New York City Rental Guide · Arts & Happenings

Gowanus Open Studios, Thirty Years of Open Doors

Welcome to the first piece in my new Gowanus series, a closer look at the creative corner of Brooklyn just down the hill from Park Slope. I know a few artists who hold studio space in the neighborhood, and at their suggestion, having just finished a piece on the Fourth Avenue corridor, I decided to dig a little deeper. As a longtime Sloper, it’s impossible to have missed the recent development boom next door, and my clients are more and more curious about what Gowanus has to offer. So I’m spending the next couple of weeks on an in-depth investigation of the neighborhood, starting with its art scene.

There was no better place to start than Gowanus Open Studios. It turned 30 this year, and on the weekend of October 17 and 18, more than 400 artists opened their workspaces to anyone who wanted to come in, look around and talk. I spent it climbing stairwells in old factories and warehouses and knocking on studio doors. It’s free, it’s huge, and it’s the best way I know to understand what makes this neighborhood tick, so I want to start with the people who make the place what it is.

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How It Started

Gowanus Open Studios began small in 1996, with a handful of artists, maybe five or ten, in a live/work building at 543 Union Street, and grew into what its organizers now call Brooklyn’s largest celebration of local art. The group behind it became a nonprofit in 2007, incorporated as Gowanus Artist Studio Tour Inc., and in 2025 it officially took the name Arts Gowanus. This year’s map stretched from Pacific Street to 19th Street and from Smith Street to Fifth Avenue, with more than 90 locations reaching into Park Slope and Carroll Gardens.

Arts Gowanus does a lot more than throw a great weekend. When the city rezoned Gowanus in 2021, the group fought to keep artists in the neighborhood and helped secure roughly 150 new rent-regulated studios as part of the deal, most renting for about $1.66 a square foot a month, with yearly increases capped. The first of those studios opened in time for this year’s event, at The Shop BK and Society Brooklyn, and it was a thrill to see artists working in brand-new spaces built to keep them here. You’ll find the full map and artist directory at artsgowanus.org.

The Artists

Walking from studio to studio, I kept thinking about how much this city stands to lose if it isn’t careful. When we rezone a neighborhood, we have to be mindful of the character that made people want to be there in the first place. The arts community is a huge part of what keeps New York vibrant and creative, and making room for artists to flourish is fundamental to keeping New York the cultural capital of the country, and of the world. We can’t develop the city into cookie-cutter corporate sameness. There has to be space for the weird, the innovative and the avant-garde, and Gowanus shows what happens when there is.

I met dozens of artists over the weekend, and a few of them stayed with me long after I left their studios. I asked each of them the same handful of questions: what their work is about, what it’s like to make art in Gowanus and, of course, where they’d send a friend in the neighborhood. Here’s what they told me.

Laura J. Stein

Laura’s work drew me in with its wispy, calligraphic movement and its hypnotic repetition. It felt like there was a secret code embedded in the carefully selected bits of paper she uses. Her collages are deeply layered, with no space left unused, because even the empty space works as its own force, a constant play between positive and negative, light and dark, line and chiaroscuro. From a few feet away they read as gestural paintings. Up close, every “brushstroke” turns out to be a little treasure, a puzzle piece holding a fragment of some hidden codex that had been tucked away in an antique magazine.

“As a painter working in the medium of collage, I endeavour to transform paper into paint,” she told me. About 25 years ago, after losing her studio, she started drawing at her kitchen table. A show of Joseph Cornell’s boxes got her collecting printed images, and her love of the Abstract Expressionists pushed her to tear them apart. “I discovered that each bit of paper contained its own light and dark as if it was a brushstroke of wet paint. I have piles of these brushstrokes in my studio.” She cuts them from auction catalogs full of silver, porcelain and jewelry, and gleans them from old books of paintings by Wayne Thiebaud, John Singer Sargent and the old masters.

Laura grew up in Queens and raised her family in Manhattan, making art in cramped apartments and offices along the way. Her daughter has lived in Gowanus for 16 years and introduced her to the Arts Gowanus community, and today Laura has the biggest studio she’s ever had. “I can work larger and that’s been great. I sometimes feel like skipping down the hallway as I am so happy to be there,” she said. “There’s a warmth to Gowanus, it feels like a small town in a big city.” Her favorite part of Open Studios: “being in the room as people look at my work, and comment on it, and ask me interesting questions.”

You can feel that joy the moment you walk in. Hers is very much a working studio. I loved walking past her boxes filled with slices of new art en route to the canvas, and there was such a mass of work that it overflowed into the adjoining hallway.

Her hot spot: Runner & Stone, 285 Third Avenue, between President and Carroll Streets. “They have the most delicious sandwiches and baked goods, and lots of vegetarian options,” she said, plus great coffee “and the best french fries anywhere!”

Her work gets around, too. Two of her collages, Turquoise and Silver and Mid-Century Color, appeared on the set of HBO’s And Just Like That in 2025, and her work has been shown through the State Department’s Art in Embassies program, at the U.S. Embassy in Conakry, Guinea.

Laura J. SteinSelected work

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See more: laurajstein.com · Instagram @laura_j_stein

Heejung Cho

When I walked into Heejung’s studio, the walls were alive with her vivid new prints, a fun and colorful abstraction of everyday architectural and forest motifs. She breaks her canvases down into blocks of color that evoke stained glass or terra-cotta tiles, as if a kaleidoscope had escaped its glass container and fallen joyfully into place, a mise en scène all its own.

