Bitter & Esters – Brooklyn Artisan

Joy’s Best of Brooklyn for March 7 through March 10

Events sell out fast…sign up, buy tickets, reserve…don’t miss out.

Brooklyn Arts Council, Larry Racioppo, Silver Mermaid, 2002 C-print, 20" x 24")

Larry Racioppo, Silver Mermaid, 2002 C-print. Thursday evening opening reception for Sea Drift, a new show at Brooklyn Arts Council. Part of Armory Arts Week, see below.

Local and Beyond: food, gardens, environment

An early-season scene from Windflower Farm.

Thursday Park Slope CSA membership orientation for the 2013 season. Learn about the benefits of membership in a Community Supported Agriculture partnership. The Park Slope CSA’s deadline for the 2013 season is April 19, and you can sign up for full or part shares of deliveries by Farmer Ted from Windflower Farm, along with eggs and meat from Lewis Waite Farm and Hot Bread Kitchen. Distribution is at the Garden of Union, a community garden on Union Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues in Park Slope. Learn more this evening, along with a cooking demonstration and refreshments at the Old Stone House, Park Slope. 6pm-8pm.

Friday Former Vice President Al Gore will discuss his latest book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change. This new book is billed as a frank, visionary, and ultimately hopeful investigation of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come, written by a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right. Ticket purchase guarantees an autographed copy of the book. At powerHouse Arena, DUMBO. 6pm-8pm.

Saturday 32nd Annual Making Brooklyn Bloom sponsored by Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Slow Food NYC’s Urban Harvest program. This is a free day-long event at BBG featuring hands-on workshops, exhibits and speakers taught by community gardeners, BBG staff and greening experts. Gardening for a Resilient City is this year’s topic: to explore our local resources to rebuild a more verdant, sustainable Brooklyn in response to recovery efforts after Hurricane Sandy. Workshops include: Upcycled Treasure: Tree Guards to Greenhouses; Using Stormwater in the Garden; The Global Gardener: Growing Food from Around the World; Brooklyn Urban Gardener Volunteer Program. Exhibits and Activities include: Therapeutic Horticulture; School Gardening; exhibits from local greening organizations. Dr. Vandana Shiva, global environmental activist, author and founder of Navdanya will present the keynote address Cultivating Resilience: Diversity, Democracy, Community. Advanced registration is requested for many events. 10am-4pm.

Fort Greene’s iCi received Snail recognition in 2012.

Related: Slow Food NYC Snail of Approval, a website/directory of restaurants, bars, food and beverage artisans that have been awarded the SFNYC Snail of Approval. To be considered for this distinction, establishments must meet standards that contribute to the quality, authenticity and sustainability of the food we eat and drink in New York City. 2013 recent awardees from Brooklyn include Red Hook-based Waterfront Wines & Spirits and Uncouth Vermouth. Previous-year awardees include Ted & Honey, One Girl Cookies, Lot2 and many more.

Saturday Bread & Brew: A Celebration of Dutch Foodways in Breukelen at Wyckoff House Museum. Tour NYC’s oldest house and learn about brood and bier, important foods in the Dutch-colonial diet. Brooklyn Brewery’s beers will be available to sip; taste bread (including beer bread) that has been baked using traditional colonial methods on an outdoor fire pit. Reservations requested. East Flatbush. 4pm-6:30pm.

Bunnycutlet Gallery exhibit Printmouse. Alexandria Kwan, KVDZV, silkscreen

Alexandria Kwan, KVDZV, silkscreen. Printmouse exhibit at Bunnycutlet Gallery, part of Williamsburg After Hours.

Armory Arts Week in Brooklyn

The Armory Show is an international contemporary and modern art fair held every March, not in an armory, but on Piers 92 & 94 in Outer Brooklyn. The Show has expanded to include arts events and exhibitions throughout all of NYC during Armory Arts Week, where neighborhood arts scenes are highlighted. Below, here’s a small selection of what’s happening in Brooklyn. Check the website for the complete list of events.

• Thursday First Thursday Gallery Walk, DUMBO.
This newly-retooled website (check out the DUMBO Decoder) has tons of gallery events as well as other info for the area:

A.I.R. Gallery, the first all female cooperative gallery in the U.S., opens this evening with 40/40: A Double Vision. Celebrating 40 years of advocating for women in the visual arts, this exhibition celebrates the past, present and future of A.I.R. Gallery. 6pm-9pm.

Brooklyn Arts Council, Sea Drift, a group exhibition featuring the work of seven Brooklyn-based artists, presents a meeting of mythic ideas and realities regarding the waters surrounding Brooklyn. Opening reception, 6pm-8pm.

Related: Happy hour in DUMBO drink deals from ReBar, Superfine, Gran Electrica, more…

Intentionally conspicuous Williamsburg, really?

• Saturday Armory Arts Week—Brooklyn Night
Full listing for all Brooklyn Night events is on the website.

Williamsburg After Hours. 23 galleries will intentionally make themselves conspicuous with light, music and video installations that will be visible in doorways, sidewalks and adjacent buildings, along with performance art in the streets. 7pm-10pm.

Brooklyn Metal Works spoon-making workshop class caption here

Brooklyn Metal Works holds spoon-making workshops in their studios. On Saturday, they are a part of Brooklyn Creates.

Brooklyn Creates is one part of this day devoted to Design and Glass. Begin with a visit to the Museum of Art & Design, one of Brooklyn Artisan’s favorite spots, for a screening of Toledo Workshop Revisited. Follow with an opening reception at Heller Gallery of glass artist Amber Cowan’s Reconstructions. End the day back in Brooklyn with Brooklyn Creates, an evening showcase of farm-to-table food and homemade brews, served in hand-crafted glass and metal tableware. Sponsored by Landhaus, Bitter & Esters, Brooklyn Glass and Brooklyn Metal Works.

