Mayor Bill de Blasio has long been a proponent of providing free Pre-K and after school activities to all children in New York City. When the recently elected mayor gave his State of the City Address his focus on strengthening our cities educational structure was one of his main focuses. As one of the major cities in the world, New York is failing in education. The city’s Public School system’s unsatisfactory condition due to lack of resources and funding is appalling. Twenty Five percent of NYC public elementary schools are operating without an art teacher while funding for art materials has declined by eighty percent. De Blasio stated his commitment to not lose sight of the industries that have made us the center of commerce and culture. The mayor also declared that by supporting public school education for kids and strengthening the advanced education provided by CUNY, New York City would strengthen the creative industries and skilled labor in the city. Pair this statement with a recent study showing that arts education leads students to think more critically, and you can see how vital it is that arts education is a key component of public education.
There are many educators who are aware of the benefits of an arts education. We applaud the successes of Principal Ramon Gonzalez of Middle School 223 The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology, in the Bronx. The school participated in The Center for Arts Education’s federally funded School Arts Support Initiative, which “seeks to help nine New York City middle schools to develop sustainable education in and through the arts in place of limited, fragmentary and sporadic arts education programming.” The results are encouraging!
It has been our approach from the start to develop an inspirational environment for NYC school children to work with artists both inside and out of the classroom. More Art has organized after-school programs with local schools intended to introduce students to contemporary art and provide an opportunity to collaborate with contemporary artists on artworks.
Tony Oursler worked with students from Liberty High School and Clinton Middle School to produce a collaborative video with real time scrolling text messaging display to be projected in the Fulton Houses playground.
For our Envision New York 2017 project Coco Fusco focused on creating a message that expresses the opportunity to think about art’s role in the intellectual development of children.
This message should resonate with New Yorkers as we enter a new chapter in city government. It is true that children are our future and if they are taught well they’ll lead the way a bright future. However, we must get over this inequality gap that greatly divides our city and ensure that every child has access to a world-class public education.
Justin Blinder is another Envision New York 2017 artist whose submission addresses gentrification. Vacated uses Google Streetview to highlight the vacant lots where new buildings now stand in gentrifying neighborhoods throughout Brooklyn. The work is ephemeral in the psychical world, but online it exists long after these vacant site become shiny new luxury buildings. The result is a virtual walking tour of gentrification. It is interesting to see the history of the buildings surrounding the vacant lots as well. In some areas we can see how remnants of the past –historical turn of the century buildings, graffiti tags, and urban decay – are juxtaposed with box shaped new condos.
We asked Justin some questions about how Vacated manifested and about how gentrification has affected his experience as a Brooklyn based artist:
What is your background as a New Yorker?
I originally moved to New York from Boston to attend Parsons the New School For Design. I’ve lived throughout various parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn for the past 6 years.
What specific issues or ideas have shaped your practice, and what issues continue to inspire your work?
Much of my work focuses on the transition of physical artifacts and infrastructure into the digital sphere, and the new criteria for value and ownership that are formed. In the context of physical urban landscapes, my practice often focuses on how urban artifacts can serve as social and cultural signifiers and form narratives about our cities. For the past few years, I’ve been trying to conflate these artifacts with digital tools. Currently, we often see data and statistics represented through data visualizations. New York’s “ghost bikes,” white bicycles indicating where cyclists have been killed or severely injured, could also be viewed as a data visualization, and to me are much more substantive and emotionally evocative than most charts showing a statistic. I often think about what sorts of urban markers can be used in place of graphs and numbers to tell stories about cities.
What role do you feel you have as an artist to create a public discourse?
For the past few years, most of my projects have primarily been dialogic. I’ve been experimenting with building tools and online communities to incite discussions about specific topics. An example of a past project, entitled Dumpster Drive, took the form of a file-sharing network I built in 2011 that allows users to dumpster dive through each other’s digital trash. The software serves a utilitarian purpose, but the real intent of the project was to engage participants in talking about how our notions of sharing have changed drastically when comparing physical and digital media. We don’t think twice about putting an old book on the stoop for someone else to reclaim, but giving someone the chance to do the same digitally raises a lot questions that we often overlook due to the ease of online sharing.
