Clutter moves Five Points from Brooklyn to Beacon
After Miranda O’Brien and Josh Kimberg moved to Beacon from Brooklyn in 2011, they opened Clutter Gallery at 163 Main St., named for a glossy magazine O’Brien founded in England 21 years ago that ceased publication in 2017.
Clutter is the only gallery in the country dedicated to weird and wonderful designer toys for adults, says Kimberg. Earlier this year, the couple moved from their Main Street space, a popular gathering spot on Second Saturdays, to the KuBe Art Center, where they plan to add an art toy museum operated by a newly created nonprofit, the Designer Toy Foundation.
At the same time, the couple is transplanting their annual Five Points Festival of “designer toys, indie art, weird monsters and underground culture” — scheduled for June 7 and 8 — from Greenpoint in Brooklyn to The Yard in Beacon.
Jesse DeStasio, a Philipstown resident who hosts his own festival, Toy Pizza Expo, which met at the Happy Valley Arcade Bar in Beacon and merged this year with Five Points, will be there with Knights of the Slice, an action-figure line he created in 2015. Ron English of Beacon, a longtime toy designer and muralist under his Popaganda umbrella, created the event poster.
“This town takeover goes against the grain,” says Kimberg. “We put together a roster of complete weirdos and fans of the bizarre.”
Five Points, which began in 2017, attracted 6,000 people in Greenpoint last year. The first Beacon event will include live music, painting, tattooing and promised “oddities.” The Beacon Theater will show sci-fi flick Dune (1982), the original Godzilla (1954) and Ghidohra (1964), the “three-headed monster.”
Inspired in part by Japanese manga and anime, collectible designer items range from $20 to hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Kimberg. Made mainly with resin and soft vinyl, the irreverent totems stem from street and underground art. Though some small runs are handcrafted or 3-D printed in people’s basements and garages, most items are imported.
Small-batch, handmade toys created by popular artists are obviously more cherished than a run of 500 made in China, says Kimberg: “What’s most important is the name value, not a brand or even what the figure depicts. It’s like Andy Warhol’s silkscreens and Toulouse Lautrec with the printing press, creating multiple copies of works with a mechanical means of production and building a reputation.”
Some artists in the free-for-all subculture create original designs and others reference pop culture, a la Warhol. Homer Simpson is a popular subject, but almost all designer toy representations of familiar figures distort and take liberties with the original form, signifying that the work is unlicensed.
“There is a conversation over whether this is fair use, and thus legal,” says Kimberg, who once received a cease-and-desist letter but rebutted it with a 20-page reply. “We outlined the work’s transformative nature, and they went away,” he said.
