought-provoking collections of photographs. We really enjoyed James Lattanzio’s collection, “Varsity,” which featured striking portraitures of a range of college varsity athletes.

Allan Marman’s collection, “From the Ground Up,” a series of still-life-style photographs that manipulated flowers and plants, also stood out to us. Not only did the photographs seem to embody the flat dimensionality of still life pieces, but they also seemed to represent aspects of different seasons.

Most importantly about the Soho Photo Gallery was its relatively impressive (the standards were low) array of snacks. Pretzels AND tree nuts? Don’t spoil us, now! They also had sparkling water, which was nice.

ApexArt, 291 Church St. 

To call Apex Art merely a gallery would be underselling it. No, it was a narrative, a 3-dimensional experience. Indeed, this sci-fi themed art experience, named “Fellow Travelers,” featured the most cohesive theme we encountered on the trip: space! After browsing through some cosmic poetry (no, really) by Sun Ra, in which Jenny identified three Microsoft Office fonts used in the book, we moved on to viewing Ionel Talpazan’s “Diagram of a UFO #1.”

Because this exhibition included a lot of opportunity for viewer involvement, we took advantage of this and watched a film about a space program that would potentially build in space establishments for refugees.

Bortolami, 39 Walker Street. 

After entering Bortolami, we were immediately struck by the upscale and museum-esque atmosphere of the gallery. Separated in multiple, open private rooms, this gallery contained a rentable office space on the ground floor. Barbara Kasten’s “Parti Pris,” the dominating exhibition at Bortolami, was beautiful and compelling at the same time, and both of us thoroughly enjoyed her artwork. Indeed, her art, which consisted mostly of plain backgrounds overlaid by acrylic geometric shapes, created the aesthetic of angular, hard lines softened by gentle shadows of colors.

Alexander and Bonin, 47 Walker Street.

The outside of the building was very unassuming, but once you step inside, the hallway expands down like a cool, modern Grecian inspired museum. What was interesting was that even though it seemed very gallery oriented, a number of the open rooms were actually workspaces, with employees typing away at their computers. The exhibit itself was a collection of sculptures in papier-mâché, that loomed out of the walls in very life-like busts and full body cast of people.

Highlights include us trying to get a glass of wine, holding up other gallery-goers on the stairs as Zoe tried to take a picture of the underside of a bunch of women swimmers (nothing creepy, just some up-the-nose shots), and this little Spiderman sculpture.