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 Opinion by James Chandler
Can New London Connecticut become the "New" Brooklyn?
Brooklyn, New York has been the preeminent artist community in the United States for artistic innovation and risk taking. For example, Brooklyn was arguably the birthplace of Hip Hop and of Graffiti as an art form, two of the most influential artistic ideas of the end of the 20th Century.
Brooklyn is a prime example of how a community can reach a critical mass of new ideas, nurture community collaboration and through this collaboration and exchange develop mold breaking new forms of expression.
This was possible because historically during the last half of the 20th Century, Brooklyn was a city where rent was cheap, gallery space easy to arrange and in the cultural milieu that is New York a creative critical mass was achieved. This critical mass comes about when sufficient numbers of creative people live together, exchanging ideas, changing them, expanding on them and refining them.
Brooklyn has been this inspiration for a very long time with an affect felt in film, music and the visual arts.
Now Brooklyn is increasingly becoming a gentrified city. As more and more people move to Brooklyn to escape the higher costs of Manhattan, the costs of living in Brooklyn increase. The costs of opening a boutique restaurant, an art gallery or an offbeat retail establishment have become so high as to pose a real barrier to this kind of business. This increase in cost drives out the edgier artists, as commercial success has not arrived for them. As more people leave the city, the critical mass required for creativity is diminished. Brooklyn is becoming less a place where doing something new and exciting is expected and is instead becoming a bedroom community for greater New York.
A word about how new ideas are the product of the communities that develop them. The reasons places like Brooklyn and Silicon Valley excel are because they become places known for pushing a worldview. This attracts similarly minded and interested people. Given a sufficient number of risk takers, risk become an expected quality and art takes off. Brooklyn had this quality for a very, very long time. Great art and great artists came out of the Brooklyn artistic scene
I recently visited a town, New London, located conveniently halfway between New York and Boston that is actively working to take over as the new Brooklyn.
A city founded by the English just three years after the Dutch charter of Brooklyn in 1649. A town of inexpensive housing, independent boutique restaurants, thrift stores, idiosyncratic retail stores and food cooperatives. Most importantly the town supports and funds art galleries and music venues. I visited on the day of the IM (Independent Music) festival, where the city by way of a grant and funds from the city’s budget set up two stages on a pier in their harbor and paid several unsigned bands to perform for the city’s residents and for students attending Connecticut College and the Coast Guard Academy that are located in New London.
The music was great fun, and the collection of young people colorful. The music included hip-hop, electronic, puck and everything in between. A band that interested me in particular was a positive Hip-Hop/Jazz fusion group called Above/Below, a link to the music is HERE.
But this is a log on the visual arts, so to return to the visual arts, what impressed me on the evening of these performances, the city of New London arranged for nearly a dozen gallery openings throughout the small downtown. The town is full of previously abandoned storefronts and in order to make use of this space and to draw visitors from New York, Boston and points in between, the town has helped entrepreneurs to convert these empty retail storefronts into art galleries exhibiting both conventional art as well as the wildly experimental and unusual.
What must be remarked on is the large numbers of galleries exhibiting art in such a small town and the crowds of young people touring the art. The town is on a successful route to becoming a destination for lovers of the visual arts, particularly art that is cutting edge.
New London is also nearby to important artist friendly towns, nearby Old Lyme, Connecticut is home to the Lyme Art Association as well as the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art, and Mystic, Connecticut is home to the Mystic Arts Center and host to the very well attended Mystic Fine Arts Festival.
So impressed am I by New London’s work to rebrand themselves as the potential replacement to Brooklyn, I recommend any young artist looking to arrive in a place where the experimental is encouraged, where the cost of living is low and where a young artist can submerge themselves in a milieu of similarly minded young creative’s should look to New London. I believe the town has great potential to be the birthplace of many of the futures art and music innovations
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