Can you elaborate on your connection between art and activism, what inspired you to make civic-minded art?
Most of my projects focus on hacking or repurposing existing systems to engage others in discourse about certain issues. I don’t think of this process as inherently artistic, but instead as a civic duty. The activist component of my work is not about any specific ideological thesis, but about framing and distilling a slice of everyday life and spaces in a way that, hopefully, incites questions about (and maybe even change) the larger political and economic forces that shape our cities and social worlds.
Your project for Envision New York 2017 is titled Vacated. When did this idea first strike you?
Over the past couple years, “NYC Open Data” has released a wealth of civic data spanning numerous city departments. I wanted to use this data to look at gentrification from a critical perspective. The project originally focused on how graffiti complaints in different Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs could be used as a lens into how certain neighborhoods are becoming increasing gentrified, and also serving as a visual archive for graffiti that had since been erased by the city. My intention was to use 311 data via NYC.gov and show the graffiti that had been removed using Google Street View. Most of these locations still exist online in Google’s cache, but they have since been erased from the physical world.
When I took a closer look at the locations, I began to realize that a large amount of complaints were located in areas that were saturated with new housing developments. These modern buildings often neighbored graffiti ridden vacant lots that had actually been developed since Google’s Street View car had taken these photos. So I decided to use a NYC building footprint dataset to search for buildings that had been constructed in the past 2 years on Google Street View – many of them appeared as vacant lots, gaps where coffee shops or luxury condos now stand in gentrifying areas.
We often think about gentrification as what newly appears in neighborhoods. Vacated uses cache as a narrative tool, showing instead the absence of new establishments that currently exist, and accentuating and acting as a sort of reminder of what is not there, either because it is gone or has not yet been built.
How have you felt the ramifications of gentrification?
In just these past few years, I’ve visually witnessed accelerating gentrification – the sort that only accompanies widening wealth inequalities in the midst of a great recession or economic crisis. Since moving to New York, I’ve lived in 12 different apartments throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn in just the past half decade. Most of my relocations were initiated by rent increases. Besides seeing physical manifestations of gentrification through new housing developments and boutique shops, I’m fascinated with how the names of neighborhoods change over time as well.
As others have discussed and lambasted, real estate agents seem to often use the term “East Williamsburg” to describe developments that are technically deep in Bushwick. Hearing “North” and “South” Williamsburg has also become more common. These toponyms hint at the social cachet that certain neighborhoods carry over time. I find these terms interesting both because they create meta-cartographies that can easily change our perception of certain locations, but also how they can be used as a tool that carries political capital. The modifiers within neighborhoods themselves are either being used to further gentrify neighborhoods, or to strategically fend off developers. The fact that the original plan to repel developers by using the less enticing acronym DUMBO backfired also emphasizes the complexity of the gentrification process to me, and just how many political and economic actors and forces are at play.
How do you see the rapid rate of gentrification affect the arts community?
I think that rapid gentrification has raised a lot of interesting questions regarding the need for physical space within art communities and the political economy of the art world. The Internet has been liberating as a means of creating meta-communities that can be more inclusive and reach much broader audience than physical institutions, but I am not sure that it is enough on its own. Physical space and materiality are very important to me. I hope that members of the arts community (myself included) continue to explore the various ways our online and offline worlds shape each other, and how form influences the types of communities and interactions we experience in each.
Gentrification is a dirty word that is central to the discourse of New York City’s rapidly changing environment. It’s a major concern for longstanding neighborhoods of working class people. There are different perspectives as to whether gentrification hurts or helps the neighborhood’s vitality, but what should be evident to all are the drastic changes in many a neighborhood’s zoning. Old historic buildings are coming down at a swift pace, and new luxurious glass condominiums are popping up in their wake.
Areas such as SoHo, Chelsea, The Meatpacking District, The Lower East Side in Manhattan, and Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, have mainly been stripped of their multi-ethnic, working-class legacy and replaced by consumer driven extravagance. Most of the residents who have lived for generations in these neighborhoods can no longer afford the inflated cost of living. While proponents of this change report better quality of life overall –less violent crime, less drugs, better nutrition options, more jobs– they are blatantly ignoring those who had already struggled to create a better life in their longtime neighborhood. Just as they begin to make ends meet developers start buying up as much property as possible and raising rents at a staggering rate. Despite the unfilled promise of “new jobs” and “affordable housing” often included in these developer’s rhetoric, longtime renters have little to no choice but to relocate.
