Vera Haller

Post-Sandy, NYC Artists Find a Slow Road Back to Creativity

2013-01-28T17:48:00-05:00

In the best of times, the life of an artist is difficult. Lean years, sacrifice and solitude are the norm. Add a natural disaster and life becomes even more precarious.

Such is the fate of seven artists in residence at the Smack Mellon gallery, whose building in Dumbo is separated from the East River by a sliver of Brooklyn Bridge Park. The location is inspiring, with views of Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, but it also was in Hurricane Sandy's sights.

The artists were in the middle of their yearlong tenure at the gallery, set up in spacious basement work studios, when Sandy hit, flooding the building with six feet of salt- and sewage-laced water. Their sculpting tools and tubes of paint, not to mention painstakingly created works, were ruined, as was their precious space to create.

Workers remove walls in the damaged basement on Nov. 2, 2012 (Photo credit: Smack Mellon/Flickr)

"The artistic process just stopped," said Blane De St. Croix, a sculptor who was among the artists in residence. He estimates that he lost $58,000 in tools, supplies and art work in the flood.

But despite the financial setbacks and the loss of the studio, which suited his work in large-scale, environmentally-themed sculptures, De St. Croix is beginning to coax the creative process forward. The need to create is a powerful force that cannot be dampened for long, even by a disaster of the magnitude of Sandy.

"To live and work as an artist in New York City is a constant struggle," said Smack Mellon's executive director, Kathleen Gilrain. "To have something like this happen to them is to see how resilient they are."

The artists are continuing their residency program, which runs through the spring, in donated office space in a nearby building. Temporary walls have been erected to give each artist some defined space but it does not compare to the large, high-ceilinged studios with concrete floors and access to a kitchen, computer lab and wood shop that they had at the gallery.

The disaster, too, has became a shaping force in their work.

For De St. Croix, returning to work has meant spending more time at his computer researching his next project, an examination of environmental changes in the Arctic. After experiencing Sandy, he is resolved to find funding for an expedition to conduct an on-site survey, which he often does for a new work.

"It's reinforced the need for me to go to the Arctic. What happened in New York is in direct correlation to environmental change and global warming," De St. Croix said.

Throwing himself into the Arctic project has lessened the sting that lingers from having to destroy his last installation -- 12-feet-tall sculptures of wood, stucco, dirt and acrylic paint that celebrated the preservation of the Palisades cliffs. The sculptures were displayed at Wave Hill in the Bronx and the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers in a show that closed Dec. 2.

Preserving the works was not an option. With the financial hit he took with Sandy, De St. Croix said he could not afford new storage space and he no longer had a studio large enough to accommodate the works when the show closed. He does not know how the installation was destroyed. A curator at Wave Hill took care of it because De St. Croix said he would have found it too painful to be present. "I had nowhere to put them," he said.

Just as De St. Croix creates on a large scale, fellow artist-in-residence Skye Gilkerson works with the miniscule. Her biggest loss was a film canister filled with tiny paper cutouts that she and an intern had spent months collecting for her delicate collages.

"It just took the wind out of my sails," Gilkerson said. In addition to the work in progress, she lost archives of past creations, books and supplies.

But she, too, is back at work, her plants and drawing board newly installed in temporary studio space. Gilkerson said she was trying to "pick up where she left off," preferring to begin new work rather than restoring existing pieces damaged in the flooding. On recent weekday, a new intern was in her studio cutting out small pieces of text from magazines to replace the ones lost in the storm.

Artist Skye Gilkerson in the temporary studio space.

The only paper items she kept from the flooded studio were old sketchbooks, which she is storing in her freezer at home, a tip to avoid mold that she picked up at restoration workshop held at MoMA. She plans to take photos of each page to retain a record of her ideas.

Gilkerson said the hurricane was "devastating and painful and also kind of beautiful." It wiped out the to-do lists and backlog of work and forced her to live and work in the present moment, she said. "There is no other option."

While the artists return to work, Gilrain, the gallery's executive director, deals with the damage to the basement and worries about the future. Walking through the space, she pointed to the watermark left on the walls by the flooding and she moved a big industrial fan brought in to help dry out the rooms from the hallway to the kitchen.

Gilrain sees the artist-in-residence program as an important service to the city's artistic community. Artists, especially those at the beginning of their careers, find it increasingly difficult to live and work in New York, and securing studio space, through programs such as Smack Mellon's, can provide a boost to their careers.

And while she was encouraged by financial support the gallery has received since Sandy, she was unsure it would be enough to rebuild the downstairs studios and continue with the residency program.

"It's really, really important to keep artists in New York and to have good studio space for them to work with," she said in an earlier phone interview. "Working at their kitchen tables just isn't as conducive" to artistic growth, she said, "as having a thriving studio practice."

Artist Seeks to Stage His "Dance of the Cranes" in New York

2012-08-09T16:56:05-04:00

Most New Yorkers treat construction cranes with wariness. Urban survival instincts tell pedestrians to avoid anything that tall and heavy in the midst of the city, which has had its share of crane accidents over the years.

