Artisan Brooms hand made from Broomcorn
grown along the Gowanus Canal
October 15 5pm-7pm at Proteus Gowanus in Brooklyn
Please join us for an evening of broom making on Saturday October 15th from 5-7pm at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street in Gowanus Brooklyn.
For this event we’ve invited an artisan broom maker from the foothills of the Catskills to create two very special brooms fashioned from a crop of broomcorn grown this summer on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. The Gowanus Brooms are the culmination of the project “SWEEP” by the collaborative Husk with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and with support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and FEAST Brooklyn.
This May Husk planted broomcorn seed along a terraced garden just above the high tide zone of the Gowanus. Broomcorn is a type of Sorghum that was once commonly used to make brooms. Brooklyn, itself, was once home to a small broom making industry but with the introduction of synthetic materials broomcorn cultivation declined and the broom making industry left Brooklyn. The broom industry in the USA declined overall when foreign brooms were permitted into the United States, duty free. Today, Mexico is the largest supplier of commercially grown broomcorn to U.S. broom makers.
The Gowanus Canal is currently a US Superfund environmental clean up site and our broomcorn garden was only steps away from a caution sign marking a combined sewage output. The Gowanus Brooms are meant to draw attention to efforts being made to clean up and restore the area around the canal. The brooms are also a reexamination of the possibilities for ecological and economic restoration of the Gowanus. This evening Husk celebrates the rare heritage craft of broom making and invites you to watch the transformation of the Gowanus broomcorn into the Gowanus Brooms.
Come enjoy music, photographs of the garden, and beer donated by Sixpoint Brewery.
Husk is the collaborative efforts of Christina Kelly and Jeffrey Hutchison
http://www.husknyc.com.
The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is a steward for the preservation, restoration and green development of the Gowanus Canal:http://gowanuscanalconservancy.org
Broomsquire David of Catskill Mountain Broomworks:
http://stores.catskillmountainbroomworks.com/StoreFront.bok