BRIC BIENNIAL Special Project - The Barbershops
Youth Wing, Teen Center
Photographer Hidemi Takagi photographs the barbershop culture in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. The idea of barbershops as a social club, a place to debate politics, social issues, sports and family; where young and old all go to catch-up and learn, are sensitively captured in these photos. Featured barbershops include ABC 2 Barber Shop, Nine Hair Studio and De Rite Barbershop.
Hidemi Takagi has been translating her personal vision of New York into photographs and videos since leaving Japan in 1997. For the Barbershop series, Takagi documents institutions that are central to public life in the Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights barbershops that come under threat from real estate development and rapid gentrification. Fascinated by the culture and concerned for the future of these institutions, Takagi traveled to varied barbershops in her neighborhood where she observed, chatted, and photographed the barbers and their customers, allowing for the character and feel of each shop to come through.
Hidemi Takagi was born in Osaka, Japan and is based in Bedford Stuyvesant.
Email: takagi.hidemi@gmail.com
Website: www.hidemitakagi.com
Please see the Translations & Annotations exhibition in the Grand Lobby as part of the BRIC Biennial: Volume II, Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights Edition.
The BRIC Biennial: Volume II, Bed- Stuy/Crown Heights Edition is the largest and most ambitious exhibition to date organized by BRIC. This second edition of this initiative will be centered at BRIC House, with portions of the show also on view at important cultural institutions and art spaces in the neighborhoods being covered by the show: Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn Public Library (Central), and FiveMyles.
The work of hundreds of artists based in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights were reviewed in order to select the approximately 40 included in this exhibition. This edition of the BRIC Biennial will focus on the theme “Affective Bodies,” drawing from affect theory, which places emphasis on bodily experience rather than on learned knowledge. Artists exhibited at Weeksville Heritage Center will be grouped under the theme “The Lived City,” considering how people’s lives and experiences endow urban spaces with emotional resonance. The exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library will include “Translations and Annotations.” And finally, FiveMyles will focus on presenting a series of performance artists.
Overall, the BRIC Biennial highlights the significance of Brooklyn as the place where New York artists create work and develop their careers. By focusing on a small geographic area, comprehensive research can be undertake on artists in the selected neighborhoods, highlighting those who are making important creative contributions with their work.
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Preview the Exhibit
