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Art Scene, Meet the Quakers |
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by Jeffrey Stanley
On December 9th a nine-day art show of BFS student work opened at Gallery Hoyt at 77B Hoyt Street. The idea came about from a chat that Head of School Michael Nill had with gallery owner and long-time community activist Nat Hendricks. The two met when the school was looking in the neighborhood for a new home for the Upper School six years ago; they became re-acquainted when the BFS Board explored new options for school expansion within the past year.
The show consisted of a representative sample of work from BFS Preschool, Lower, Middle and Upper School students. Sculpture and woodworking pieces filled the storefront, and the walls were decorated with students' explorations of primary colors, collage, linocut and representative drawing and painting. Opening day was co-hosted by BFS senior and IB Visual Arts student Taj Zahran, who was there partly as an art lover and, he admitted, partly to earn some of the community service hours required of all students. He plans to major in political science.
Gallery Hoyt is but one part of Nat Hendricks' (photo below) efforts to enliven his block on the edge of Boerum Hill. "If I have a vacancy I let it become an art gallery," he said. "My brother's an artist. I do photography, so I have galleries." A Vermont native and birthright Quaker (his family helped start three colleges in the state as well as the Putney Friends Meeting), Nat has been living in Brooklyn since the late 1970s. During that time he began the Midweek Quaker Meeting at 325 State Street, was elected to serve on a city Poverty Board, served on a city-run Council Against Poverty, ran for state senate and US Congress (he lost both times), started the Brooklyn Brownstone Conference to organize property owners across Brooklyn to embrace urban renewal, served as president of the Brownstone Renewal Committee, and was president of a similar organization called Back to the City which organized urban renewal conferences across the US. He is a member of the Brooklyn Monthly Meeting.
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