On her drafting table I found the pieces she’s working on now, very interesting plays on perspective set in the hallways of an old apartment. They have a wonderfully topsy-turvy quality, like stepping into a Tim Burton scene or wandering the canals of Amsterdam, where the old houses lean every which way. One look at them and I could tell there was something really special going on here.

Her wood pieces come from an earlier series, but I found them completely fascinating. They sit somewhere between painting, relief and architecture, and as someone who studied design, I couldn’t stop looking at how she builds space on a flat surface. They have the quality of incredibly heavy, solid objects, but when she showed me how they’re constructed, a generous trade secret I won’t share here, my respect for her craftsmanship grew tenfold.

“My work explores the intersections of space, materiality, and personal memory,” Heejung told me. She works across relief, painting and wood fragments, “carving, joining, and building tactile depth on a flat picture plane.” Originally from Seoul, she studied sculpture at Seoul National University and earned her MFA at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, and she has lived and worked as an artist in Brooklyn for more than 23 years. This was her fifth Gowanus Open Studios. If you ride the J train, you may already know her work: Perspective, her 24 glass panels at the 85 St–Forest Parkway station, was commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and built from prints of wood fragments she collected in Woodhaven and Cypress Hills.

What she loves most about Gowanus is its community: “Rather than feeling like a commercial market, it feels like lifelong companionship, nurtured by local collectors and an audience who genuinely care about sustaining artists’ lives.” The neighborhood, she said, “has a distinctive industrial texture, raw creative energy, and historic character that you can’t find anywhere else,” and it’s also a warm, family-friendly place. “As a full-time artist and a mother, I feel fortunate to work in an environment rich with creative peers while being surrounded by wonderful resources for families.”

Her hot spot: She couldn’t pick just one, so she pointed me to Loop and Cluster, the nonprofit arts organization she co-founded to foster creative collaboration and community projects (loopandcluster.org, Instagram @loopandcluster).

Heejung ChoSelected work

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See more: heejungcho.com · Instagram @heejungcho_art · Studio: 540 President Street, Suite BB #9

Brenna McLaughlin

What a surprise it was to run into Brenna at Open Studios. She’s one of the artists showing this year whom I actually know personally, but I want to be clear that our connection didn’t sway my decision to write about her. In fact, I stayed with her work longer than anyone else’s, because my fascination with it was so enduring.

Brenna’s work is ethereal right up until it slaps you in the face. Her photographs are meditative, airy and even a little mischievously magical, before she graffitis over them in cursive rants that feel like New York street art meeting mystic Sufi poetry. But watch out, she pulls no punches. The Anger Management Series felt like every moment I’ve had when my racing mind interrupted a peaceful scene. It grew out of a creative exercise she practiced this summer, she told me, “on top of frustrations layering up in the world I disagreed with but felt I had no power over.”

Brenna studied photography at Columbia College Chicago, in my hometown, then earned a master’s from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s in art education from Brooklyn College. After many years working in the photography industry, she now teaches photography at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and exhibits her own work. She doesn’t live in Gowanus, but she shows there from time to time, in a studio space donated by building owners who support artists.

After more than 20 years in New York, she has watched arts nonprofits get shaken up by the hunt for affordable rent, but her view of Gowanus is clear: “Even with all the development, Gowanus is first and foremost an artist community. The artists in the area work hard to create opportunity and also connection with each other.”

Her hot spot: the café at Powerhouse Arts, 322 Third Avenue, “and space to hang out in Gowanus!” Powerhouse Arts fills the old Brooklyn Rapid Transit power station on the canal, built in the early 1900s and abandoned for decades, when it was known as the Batcave. After a renovation led by Herzog & de Meuron, it reopened in 2023 as a home for printmaking, ceramics and fabrication studios.

Brenna McLaughlinSelected work

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See more: her Arts Gowanus page · Instagram @brenna_mclaughlin

Why Gowanus, Why Now

Gowanus is changing fast. New buildings are rising along the canal, the cleanup continues, and new neighbors arrive every month. What struck me at Open Studios is how much of the neighborhood’s soul still lives in its studios, and how hard its artists and Arts Gowanus have worked to keep it that way. As Laura put it, “It will be interesting to see how all of the new buildings and inhabitants merge with the older buildings and people that have been here for a long time.”

About Jason Mezydlo

Jason Mezydlo is Managing Sales Partner at Gordon Realty Partners and has worked in New York City real estate since 2012. A graduate of the Harrington College of Design with a BFA in interior design, he brings a designer’s eye to every search, helping clients see what a space can become before they sign. Jason began his career in commercial leasing, guiding small business owners through site selection, lease negotiation and space planning, before moving into Manhattan’s luxury rental market and home sales across Manhattan and Brooklyn. A longtime Brooklyn resident, he pairs market expertise with a deep love for the city’s history, art and architecture.

347.286.5797 · jason@gordonrealtypartners.com · JasonMezydlo.com · @JasonMezydlo
Gordon Realty Partners · 622 3rd Avenue, New York, NY · NYS Licensed Real Estate Salesperson

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