But artist Brandon Vickerd sees cranes differently. The towering structures remind him of graceful dancers whose presence is a sign that the cityscape is about to be transformed. They should be celebrated, not shunned.

To that end, Vickerd, of Toronto, has created a performance art piece,"Dance of the Cranes," in which side-by-side tower cranes turn and swoop their booms in a choreographed routine set to music.

He has staged the performance once before, in Toronto, during the evening with cranes adorned by Christmas lights, and now wants to bring it to New York, the "quintessential North American city."

View of a crane during the 2009 'Dance of the Cranes' performance in Toronto. (Photo by Tom Legrady/www.brandonvickerd.com)

"Living in cities, we tend to get caught in our own little bubbles," he said. "With 'Dance of the Cranes' I want to provide people with a spectacle that makes them rethink the act of construction as a celebration. It is essentially changing the landscape and renewing and reconstructing the world around us."

The problem is finding a willing developer. He is about a year into his search for one who will let him stage the work at an existing building site.

"It's taking longer than I would like, but not necessarily longer than I expected," Vickerd said in a telephone interview from Canada. "A lot of projects that depend on other people buying in sometimes take years to execute."

He said he has contacted 10 to 11 developers, primarily through email. Two conversations, but no commitments, followed. "They instantly have a bunch of questions they fire back. They can be abrupt," Vickerd said. "'Why should we be involved? Who covers the cost? Why are you doing this?'"

His most promising lead has been at a site in downtown Brooklyn. Vickerd did not want to identify it to avoid upsetting talks.

"It's such a delicate balance of reminding them and engaging them and not being overly pushy," Vickerd said. "It's more like a PR job than anything."

Helping him is Martha Wilson, founding director of the arts group, Franklin Furnace, which awarded Vickerd a grant to bring the piece to New York. Wilson has been intermittently texting the developer, to whom she was introduced by a contact at the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a nonprofit development corporation.

She, too, stressed the need for diplomacy, saying she was sensitive to the fact that the developer was busy running a construction site so might not give priority to an art performance.

Vickerd, 35, an associate professor at Toronto's York University, staged "Dance of the Cranes" in Toronto in October 2009 during the city-sponsored Nuit Blanche art festival. "The event was well known in the city and the developers had an understanding of what it was for. They understood there was going to be an audience as part of an established event," he said.

In New York, he has been operating without that context so the task of communicating his vision has been more difficult.

But if he gets a commitment, Vickerd said the experience of that earlier performance will be helpful. In Toronto, he worked closely with the union representing operators to learn how the crane could and could not move, and to figure out matters such as how close the cranes could stand to each other and still allow the booms to sway and turn.

As in Toronto, he needs to find a building site where two cranes are already situated and where they would be framed by a nice view of the city. He said he would work with the existing operators to direct them through the choreographed movements that make up the performance.

Most of his estimated budget of $7,000 to $8,000 would pay for the wages of the crane operators and riggers, one for each crane, who stand on the ground and radio commands to the crane operators, Vickerd said. He has lined up enough money in grants to stage the performance. All he needs now is the site.

His Toronto performance was well received, he said. Many of the spectators who stopped to watch were passing by on their way home from work or out walking their dogs. The police showed up a couple of times and Vickerd had to explain to the officers that he was staging contemporary art.

An excerpt of the Toronto performance viewed on a YouTube video shows the cranes turning slowly in tandem, their booms swooping sometimes in unison and other times slightly out of sync with one rising while the other lowers. For the Toronto performance, Vickerd set the piece to a song by the Montreal band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but he said he may change the selection if it is performed again.

He said the spectators seemed drawn to the unusual scene of the huge cranes moving and stopping together. He was not concerned that some might have missed his point, that cranes should be celebrated for the transformation they brought to cities.

"At the bare minimum, they will have a sense of sublime joy of experiencing the space around them in a new way," Vickerd said.

Artists Find Inspiration in Governors Island's Past

2012-07-13T18:32:16-04:00

For all the changes on Governors Island -- the public access, bike paths, music festivals and picnic spots -- it is the island's past that inspires a group of artists who work in a light-filled former Army warehouse that sits just to the right of the ferry slip when arriving from Manhattan.

Its history and dramatic placement in New York Harbor make the island a unique locale for the artist-in-residence program, run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Jeanne Verdoux creates whimsical miniature characters out of items found on the island and photographs them with dramatic backgrounds from the surroundings. Her first character, "Mr. Bones, the Indian Chief," was modeled after the Native Americans who once used the island as a fishing camp.

Governors Island photo by artist Jeanne Verdoux, titled "Cheese!"

Kenseth Armstead finds the island a perfect setting for his project, "Spook," in which he uses drawings and video to tell the story of James Armistead Lafayette, an African-American double agent during the Revolutionary War.