These industrious areas were once a vibrant neighborhood for arts communities as well. Artists move into a neighborhood –plagued by unemployment, gang-violence, and buildings left to decay– establish studios and collective spaces in old lofts, and generally make positive changes to desolate public space. Artists tend to be a developer’s point of entry, and soon after they assemble together and create thriving creative communities, the private sector rushes in and drastically develops the neighborhood. Due to the rapid commercial growth, the prices of studio spaces become extravagantly high and unaffordable to many of the artists who were initially drawn to the large, affordable live-work space. It is easy to point a finger at these artists for spurring this gentrification, but this issue has also led the artistic community to become vocal and participate in collective community organization. Collaborating with the longtime residents, artists have the power to bring about transformative social change.
In the 1990s the artist Rick Lowe solicited the help of local African American artists and transformed an abandoned set of row houses in Houston’s Northern Third Ward neighborhood –one of the oldest African American communities in the city– into houses for low-income families. The project called Project Row Houses incorporates workspaces, offices, and residency spaces for artists, while providing arts education, a community gallery, a park, and low-income housing and commercial space for the community. The Project Row Houses also has residencies designated for young mothers to live and receive support to finish school.
Before he founded Project Row Houses, Rick Lowe was making socio-politically driven art in the form of large paintings but the revelation to move out of the studio and into the community came when a group of local high school students visited his studio. Rick Lowe, quoted in an article by Michael Kimmelman for The New York Times, (“In Houston, Art Is Where the Home Is,” New York Times, December 17, 2006) “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.” A wide-range of artists including Edgar Arceneaux (co-founder of the Watts House Project, a non-profit neighborhood redevelopment organization in Watts.), Andrea Bowers, Sam Durant, Julie Mehretu, and Coco Fusco, have worked on and contributed to the Project Row Houses.
Rick Lowe’s transition from an artist making a socio-political statement from within the art world, to an artist whose making a statement within the community, demonstrates the transformative value contemporary art has in our daily lives. By engaging the community through collaborative artistic projects and arts education, an artist can help form a diverse and all-embracing network of people, hopefully inspiring the growth of a movement where creative practices result in socially engaged action taken by communities.
In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has unofficially designated a conceptual artist as commissioner of renewal on the South Side. The artist, Theaster Gates, has dual degrees in Urban Planning, and incorporates abandoned buildings and houses as raw material. Gates’Dorchester Projects is one of his most celebrated works, and it is another example of what artists can do to work collaboratively with the community. Gates bought and reshaped abandoned buildings in the South Side’s Grand Crossing neighborhood. In these reframed buildings Gates created cultural institutions for the neighborhood to have access to a library of books and music that he collected from a defunct music store and a failed bookstore. As the project grew, he bought more property, both residential and commercial, and has kept the tenants rent well below market rate. He hopes that his investments in the local community will spur a thriving new South Side. However, with all these positive changes and interest from a wide range of people including philanthropists, politicians, art collectors, there is the possibility of gentrification down the road. It is also possible that his work will inspire others to continue to develop, build, and preserve a creative and affordable neighborhood that is beneficial to longtime residents and artists.
Jules de Balincourt and William Powhida articulated a call for an undertaking by Brooklyn artists slightly similar to the philosophy of Theaster Gates. Powhida is an artist and art critic, and de Balincourt is a painter. Both artists live in Brooklyn and want to create an alternative course to the current neighborhood development. They want to prohibit developers from turning potential studio and loft spaces into overpriced studio apartments, big banks, and shopping malls. They propose that artists collectively purchase large buildings and make them into a permanent artistic space devoid from real estate and private sector influence. The goal is for these neighborhoods to remain a place of uninhibited creative influence while sustaining the history and character of the community.
We commissioned William Powhida to create a project for Envision New York 2017, our web-based public art project. Powhida’s contribution, The Yellow Building presents a plan for artists and other creative workers to buy a commercial property as a trust, foundation, or corporation that would hold the building in perpetuity as studio space. Powhida explains, “This poses a stewardship model based on collective need within the capitalist market system. Private property and ownership are not abolished, but the terms are modified to provide a way around the decision making of an individual owner or developer.”
