Along Van Brunt street there are some interesting gallery spaces. What’s nice for Red Hook is that each one looks and feels quite different. That should come as no small surprise since the directors of each could not be more dissimilar.
One of them, Peninsula Art Space, is the newest denizen of what was once an old foodmarket strip. It belongs to a man named Eric Fallen. “It grew out of an angry period,” he said, when he took on the teaching establishment and lost.
An essay and creative writing professor at several institutions including Pratt and FIT, Eric had joined the staff of SUNY Maritime in the Bronx. He began as an adjunct, and his remarkable teaching gifts and a charismatic personality (to say the least) vaulted him to a full time instructor. This is rare but understandable if you learn a few things about this Canadian born ‘risk taker’ from Montreal.
An early underachiever
“As a kid I always tried to organize my life,” he noted over a cup of coffee one late afternoon. I just waited, suspecting there would be a great punch line… And sure enough, “But it’s really two seconds before your death normally when you accept your nature.”
This interview was getting very juicy. I thought that might not be the case for other people, why did he say that? It turns out this descendant of eastern Europeans from a tiny Jewish enclave called Chernowitz-Bucovina, is a restless soul, a risk taker, a natural born performer – impresario if you will. He was a terrible student throughout his schooling. Ironic isn’t it that he should be teaching college for twenty years. But there’s more irony.
“I was not a writer or reader as a child but got into theater and acting.” His parents, a medical doctor father and artistic mother with her own radio talk show in Toronto, understood this hyper active creative child and sent him to summer theatre camps. And yes, he does write but very short plays consistent with this hyperactivity, plays that on average run about ten minutes in length but are not to be taken lightly.
Sure, a lot of people write. It’s very self aggrandizing is it not, seeing your name ablaze across newsprint. In some ways it’s like art, who isn’t an artist, really? But Eric paid his dues. Despite pitiful grades at high school where much time was spent posturing as the cool kid, playing hooky, telling jokes, practicing cool smoking routines in the park, he managed to finesse his way into a prestigious media studies program at Concordia University.
The application was unusual for the time, a very personal and open format for a smart kid to show his stuff. Eric did just that, explaining his personal response to, of all things, Aristotle’s Poetics. The comic in the park reads Aristotle, you gotta be kidding. “I made short films and minored in creative writing.”
But he wasn’t prolific. “I managed to progress,” despite bringing up the rear of the class. After graduating he worked on the fringes of the film industry driving a prop truck and dressing sets until, as he says, he wondered “What the f… am I doing?”
So he sat down and wrote a play called “The Chieftain.” The play was performed at the Toronto International Fringe Festival under his direction.
With this fine result in hand he was accepted at Brooklyn College’s Playwriting Program. That program was created thirty years by Jack Gelber, whose play ‘The Connection” was the first great success of NY’s Living Theatre.
Fallen rented a room from a female Jamaican taxi driver and immediately loved it here. “You think I grew up?” he asked me. It seemed an odd question, exposing such a serious heartfelt issue across an afternoon cuppa Joe.
His Pulitzer Prize winning professor wondered why or when or even how come this obviously talented student wouldn’t produce anything. “I’m very bad at quiet work,” and luckily and again, ironically, all the others in his program were rather prolific. They were annoyed that none of their words saw the light of day and by the second year into the program were, “grumbling that their work needed to get produced.”
Enter Eric.
He drove to Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side, found a tiny theatre, held auditions, and produced their plays. “I like doing risky, throwing myself into things. That’s how this gallery got going.” And it’s also how he juggled three lives; that of the college professor, the writer and the business man/gallery director.
Sometimes it’s a good thing when you do an interview to get the subject to try and define themselves in a sound byte. So I asked him, “If you had to make an elevator pitch, what would you say?”
I asked this at the beginning of our discussion and half way through is when he figured it out, “I like collaborative projects and the Gallery grew out of that sort of energy. I was angry at the way people get crushed by institutions, I lived in Throg’s Neck, near the SUNY campus and a whole department which was like a warm family and it ended miserably.”
By the way, he was standing up for the little guy against some untoward cronyism.
In all this turmoil, he was looking around, had always loved Red Hook and found a charming wonderful place right above Rocky Sullivan’s. “I responded to an ad on Craig’s List. I brought my check book and brought my soul.” Two weeks later Hurricane Sandy swept through. And in the interim immediately after he had been noticing on the corner of Sullivan and Van Brunt a certain glass storefront, a perfect spot for a gallery – although, “ I had no experience.” Other than confidence by way of osmosis and his family’s sensitivity to all things creative. And with Sandy and an unpleasant corporate fight under his belt he determined thereafter to be in tight control of his life. For the first time he did something out of character, he remained tight lipped and didn’t tell a soul about his plans, didn’t let anyone shoot him down. In short order, this man who had visited my first gallery with an idea to open one for photography actually did just that. Though it wasn’t really photography but rather a solo show of an artist who did black and white’s of urban landscapes.
He started meeting and talking to other such entrepreneurs like Florence Neal of Kentler International Drawing Space. Florence is a trail blazer whose large and gracious space has brought art pioneers to the Hook for 25 years. And he started talking and meeting artists and young curators, realizing that his ‘real nature’ was to assemble their talents and let them run with it. So he ‘adopted’ guest curators like Rachel Valinsky, a recent Art History graduate of Columbia University who had just curated a show in Williamsburg. Along with another assistant director, Marion Guiraud, the Peninsula has been up and running, diligent, enduring, through cold, and wind and snows. Their help has allowed Eric to continue his writing – short plays, of course. He entered one of them, The Monster into Samuel French’s annual one act play festival’s competing against 600 other applicants and was accepted. The following year he beat the odds with a consecutive win for ‘Perfect Weather’ both of which were performed during the festival’s run. Last year, his Who’s the Boldest was produced and selected for exhibition at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Not too bad for the restless, histrionic show off in the park.
You can meet him at 352 Van Brunt where his guest curator is none other than Florence Neal presenting 20 other artists from her ‘Flat Files’ to herald her own visionary steadfastness in this old, cobbled fishing village. A skyline once huge now broken by the giraffe necks of yellow cranes, Komatsu’s and Caterpillars. The show runs through May 3rd.
Alexandra K. Corbin, is the owner and director of Gallery Small New York
