ART

Best 
Exhibition in a Fire-Damaged Park Slope Brownstone
Associated at Open Source Gallery
After the three-alarm fire that decimated the corner of Fifth Avenue and 17th Street, we worried that we'd lost Open Source Gallery—the only non-profit among a small but very strong set of South Slope galleries—but founders Monika Wuhrer and Gary Baldwin took those charred lemons and made... um, hot lemonade? In April they mounted this superb group show in their badly damaged home next door to the destroyed gallery (which has since reopened down the block).

Best Hipster-Bait-y Street Art (tie)
Hanksy and the Hipster Traps
Yes, the Soho-originating, Bushwick-visiting stencil Hanksy has street and screen cred with its terrific Banksy-Tom Hanks pun, but Jeff Greenspan and Hunter Fine's hipster traps actually succeeded in capturing an incredible amount of attention from both hipsters and hipster-haters.

Best New Art Fair
Art Brooklyn in DUMBO
With a record number of satellite fairs this year, Armory Week finally spilled right off the edge of Manhattan, bringing the scrappy Verge Art Fair to DUMBO, where every gallery and vacant storefront was put to great use.

Best Public Sculpture Depicting a Fictional Monster (tie)
"The Brooklyn Griffin" on Meserole Street, "The Abominable Grass Man" on John Street
Both the UK street art crew ROBOTS and Brooklyn-based duo Mosstika used their materials (found wood and grass, respectively) creatively, but whereas the turf yeti survived only a few days (nobody watered him), the winged scrap wood creature still watches over the intersection of Waterbury and Meserole streets in Bushwick nearly a year later.

Worst Public Sculpture Depicting a Fictional Monster
"Asphalt Tattoo" on Jay Street
We had serious reservations (mostly to do with our bike tires' prospects for sustained fullness) when this dragon was cut into the street and filled with broken glass near a busy intersection in DUMBO last summer. Was this some Bostonian art prof's idea of a cruel joke? Apparently, but one year later it looks much, much worse for wear, and the joke's on Paula Meijerink—plus we didn't get any flats!

Best Tag
Moustache
We stopped drawing mustaches on people in magazines ten (ok, two) years ago, but we took comfort from knowing that subway billboard tagger Moustache Man was scrawling his curly, cursive signature on subway platform celebs' upper lips. Until 26-year-old Virginia native and Gray Line tours employee Joseph Waldo, bka Moustache Man, was arrested in late June after the NYPD tracked him via blog bragging.

Best Neighborhood-Wide Gallery Night
Beat Nite in Bushwick
Sorry, DUMBO First Thursdays and Williamsburg Second Fridays—not to mention Sunset Park Sixth Sundays—but this bi-annual art party all over Bushwick (and contiguous Ridgewood) organized by de facto neighborhood spokes-gallerist Jason Andrew is far and away the borough's best and most fun.

Best Public Art Exhibition
Total Recall at Metrotech
As a rule we try to spend as little time as possible in the Metrotech environs—easy, since there's so little of interest there—except that at regular intervals the Public Art Fund mounts kick-ass outdoor exhibitions there, like this one featuring memory-probing sculptures by Martin Basher, Zipora Fried, Sam Moyer, Matt Sheridan Smith and Kevin Zucker (and on view through September 16).

Best Art Space We Gained
Kunsthalle Galapagos in DUMBO
Though dormant since its third show closed back in April—a silence that makes us very concerned that KG not end up in the following category next year—this superb new gallery atop Galapagos Art Space boasts cathedral-like ceilings and an expansive space ideally suited to the type of site-specific sculptural installations that the kunsthalle model of community-supported gallery has fostered in Germany.

Best Art Space We Lost
99% Gallery
This roomy Vice neighbor on North 10th Street seemed to have all kinds of momentum behind it last fall, with shows of locally and nationally renowned street artists, photographers and printmakers. Then everything went quiet; what happened?

Best Artist We Lost
Dennis Oppenheim
This native Washingtonian had been a New Yorker for 43 years when he died at age 72 on January 21st, 2011, after being at the forefront of the land and performance art movements in the 60s and 70s, and helping to expand the field of contemporary sculpture from the early 80s onward.