Is artistic intervention in the community a viable solution to the issues of poverty, public education, housing, food justice, and other pressing social issues? Probably not on its own, that is a problem that needs to be solved by community officials creating public policy beneficial to solving these issues. What artist and community collaboration can and should do is present a visual narrative that is indicative of the social change we all want to see for our current and future generations.
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Thomas Hirschhorn’s Monument to Antonio Gramsci closed on Sunday, September 15, 2013, ending a ten-week stay in the Forest Houses Housing Project in the Bronx.
The project, produced by DIA Art Foundation, featured a hand-made wooden complex that housed a museum, resource and arts center, radio station and lecture theater, all celebrating the words and mind of the great Italian 20th Century philosopher, who stood up against Fascism and wrote most of his opus from jail (Prison Notebooks).
We are particularly partial to Gramsci, a man who famously proclaimed that “Every human being is an intellectual” and that even more pertinently to our times wrote, “I live, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.” Indifference is indeed the plague of our times, and we are all, in a big or small way, culpable.
Part celebration, part workshop, the public art project encouraged interactions at every level. Local residents helped building and will help tearing down the large plywood structure, decorated it with murals, run a café, a child art room, a newspaper and a radio station, and used onsite computers with free wi-fi. Artsy Manhattanites though were the ones seen attending the sometime very intellectual lectures.
Hirschhorn like to play with the messiness of life, with big ideas in poor packagings, and never is his approach more effective than in a project where real interaction takes place. As Gramsci pointed out in the 1930s, “An idea is not efficacious unless it is expressed in some way artistically.” Art makes concepts approachable, and we we could not agree more.
We completed our final workshop of the academic year last week at Chelsea LAB School. Ofri Cnaani led the workshops on the history of Chelsea as a integral component to her upcoming public art installation with More Art. Ofri engaged the students in a series of research-based sessions investigating the multiple transformations undertaken by Chelsea’s famed Meatpacking district over the last century. The workshops culminated with the students constructing a two-dimensional map of the area on the classroom floor after which they placed images of historical events and captions in the appropriate locations. The activity granted a dynamic understanding to the historic narrative and provided the students with a comprehensive and cohesive timeline of their neighborhood. After an animated brainstorming session, students came up with a list of ten questions to ask long-time Chelsea residents about their relationship to the neighborhood and the changes they had personally experienced. The answers to these questions will be used as research material for Ofri’s commission, opening in September 2013. More to come!
More Art is excited to be working with internationally acclaimed, multi-media artist Ofri Cnaani for our latest project. As a dimension of the project, Cnaani has been working with a group of talented students from the Chelsea LAB School. Together, they have been re-envisioning the history of the Meatpacking district through a series of interactive, research-driven workshops. The knowledge garnered from these efforts will ultimately lead to a public art installation by Ofri in the fall, commissioned and produced by More Art. To celebrate this effort, here are some extracts from what’s been discovered.
Built in 1808 for defense during the War of 1812, Fort Gansevoort was the first large structure built in what is now known as the Meatpacking district.
In 1847, rail cars driven by horses are replaced by a street-level engine-driven railroad. 10th Avenue soon became nicknamed “Death Avenue,” due to the resultant pedestrian deaths. The West Side Cowboys—a group of men given the responsibility of riding horses preceding the trains—waved red flags during the day and red lanterns at night to keep pedestrians safe.
In the 1890s, eight bakeries combined to become the New York Biscuit Company. This company merged with the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company to become the National Biscuit Company—or, Nabisco (comprised of buildings which now host Chelsea Market and Milk Studios). The first Oreo was produced here in 1912.
In 1934, the High Line is built to transport refrigerated carts of meat, dairy, and vegetable products. The rail connects directly to warehouses and factories.
Survivors of the RMS Titanic were dropped off at Pier 54 on 12th Street by the RMS Carpathia in 1954. The Titanic would have docked at the Chelsea Piers, had it not sank.
The High Line carries its last load—frozen turkey—in 1980.
