Exhibition: Bureau Fifteen-Year Anniversary

Bureau opened its doors fifteen years ago, but the doors were already open. 

Bureau’s doors were Dispatch’s doors before, and Erica Baum, Ellie Ga, Tom Holmes, Matt Hoyt and Lionel Maunz had already walked through. Ellie surprised me, as if I had seen a ghost, walking up Henry Street though I thought she was still in France, following her six-month expedition into the polar night. Erica debuted her Naked Eye series and Kenny Goldsmith read the weather. Tom shared two funerary options, highlighting the relationship of a cinder block to a box of kid’s cereal, and Matt brought in his bedroom bookshelves to support his small sculptures. Lionel took part in an unruly, three-part ritual, filling 127 Henry Street to its maximum capacity. 

The doors had been opened, thanks to myriad conditions. With the flat file in place and the printer in the bathroom, on May 9, 2010, we opened our inaugural group show about inanimate things. Vivienne Griffin showed two sculptures made of stone, water, wood and brass. It was Mother’s Day and we had a vase of fuchsia peonies. Howie Chen brought a pineapple. Jill was there. It was a crowd.

Bureau came into being with the sun in Taurus, like a number of our artists, in the year of the metal tiger. The articles of organization were published April 24, 2010, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

But it was all gestating well before all that. Well beyond me, or Dispatch, well beyond the Swiss Institute, beyond Hunter College on 41st Street, or Columbia, watching the New Human’s play, reverberating along connected lines. Beyond getting the chance to work with Steven Parrino and affirm a love for black paintings. Or learning to say yes as much as possible when an artist you believe in has a crazy idea. 

We dropped the ceiling for Libby Rothfeld, and put a sloshing tumbler full of old tennis shoes up there. We scratched up the floors with Lionel’s cast iron and concrete. We let Andrea Merkx and Nathan Gwynne—with innumerable collaborators—force a view of one-point perspective and stage a rock opera. We built walls and took them down, worked in the dark and played sounds that are still stuck in our heads. 

In 2012, Julia Rommel’s small studio in Greenpoint was just the right size to prepare a suite of tiny paintings for 127 Henry Street; the show flyer featured the artist, in black and white, sunbathing on a beach in Delaware. For our final show on Henry Street, Constance DeJong turned the space into a limited-capacity theater for SpeakChamber. On the way to FedEx on East Houston, we spotted a space that was for rent, with light pouring in at the back from a skylight and little garden. We threw a dance party before renovation. Our plants flourished. Eventually, the Lenin statue moved from across Houston Street to our roof. On the five-year anniversary, we debuted Christine Rebet’s inky fever dreams from Haiti and her father’s nightmares of war on another Mother’s Day. Ten years in we were grateful to have a project to work on that included all of our artists, because we were losing our minds in lockdown. 

But now, five years later we have opened our new doors at 112 Duane Street. Our inaugural show debuted a new body of work by Erica, and Kyung-Me drew our cast-iron facade, still sporting its chained-up plywood entryway. Now we have a glass vestibule. This anniversary show is the first one we’ve staged in a space and, for including every single artist on our roster, I think it turned out surprisingly well. —Gabrielle Giattino