PERFORMANCE

Best Use of Brooklyn Outdoors
The Spoon River Project in Green-Wood Cemetery
This adaption of Edgar Lee Masters' free-verse classic was most notable for letting its characters make their posthumous confessions of small-town scandal in the gloaming of Green-Wood, amid an ambience established by torch smoke, moonlight and soft, fragrant breezes.

Best Slow-Motion Sports Sequence (tie)
Beautiful Burnout at St. Ann's Warehouse and In The Pony Palace/FOOTBALL at The Bushwick Starr
In DUMBO, the boxing drama by Frantic Assembly and the National Theatre of Scotland had Olivia Newton John-on-speed choreography, slowed down and gussied up with stellar production values, but the drama lacked punch; in Bushwick, Half Straddle's all-girl high school football mindfuck slowed the pace to heighten the tension with winning results.

Best Regular-
Motion Sports Sequence
The Ring Cycle Part 1+2 at The Bushwick Starr
The Bushwick Starr's Sue Kessler joked before the performance we attended that every season they seem to have at least one (this time two) sports plays. This adaptation of the first half of Wagner's Ring Cycle took the action into the ring, where its mythic competitors became ridiculous 80s pro wrestlers whose choreographed moves were nevertheless thunderous.

Best Current-Events Musical
In The Footprint at the Irondale Center
It's not often you see the story of your own neighbors, performed so close to their own community, expertly transformed into high tragedy. Using the tropes of narrative journalism and musical comedy, theater group The Civilians left attendees roused to act, exiting the theater into the very streets that needed that action.

Best Maniacal Shakespeare SingSong
Derek Jacobi in King Lear at BAM
Most Lears default to booming, hoping to discover gravity through volume. But in a Lear that will define the role for a generation of New Yorkers, Jacobi came in whispering, affecting the gestures of a child, and at his loudest squawked like an angry bird, exposing a thrilling voice intoning language of desperate beauty.

Best Ukranian-Australian Collaboration in Brooklyn
Geoffrey Rush in Diary of a Madman at BAM
With tufts of bright red hair and an increasingly ridiculous costume, the Aussie actor turned Gogol's short story into a crash course in clowning.

Best Russian-Brooklyn Collaboration in Manhattan
Maggie Gyllenhaal in Three Sisters at Classic Stage
In Austin Pendleton's production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, Maggie Gyllenhaal's Masha took stock of her life, realized that it was a total failure, and then hauntingly cried, "Better luck next time!" in a tone of furious, dark-humored, despair.

Best Rarified Death- and Law-Defying Aerial Performers
Seanna Sharpe and Savage Skinner on the Williamsburg Bridge
Provoked, perhaps, by heat-induced delirium, these two scaled the east tower of the Williamsburg Bridge on the evening of July 11th, and Sharpe performed a 15-minute daredevil aerial dance that produced some of the most breathtaking images of the year. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the duo left in handcuffs.

Best Ubiquitous Death-Defying Action Performers
STREB
Seems to us that Elizabeth Streb's Williamsburg-based extreme movement company has been especially prolific of late, with performances in Brooklyn, the Meatpacking District and Lower Manhattan over the last three months, and a fall full of free rehearsals ahead of their December extravaganza at the Park Avenue Armory.

Best Wordless Acting Marathon in a Prospect Heights Church Basement
This Time Tomorrow by 600 Highwaymen
We doubt Underhill Avenue's Duryea Presbyterian Church had ever seen anything quite like this manic comedy in which three actors tore around the building's expansive basement throwing furniture and each other.

Best Use of Live Video Onstage (tie)
Lover. Muse. Mockingbird. Whore. by Company XIV and Roadkill Confidential by Clubbed Thumb
These productions took place worlds apart in weirdly similar warehouse-style venues (Gowanus's 303 Bond Street Theatre and the Financial District's 3LD), where huge white walls allowed video designers Jamie Nesbitt and Peter Ksander, respectively, to use multiple cameras, projectors and screens to amplify the gathering, frantic energy of each show.