Joy Makon curates Brooklyn Artisan’s Craft & Design coverage and creates the weekly Best of Brooklyn lists. Send items for listings to brooklynartisan@joymakondesign.com

Joy’s Best of Brooklyn, December 21, 22, 23

PERHAPS WE’RE STARTING A NEW TRADITION FOR BROOKLYN ARTISAN, a review of all that’s been good and interesting in the past few months for our fledgling blog. At the least, this is a Best of Brooklyn listing of what we’ve been thankful for—the people, places and events that have made us stop and think, smile, and go wow, look at that. So for the next two weeks, the team will be sharing their thanks for the things that make small-town Brooklyn, as my neighbor Helen calls it, so great. In the mix, we’ll post some timely end-of-year events. If Outer Brooklyn creeps in, we’ll understand too. What are you thankful for? We’d love to know. Share with us on Facebook, email, or leave a comment.

PART ONE
The Team at Brooklyn Artisan is thankful for:

The lights in Dyker Heights. Say what you will, but the lights stop traffic
and stop us in place too. Shorewalkers, a group dedicated to seeing the world
at 3 miles per hour, is having a free meetup on Saturday at 5:30 to view the lights.
A 4 mile route is planned, but you can always do a shorter distance.
You’ll probably be on sensory overload anyway. Check the website for details.
(photograph: nycgo.com/Marley White)

Sahadi’s for renovating and reopening and turning us on to cumin once again.

Stroller Moms and Dads of Park Slope for their work and donations to help Sandy victims.

Landlines and Rotary Dials. Don’t misunderstand, we ♥ our twee iDevice. Sometimes we enjoy picking up a receiver and hearing the other person.

Saturday: Holiday Artisans Fair at The Monro (Liverpool in Brooklyn). Park Slope. 2pm-7pm.

More Brits in Brooklyn on Saturday: Holiday Artisans Fair at The Monro.
Park Slope. 2pm-7pm.

Fleisher’s Meats for letting us taste real beef.

The G train for coming back so we can get to BAM easily again.

← The footie in Bklyn → The Tottenham Hotspurs have a home in Kings County at Black Horse Pub. Oh when the Spurs go marching in!

Egg creams, panettone, black-and-white cookies for the 5 lb weight gain. NOT. (Better: our thanks to the staff and volunteers at the Park Slope Armory for running the emergency shelter for Sandy evacuees. We’re glad, too, that the Armory YMCA has reopened and we can work off the holiday excess.)

The Double Windsor, a "newish" neighborhood fixture.

In our opinion, we are thankful that The Double Windsor has surpassed Farrell’s as the neighborhood fixture.

The small businesses on our stretch of Prospect Park West that have made our life sane: Argyle Yarn Shop (new, filled with gorgeous yarn, yum!); DUB Pies (where the Paul Auster movie “Smoke” with Harvey Keitel and William Hurt was filmed); The Double Windsor (no Farrell’s competition here); Windsor Shoes (the best little shoe store nobody knows about); United Meat Market (for showing us what a butcher shop is all about and for keeping up with the changing neighborhood demographics); and even the sometimes unpredictable Enzo’s (brickoven pizza and a drink is always fine by us.)

Our generousity. Photographs and ephemera from The Santa Claus Association,
circa 1913, is on display at The City Reliquary. For 14 years, this NYC-based philanthropic
group answered letters to Santa and distributed gifts to over 28,000 children.
Williamsburg. Through February, 2013.

American Express for promoting Small Business Saturday. (Kudos to NYC Dept. of Small Business Services for their campaign too.)

Learning how to brew our own beer. Bitter & Esters will teach all the basics on Saturday at their Brewshop 101: Home Brewing Essentials class. Prospect Heights. 4pm-6pm.

Barclays Center (grudgingly) because the the traffic’s not as bad as we feared.

Brad Lander because he’s such an involved and innovative Councilmember.

Lisa Jenks for designing her coveted jewelry collection in Brooklyn!

THIS: Weigh Your Priorities. Most startups are focused on growing faster. That alone would not make us a great company. We realized we had to focus on three things: love, growth, and foundation. —Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb (as quoted in Fast Company)

An upgrade to our Jewish Christmas celebration of Chinese food and a movie. Mile End’s menu of DanDan Noodles with Spicy Lamb, Dry Rubbed Chicken Wings, Smoked Bluefish Toast, and more, plus BAM or Cobble Hill Cinema nearby practically makes us giddy. If only Schmulka Bernstein was still around.

Park Slope Gallery for encouraging Eric March’s beautiful artwork of Brooklyn cityscapes.

All-natural Gingerbread House Making. No corn syrup for us, only dried fruit and natural candy, as guided by the team from The Farm on Adderley. This Sunday, build your brownstone at Hootenanny Art House in Park Slope. Next Thursday, have lunch and build a manse at The Farm in Ditmas Park.

The return of Patsy Grimaldi. The king of coal-fired, NY-sired pizza is back with Juliana’s Pizza and is better than ever. We went opening day, and will go again!

The fact that Brooklyn is practically a brand name. We are well-represented at the
Grand Central Holiday Fair in Outer Brooklyn.

Stay tuned for Part Two next week.

Joy Makon curates Brooklyn Artisan’s Craft & Design coverage and creates the weekly Best of Brooklyn lists.
Send items for listings to brooklynartisan@joymakondesign.com