Unmoored/Unbound
Coming Soon
Unmoored/Unbound is a BWAC juried group exhibition in collaboration with Powerhouse Arts. The show will present artworks that explore themes of loss, transition, liberation, freedom and deliverance.
Being an artist often means accepting uncertainty and embracing the unknown, in our lives and in our work. At a time of political, economic and technological upheaval, art serves as a powerful expression of our uncertain and liminal existence.
Unmoored/Unbound is a BWAC juried group exhibition in collaboration with Powerhouse Arts. The show will present artworks that explore themes of loss, transition, liberation, freedom and deliverance.
Unmoored/Unbound will provide viewers with inspiring and expansive accounts of how artists survive and thrive in dark and challenging times.
The opening reception for this exhibition will be Thursday, May 21 from 5-9 pm at Powerhouse Arts in Gowanus, and continue through Friday, June 5, 2026. The exhibition can be viewed when Powerhouse Arts is open: weekdays 20-7, weekends 10-5. Note that Powerhouse Arts will not be open on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25.
NYSCA Award
We are excited to announce we are a NYSCA 2026 Grantee.
We are honored and excited to announce BWAC has been awarded a New York State Council on the Arts ( @nyscouncilonthearts grant ) for 2026. The show of support from the council is immensely gratifying as we rebuild for the future.
This $10,000 from New York State is an investment in culture, the arts, and community which speaks to our continuing mission.
ARTISTS RESOURCE
Information from professional conservators on how to handle various types of damage to art.
With the retrieval of art from our damaged gallery Tuesday September 30, many pieces in various stages of water exposure were released.
We are working with local art conservators and cultural heritage emergency response teams to evaluate the condition of work which was not picked up, but we wanted to offer some tips on how to mitigate different types of damage to art for the artists that took their pieces home.
PLEASE BE AWARE, although this is advice provided by conservation professionals, each case is different and as an artist you should research the best course of action for your situation.
The following PDF resources developed by nationally and internationally recognized art conservation and cultural heritage emergency and disaster response organizations specifically to help in situations just like this one, cover a range of topics. The links below the PDFs were gathered from variety of sources:
DEALING WITH WATER DAMAGE
OTHER ISSUES
AGENCY AND GOVERNMENT HELP
As we receive more information we believe will be helpful, it will be added here.
BWAC Member Spotlight
Welcome to a new feature called Member Spotlight, where you can get to know a little about our artist members in their own words.
We are a community of artists, exhibiting, collaborating, and working together to share our passion with the world.
Meet our artists.
Welcome to our Member Spotlight as we introduce the world to our wonderful members. We are proud to be a member-based organization providing exhibition and collaboration opportunities to artists working in various media.
We invite you to meet some of our featured artists as we “open the doors” to our artist community.
STEVEN LAWRY
1. Please tell us something about yourself. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Do you have a different career besides being an artist?
I grew up in Florida. My parents met at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in the years just after World War II. My father was an aviator and my mother a communications specialist. My father was from Pittsburgh and my mother from Madison, Wisconsin. They liked Florida and made their lives there. I went to university in Florida then joined the Peace Corps and went to Botswana, in Africa, in 1975, to work on land use and land reform problems. This set my life on a pathway of travel, study and work, living in Africa and Asia for many years, working on complex social and environmental problems and, fundamentally, trying to understand relationships between people and land. I've pursed these interests as a scholar, educator, and as a grant maker at the Ford Foundation. I've lived and worked in a number of African countries, often in rural areas, and in large cities like Cairo, New Delhi, and Jakarta. I've been based in New York City since 2001 but have been away a lot!
2. Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you approach starting a new piece?
While I try to convey a sense of beauty and power in nature, human influence is almost always present. Sometimes the human presence appears small or inconsequential in relation to what historians of 19th century landscape painting called the sublime, the awesome power and dark beauty of nature, qualities associated with William Turner's landscapes. In some of my paintings human influence is a central theme. An example is my painting, Botswana grasslands burning at the end of the dry season. The scene shows a herd of cattle in the foreground. The sky is full of smoke from fires set on dry grasslands by herders. Burning off old grass just before the arrival of summer rains ensures rapid growth of fresh green grasses once the rains arrive. Fire is used to shape and preserve an ecology suitable for livestock grazing.
3. How long have you been painting? What medium do you prefer and why?
I started painting just under two years ago. I was drawn naturally to landscapes. My paintings almost always show evidence of human presence or influence. Landscapes, including those that inspire us for their natural beauty, have been shaped by human intervention. I believe that striving for sustainability, or human and ecological well-being, is fundamentally a humanistic project of social and ecological care. A British landscape artist I admire characterizes a landscape as, "a force field of dynamic and interrelated elements." I like the notion of force field, which we normally associate with quantum physics. I'm not happy with a painting unless it conveys a feeling that the scene is alive; that the elements in concert convey a sense of the forces of nature at work. A friend at the Art Students League likes to say, "Nature always gets it right," so depicting these interrelationships convincingly is the principal task one faces in divining a composition. Are the interactions authentic, yes; but do I give a sense of dynamism to the scene? Balzac wrote that, "the aim of art is not to copy nature but to express it." Expressing nature is what I strive for, though I often fall short.
4. Your work is sometimes (often?) topical. What determines your choices of subject?
My sources of ideas for paintings vary. I aim to depict scenes that I've encountered directly in nature. I'm sensitive to the beauty of the scene and the natural history that the scene represents. Together these relate to light, color, and compositional and narrative elements and their potential to give the scene a sense of aliveness or the sublime. I've been painting New York harbor scenes, mainly because I spend my days at the harbor's edge. My first studio was in Red Hook, in a customs warehouse constructed of stone and timber in 1869 and right on the harbor (the building was destroyed by the fire that also destroyed BWAC's gallery in September 2025). My current studio is in Sunset Park, also overlooking the harbor. I take the ferry to work daily, from Lower Manhattan to Sunset Park. Being on the water makes for a wonderful commute. One of my first large paintings is View of Red Hook dockyards.
I did my dissertation research in Lesotho in the 1980s. It's a beautiful mountainous country in Southern Africa. Mountainous environments experience extreme and rapid shifts in temperatures, rainfall, snow, and winds. Summer storm in Lesotho lowlands reminds me of those forces, and of my wonderful time there.