Gallery Hours: Thursday and Friday 3 - 6 pm, Saturday and Sunday 12 - 6 pm, or by appointment

Proteotypes is the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus, an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room in Brooklyn, New York. Proteus Gowanus develops exhibits of art, artifacts, objects and books around a yearlong theme. Related programs are held at the gallery throughout that year.

Proteotypes are publications that grow out of Proteus Gowanus exhibits and programs, with particular emphasis on publications that are designed to challenge the notion of what a book is; that emphasize the book as aesthetic object; that link art to disparate disciplines; and that juxtapose seemingly incongruous ideas to create new important meanings.

The Play Book
Art Director: Maddy Rosenberg, Editor: Wendy Walker, Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze

The Play Book, the initial offering of Proteotypes, is published in conjunction with the Proteus Gowanus 2007-8 theme “Play.” Beyond a text-- not a catalogue-- designed for play and ready to use, The Play Book collects artist’s interpretations and configurations of play, ready to cut, fold, paste, and assemble. Included are a match game, a word game, a word maze, a geometric puzzler, paper dolls, an automaton, a miniature card deck, a flip-book, and a toy theater. Other features include images of play and games, pages of anagrams and palindromes, ponderings on the meaning of play, conundrums by Lewis Carroll, and a short play by Gertrude Stein. Come play along! Limited edition, available until November at the pre-publication price of $30. $40 thereafter. Click here to order

Upcoming publications

13 Writhing Machines, by Tom La Farge. Publication date: 2007/2008. These 13 pamphlets explain and illustrate procedures for generating “potential literature” by using various constraints. Many were invented by the OuLiPo, the French literary movement that used mathematical algorithms as compositional tools. Others merge visual with verbal composition. More than just word games, these operations offer an element of serious play. The complete set of pamphlets will be published as a boxed set.

Alfred Tredway White, Brooklyn Social Visionary, a Proteotypes initiative in collaboration with the Brooklyn Historical Society. Publication date: 2009. Art Director: Maddy Rosenberg, Editor: Wendy Walker, Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze. A beautifully designed 100-page book of essays, photographs and documents about this little known but immensely important turn-of-the-century social visionary. Alfred Tredway White (1846–1921), a Brooklyn merchant/philanthropist, financed and developed comfortable light-filled tenement housing for working families living in squalor caused by the Industrial Revolution. He collaborated closely with a group of like-minded friends, including Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis and Frederic B. Pratt to develop a wide range of cultural and social services. He worked to protect the city’s coastline wetlands by building Marine Park; helped create the Brooklyn Botanical gardens; constructed a public market in Brooklyn that became the world’s second largest; and encouraged responsible thinking about civic action by creating a new Chair for Social Ethics at Harvard. At a time when Brooklyn is undergoing a resurgence of development, bringing with it the displacement of low-income residents and lack of social vision, we see the importance of highlighting White’s ethically responsible accomplishments.

Libraries and Danger, Creative Director: Sasha Chavchavadze, Editor: Wendy Walker. Publication date: 2009. A compilation of text and images that grew out of the 2006/2007 “Library” exhibit and programs at Proteus Gowanus. The topic of “Library” is captivating the minds of people in many disciplines today, from the history of libraries and their elaborate cataloging systems, to the challenges that are facing libraries as they confront the web. The visual, conceptual, and metaphorical implications of the theme have inspired work in the arts, and a flowering of small alternative libraries has appeared around the country as the role of the library, and the book itself, is questioned. The book will include images of burned, bombed, rotting, and neglected libraries around the world from Alexandria to Iraq.

Blue Fire, by Wendy Walker. Publication date 2009. A visually rich book of text and images that explores the life of Constance Kent, once described as “the most famous woman in England.” Her confession, demonstrably false, led to her being sentenced to hang for the murder of her younger brother. The case inspired the first examples of two literary genres, True Crime and the Sensation Novel, specifically Joseph Stapleton’s The Great Crime of 1860 (the first “true crime” book), Wilkie Collins’ classic The Moonstone, Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished at his death) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s bestselling Lady Audley’s Secret.

The Museum of Matches, by Sasha Chavchavadze. Publication date 2009. The author, a visual artist, explores her father’s career as a Cold War CIA operative in an interdisciplinary memoir, a non-linear compilation of visual art, narrative prose, documents, photographs and memorabilia. The body of work has been presented in exhibitions, in interdisciplinary publications, and as a “one-room Cold War Museum” called The Museum of Matches, a permanent installation located in the space adjacent to Proteus Gowanus. The work was inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s description of a match game in Speak, Memory, and by Nabokov’s passion for finding symmetries between past and present.