On April 26th and 27th, from 1 to 6 pm, artists in DUMBO will open their doors to the public as part of DUMBO Open Studios, offering a rare look inside the art studios along the Brooklyn waterfront. Since the 1970s, DUMBO has been shaped by its vibrant art community. This interview series highlights a handful of participating artists in 2025. Each response offers a glimpse of what’s waiting behind the studio door. Main Window, situated in the historic Clocktower Building at 1 Main Street, has been a presentation space dedicated to public art in DUMBO since 1980. Their enduring mission is to spotlight the diverse voices of under-represented Brooklyn and New York City artists. Main Window is curated by artist and Dumbo resident Jeff Wallace. @mainwindowdumbo
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What will we see in Main Window?
Main Window is pleased to present Crossing Spaces by artist Winnie Sidharta, in collaboration with Deanna Evans Projects. In Crossing Spaces, Sidharta explores the visual possibilities and allegorical nature of painting and collage by instilling personal memories, oral histories, and a search for the ideal. Batik, woven bamboo mats, decorative tiles, and andesite (volcanic rock) carvings are just a few examples from centuries of craft practices reflected in Sidharta’s work. Her fascination with the artistry culture of East Java stems from her childhood, having grown up there. The work itself is made of painted paper pulp, clay, wood, and plaster that, together, form a composite from multiple fragments. Because the work is collapsible and can be reorganized, it often finds new contexts within the space where it is shown. This freedom of rearranging fragments, edges, and places of rupture also similarly evokes the nonsensical or even poetic aspect of wordplay and rhythm present within language.
For Sidharta, like many of us, looking at paintings is a memory-evoking experience. It is the potential for a painting to become a wondrous portal that allows for crossings between time and space, between the inner mind and the physical world. Audiences become observers and conjurers confronting, finding associations, and probing as they stand in front of an altar space or peer through a physical screen, through which paintings take form.
Crossing Spaces thus becomes a work that captures the artist’s desire to constantly find a new form where identity is in constant flux, but its impulse is held within the boundaries of materials and the site where it is shown. To Sidharta, the discoveries of painting and collage ultimately act as a conduit for endless perceptual encounters and complex cultural experiences and a material locus for wonder.
About the artist: Winnie Sidharta is a painter based in Queens, New York. Born and raised in East Java, Indonesia. Winnie has exhibited in galleries and museums in Indonesia, Beijing, California, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York City. She studied Visual Communication Design in Indonesia and Painting in Beijing, China. In 2010, she received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University and later taught there before settling in New York City in 2014. Winnie’s works investigate subjects of collective cultural experiences through the mediums of collage, painting, drawing and site-specific installation. In her current installation, she explored methods of tile-making, printing, stamping, and carving as an extension of her collage practice while examining the history of Batik textile and architectural storytelling. @winnie_sidharta