Recession Art Opens RAC, a contemporary art gallery, store, and performance venue devoted to emerging artists and aspiring collectors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side

RAC Grand Opening Jan. 21, 2012 6 pm – 12 am

Featuring Weird Party on the Other Side of the Hedge Paintings by Megan Berk

After three years of activity, Recession Art announces its expansion to a permanent home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As an addition to its semiannual group shows at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Recession Art is partnering with culturefix to open RAC, a contemporary art gallery, store, and performance venue devoted to emerging artists and aspiring collectors.

In the gallery, Recession Art will present solo exhibitions by Featured Artists as well as curated group exhibitions by alumni and other emerging artists. Affordable prints, drawings, and books by these artists will be available at Recession Art’s storefront. Curated events, including readings, performances, discussions, and dinners, will complement the exhibitions and storefront offerings.

Recession Art has selected six of its most promising and talented alumni artists as its first collection of Featured Artists. The 2012 Featured Artists are Megan Berk, Tate Foley, Danny Ghitis, Jennifer Mills, Ian Trask, and Gabriela Vainsencher. Each Featured Artist will present a solo exhibition at RAC and will be included in the first annual Featured Artist Catalog: Taking Stock: The First Three Years of Recession Art, to be released at RAC’s Grand Opening.

On January 21, Featured Artist Megan Berk inaugurates RAC and Recession Art’s solo exhibitions with Weird Party on the Other Side of the Hedge. Berk’s painting explores the impulse towards heaven in abstracted landscapes and altered architectural spaces, where a bright beyond is suggested where light meets shadow. These moments of possibility allude as much to the idea of heaven as they might to an idealized future, the idea of summer before it has arrived, or the improbable optimism that drives creative progress. Her work transforms moments of desire, self-delusion, and optimism into form and color.

Megan Berk was born in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and has exhibited her work at Bowman/Bloom Gallery in Manhattan, Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton, NY, and at Recession Art’s Works Progress at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn.

RAC is a project of Recession Art and culturefix. Recession Art connects emerging artists with aspiring collectors and provides an affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional art market.

culturefix is a bar, gallery, and event space that offers a different idea of a public space.

Recession Art | recessionartshows.com | [email protected]