The Brooklyn Rail

A seaside escape for city dwellers, Coney Island is one of Brooklyn’s most mythologized neighborhoods. Developed by robber barons and political bosses in the 1850s and 1860s, the main attractions were gambling, drinking, and dancing as cabarets, racetracks, and brothels flourished alongside amusement parks and luxury hotels. In the twentieth century, Coney Island became a more populist destination for crowds of leisurely middle-class sunbathers, even though it never quite lost its seedy, sideshow aura. Woody Allen immortalized the area’s 1950s heyday of burlesque and bumper cars in Annie Hall while Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetic cycle A Coney Island of the Mind celebrates a magical romance with the carnivalesque world at the edge of the city. In recent years, though, the area has fallen on hard times, largely neglected by historical preservation and urban redevelopment efforts. The current reality is far from the postcard photos of sand packed with idle pleasure seekers that still feed collective nostalgia for a lost era.

Despite recent dilapidation, artist and designer Steve Powers (a.k.a. ESPO) found inspiration in the hand-painted signs that still adorn the rides and arcades, as yet untouched by corporate plastic. In honor of his muse and to help stem the tide of soulless vinyl, Powers began painting signs for business owners he befriended. This summer, in collaboration with Creative Time, over twenty contemporary painters and designers transformed Powers’s informal service into a site-specific display that also functions as critical urban renewal.

Presenting artists from a wide variety of visual practices, The Dreamland Artist Club’s confluence of design and contemporary art in seems natural given Coney Island’s geographical and historical specificity. It’s a world of inventive marketing, far from Manhattan’s corporate grind, filled with amusements dedicated to fun and fantasy, yet still an imminently capitalist enterprise. The pessimism of hard times was not lost on Powers, who observes that, "The reality of the situation is always going to be economic, and we fit neatly into that equation: you couldn’t beat our prices." Working with the proprietors of roller coaster rides, arcade games, and greasy food stands to integrate art into the boardwalk, The Dreamland Artist Club has begun to refresh and transform the visual landscape of Coney Island, bringing the reality a little bit closer to the fantasy.
—Megan Heuer