Fountain Flows for Artists in Prospect Heights

Michael Boring lived for three years in a loft in Bushwick, a neighborhood that long has been called an emerging artist colony, but it was not emerging fast enough for Boring, who moved recently. Right around the corner from his new apartment, he made a lucky discovery – an old auto garage on Grand Avenue that had been renovated by and for artists, and given an arty name: Fountain.

“I didn’t necessarily plan to move to Prospect Heights; I just found an apartment here,” he said during a recent opening reception for an exhibition at the Fountain gallery.  And while there is some dispute as to whether he did actually move to Prospect Heights, or , the neighborhood, whichever it is, has won him over.  “You can find hip in Bushwick, but here there’s the main library, the museum, there are bars and restaurants.”

And here is Fountain, a gallery and 11 artist studios (one of which Boring rents) at 604 Grand Avenue, between St. Marks and Bergen. Troy Hagenbart and Susan Gargiulo renovated the building and opened Fountain three years ago.

A married couple, they are both graduates of art schools, Hagenbart from MassArt and Gargiulo from Pratt. But their more crucial affiliation may be to .

Troy Hagenbart’s brother is Wade Hagenbart, the proprietor of Angry Wade’s on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens and the Dram Shop on Ninth Street in Park Slope, two bars that, ok, might be in trendier parts of Brooklyn. But it surely says something about the prospects for Prospect Heights (or Crown Heights?) that Wade Hagenbart and a business partner bought the building at 604 Grand, which had been empty and unused since the death of its previous occupant.  

It seemed the ideal building to re-create the kind of artist spaces that inspired Troy Hagenbart when he was living in Chicago. His time there also gave him the idea for the name, which is in homage to a big fountain in Chicago that everybody apparently knows about.

There have been more than a dozen exhibitions in the two front rooms of Fountain, which serve as a gallery. There is no common theme. “If I like it, I’ll curate it,” says Hagenbart. He has exhibited the work of artists who live in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Virginia, and, yes, even Brooklyn

The art collective Other People put together a haunted house installation last Halloween. Entitled “Urban Nervous: A Crawl-Through Haunting,” it put a decidedly New York spin on horror, with references to “bed bug infestation … a morning after trip to the STD clinic … the freaks that surround you during your morning commute.”

Brooklyn artist Owen Rundquist had a collaborative exhibition with Boston artist Alex DeMaria – Hagenbart likes to have two-person shows – entitled “Under The Same Shadow,” which was a multimedia sculptural installation exploring “the place of ritualism and the occult in a pop context.”

Billie Mandle showed her photographs of parking garages “digitally removing the parking lines and signs to create abstract structures,” Hagenbart said.

Tucson-based artist Gary Setzer presented his new work, Supralingual/Sublingual: The Tongue is the Terrain, which combines video, music and performance.

Next up is a joint exhibition featuring photography and sculpture by two Ryans, Ryan MacDonald and Ryan Feeney; the opening reception is scheduled for June 4th.

The art, Fountain's founders admit, hasn’t found many buyers – or, actually, any buyers.

“We’re not really salespeople,” says  Gargiulo. “It’s really just exposure.”

But Fountain helps sell the idea of Prospect Heights as its own emerging artist community -- if not an "emerging artist colony," at least an artist outpost.

“Since we’ve moved here, a couple of gallery spaces have opened up in the neighborhood,” Gargiulo says.

Others may be writing about the exodus of artists from the city, unable to afford it. Troy Hagenbart says: “You can survive here in New York better than you can in other cities.”

Fountain will hold a garage sale next weekend, the Fountain Fair craft market sometime during the summer, and starting in June, they will be a host site for a  – Community Supported Agriculture – the latest venue to enable urban residents to buy directly from a farm. 

“We have this amazing space, but a lot of time it goes unused, ” Gargiulo explains. (Other than the opening receptions, gallery hours are by appointment only.)

So once a week from now on, some 100 people will congregate at Fountain to pick up their radishes, garlic scapes and cutting-edge art.