The back room of Burrito Bar seemed an odd place to find the devotional paintings of Sister Karol Jakowski. The sister's earnest pieces depicting the Virgin Mary could easily have been lost in the psychedelic swirl of the room at 313 Church Street, only faintly lit by candles, lava lamps and a spinning disco ball.

		But there was Michael Fortenbaugh, president of the Downtown Arts Club, climbing into a booth for a closer look. And he'd brought along more than a dozen others in search of art installed in Tribeca and Battery Park City bars as part of the club's first bar art, or "BART," crawl. "It works for the community, works for the artists and works for the bars," Fortenbaugh, nursing a bottled beer, said of the crawl. The pieces by more than 40 artists were meant to satisfy a range of tastes, from the outsider paintings of Jakowski and Sally Davies at Burrito Bar to the "sonic sculpture" constructed of audio tape by Alyce Santoro hanging from the ceiling in the Knitting Factory to the video self-portrait by Songyi Kim rolling at Kori.
Mark DeMuro, who curated the shows, along with Hope Stevenson, who managed the project, helped launch the BART crawl last month in hopes that the tours will become an annual event. Although BART officially ended on June 25, many of the bar owners were expected to keep the work up longer. (A list of artists and where their work is showing can can be found at www.downtownartsclub.com.) "There were artists who said 'I'm not going to hang my work in a bar,'" said DeMuro, who installed his own paintings at Bubble Lounge and at Kori. "Fortunately, enough said 'Yeah, I'm going to send my kids out in the real world to fend for themselves and see how they do.'" Getting most restaurant and bar owners to agree to hang the art was an easy sell, he said. "I had one guy stop me about three-quarters of the way into my pitch and say 'Mark, it's a beautiful idea. Let's do it.' And some of the owners didn't just say, 'Sure, come in and hang it,' but were sweating on ladders working to hang it themselves." Among them were Ric Ramirez and Paul Ujlaky, owners of Lush, at 110 Duane St., who drilled anchors into the lounge's Venetian plaster walls and installed lights to accommodate the exhibit. "The only request I had is that the pieces work with the walls," said Ramirez. "And I'm real happy with the way it looks." Lush exhibited works by seven artists, including several pieces from Tribeca artists CJ Collins, and the wild, grinning papier mâché masks of the late Diane Sbano. Dave Cohen, a Battery Park City resident, was one of the 15 people who joined the tour. He is a member of the arts club, ships art for a living and is partial to a drink now and then. "So, when you put it all together, this is perfect for me," he said. Others, like Monica Mullan, a financial analyst who lives on the Upper East Side and professed no special interest in art, said she was just along for the ride. She'd heard about the crawl from Fortenbaugh, who gave her sailing lessons last year. "I didn't even know where Tribeca was," she said. "But any excuse for a pub crawl." The two-hour tour began at Bubble Lounge and ended at Lush, with stops along the way at Burrito Bar, I Lounge, and Kori. By the group's third stop, the spirits and the conversation were flowing. And Stevenson, the shows' manager, had finally hit on a signal to keep the group moving along. "Bottoms up," she shouted. "We leave in five minutes."