Ridgewood’s sidewalks hold more than 800 empty street tree beds — roughly one for every 90 residents. For one weekend, twenty of them stop being empty. The Fallow Frames Biennial is back for its second edition, free and open to anyone, and it works the way the neighborhood works: you walk it.
What it is
- Twenty vacant street tree beds converted into temporary, site-specific artworks by 24 invited artists, spread across Ridgewood sidewalks.
- Saturday, Sept. 19 and Sunday, Sept. 20, 1 to 6 p.m. — Sunday is the last day.
- Free. No tickets, no registration, no gallery hours to plan around.
- Curated and organized by Alexa Hoyer and Alexander Zev; the full artist list is at fallowframes.org.
How to do it
- Get the map first. The digital festival map lives at fallowframes.org (with QR codes posted around). A physical Map Station ran Saturday at Herman Hochberg Plaza, the 71st Avenue plaza at Myrtle Avenue, hosted by the Myrtle Avenue BID, and printed maps were handed out around the neighborhood.
- Budget one to two hours. The pieces are scattered across blocks, not collected on one street — this is a walking exhibition, not a single venue.
- Some beds to look for. Lisa Hein and Robert Seng’s TREE-PEAT (Triple Turf) at tree bed 8, a three-part garden of living plants and TrafficMaster turf. Daniel Fishkin and Femi Shonuga-Fleming’s Building the Bass Castle (Volume 2) at bed 5. Ecurie Marchal’s Marker for A Duck at bed 15.
- Getting there. The M train runs from Rego Park and Forest Hills through Middle Village into Ridgewood (Seneca Av, Myrtle–Wyckoff Avs). The L stops at Myrtle–Wyckoff Avs and DeKalb Av.
The premise is the good part. A street tree bed is a piece of public space nobody designs and nobody looks at, and twenty of them given to artists for a weekend is a cheap, low-stakes test of what the rest of that overlooked geography could be. The artwork is temporary; the argument it makes about empty tree pits is not. Sunday afternoon is the last chance to see it this edition.