BROOKLYN! TRUE AND THROUGH
BY DOMINIQUE NAHAS

(Excerpt)
The ur-map of the beginnings and development of a social milieu that we know now as the Brooklyn phenomenon from the late '
70's to 2000 is artist Ward Shelley's 7-by-3- foot penciled time line/genealogy chart of Williamsburg. Made last year for a show at eyewash, it consists of a visual torrent of hundreds of names of artists, bars, galleries, exhibition spaces, nightclubs, restaurants, art happenings and underground parties, birth and death dates as well as notations on the media's steady interest in the area, as witnessed by New York Magazine's "New Bohemia" story in 1992. Snaking and arching visual arrows weaving from one piece of information or another and lively graphic forms suggest extended narratives of associations and ruptures as well as collisions of events, stratification and consolidation of careers and demarcated waves of artists coming into the area.
Shelley's chart gives a sense of an aggregate of people and their activities moving through time and across geography. People, events and locales are visually connected with others in a tangled web of interrelations. Names of events are bold faced. "The Salon of the Mating Spiders" at Test Site in 1992 with 600 artists is only one of the prominent features in the chart. The timeline doesn't claim utmost fidelity, as the artist is quick to point out. Its accuracy, as he states, is far outweighed by its value as a "persuasive discussion, a highly rhetorical one" of the liveliness and the development of the community before what Shelley terms in his map the "Golden Age of Williamsburg" (roughly 1991 t0 1994), the "Second Wave" (1995 - 1996), and the Consolidation and Professionalism" years (1996 - 2000).