Loew's Pitkin ©Larry Racioppo

  Large scale photographs of some of the most spectacular and soulful interior spaces found in Brooklyn, lovingly crafted and printed by Brooklyn-born artist Larry Racioppo, will be on display at Safe-T-Gallery in Dumbo from April 3rd to May 11th in an exhibit called simply “Brooklyn Interiors.”

  The spaces that fill Larry Racioppo’s photographs are always larger than any possible building that might enclose them. Whether it is the conscious majesty of the Loew’s King and Pitkin Theaters, now gone spectacularly to ruin, the blue collar universe inside the Furlong Tavern, or the scattered desks and chairs in a closed Catholic elementary school much like the one he attended a generation ago, his rooms contain an almost infinite number of lives and dreams -- all solidly encased within their painted, often peeling walls. “Brooklyn Interiors” is the result of years of seeking out and gaining access to those places where the physical bones of the city concentrate and clarify the elusive spirit that makes Brooklyn Brooklyn.

   Larry Racioppo has been photographing the people and places of Brooklyn since the 1970’s. About his photographs of religious life in New York, Ken Johnson of the New York Times wrote “Mr. Racioppo studies his subjects with sympathetic interest, neither satirizing nor proselytizing. You don’t have to be devout yourself to be touched by the human yearning for supernatural meaning that his photographs evoke.”
Larry Racioppo’s photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the country, including one-person shows at the Museum of the City of New York, The National Building Museum in Washington DC, The Municipal Art Society (New York,) and at Safe-T-Gallery. “The Word on the Street,” an exhibition of 80 of his photographs at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York received a Chairman’s Extraordinary Action Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for photography, and has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

“Brooklyn Interiors” will be on exhibit from April 3rd through May 11th at Safe-T-Gallery and will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday April 3rd, from 6 to 8 PM.