"It's an authentic site from the American Revolution, the site of one of George Washington's worst losses," Armstead said. "It allows me to put James, my character, and the African soldiers of the American Revolution in the space where it was held."

And Tamar Latzman incorporated the 19th-century feel of the island's old brick buildings (they were part of an Army base, then U.S. Coast Guard base) into her video project, "Mrs. Tadd Visits." In it, she reveals the identity of a woman who was photographed by the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and imagines what their relationship was like.

Every year, two sets of 18 artists are awarded studio space in what is called Building 110 for five months. The current residents started in March and end their residency later this month. An open house, when the public can tour the space and see their work, will be held on Saturday, July 14, and Sunday, July 15.

The artists travel to their studios -- large, airy spaces, some with stupendous views of Lower Manhattan -- by ferry and must abide by its schedule. The last ferry out on weekdays is 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on summer weekends, when the island is open to the public.

And while this structure may run contrary to free-floating artistic spirits, "the amazingness of being on Governors Island trumps the challenges," said Melissa Levin, director of artistic residencies for the LMCC.

She said the program, which began in March 2010, has provided a welcome "retreat-like experience in the city" to dozens of artists. Artists must apply for the space and are chosen by a panel of arts professionals, Levin said.

The juxtaposition of frenetic city life and island serenity is particularly appealing to some participants.

"I feel like I'm completely losing New York City when I come here and I actually am in another time and space," Armstead said.

The views, too, are inspiring. Dominique Paul, who makes wearable structures out of clear plastic bottles, egg crates and small lights, was reminded of Franz Kafta's The Metamorphosis after looking at her view of the skyline every day.

"At first you look at it like a tourist and then you realize there are different architectures, people work in there and in some buildings I can imagine the life of the people," she said. These observations inspired a video project in which she morphs from an office worker in a suit made out of egg crates to a beetle-like bug with light-filled spiky water bottles covering her back.

Artist Dominique Paul at studio space on Governors Island. (Photo by Vera Haller)

On weekdays, the island still has a ghost town feel, some artists said.

Verdoux, who spent the desolate weeks of early spring wandering the island collecting bones, buttons, feathers and shells, said her work with the miniature figures created a "mini-world" inside the "mini-world" that is Governors Island.

"People lived here until 1996 and then everybody left but there was a real life to the island. There was a theater, a YMCA, a pool, four churches and a synagogue. Anything you can imagine in society is here, completely intact and there's no one here," she said. "It's a world that's been abandoned."

That all changes on summer weekends when the island is open to hordes of New Yorkers who come to bike, picnic and enjoy the views. They also, apparently, like to see art.

Levin said that a gallery attached to the studio space has gotten up to 915 visitors on weekends. And during an open studio event on the first weekend of the summer season, some 2,400 people toured the LMCC's space.

Armstead said he enjoys interacting with visitors to the island because it takes him outside his usual circle of gallery and museum shows. "We had 2,000 people here on the first day and there were people who were just regular Joes who wouldn't naturally go to an art museum," he said. "For me, it is the great part of this."

Low-Key Collection Offers Rich View of Hudson River School

2012-06-15T10:46:01-04:00

A sweet yellow and white house sits tucked away on a street in Hastings-on-Hudson that dips steeply toward the Hudson River.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, its Gothic Revival design, gingerbread trim and lovely grounds make the house, Ever Rest, a popular stop on the historical society and garden club circuit. Rose-patterned wallpaper covers the parlor walls and dark wood antiques fill the house.

But Ever Rest is more than a pristine example of 19th century American architecture. It is also a repository of the paintings of Jasper F. Cropsey, who lived there from 1885 until his death at 77 in 1900.

Ever Rest. (Newington-Cropsey Foundation)

Cropsey's romanticized scenes of the Hudson River Valley and environs line the walls. More Cropsey paintings are on view in a gallery built in a ravine below Ever Rest, just behind the town's train station and about 20 miles north of midtown Manhattan. In all, the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, which maintains the Hastings complex, holds about 100 of his oil paintings and 30 watercolors.

It is one of the richest, and least known, caches of the Hudson River School, the art movement popular between 1825 and the 1870s that consisted of New York-based artists who painted in great detail the grand views of the river valley and nearby countryside.

Earlier this month, five new vistas were added to the Hudson River School Art Trail, along which hikers can see the actual scenes that inspired some of the 19th century landscape paintings. And a touring exhibit, "The Return of the Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision," comes home to the New-York Historical Society on Sept. 21 for a run through next February. It contains 45 important paintings from the school, including work by Cropsey.

Cropsey, an architect by training, was part of a second wave of Hudson River School artists whose idyllic landscapes were modeled after the successful works of painters such as Thomas Cole and Asher Brown Durand.

Jasper F. Cropsey, "Lake George," 1870. (Newington-Cropsey Collection)

Although a quiet man, Cropsey lived on a grand scale. He painted 2,400 works, twice toured Europe with his wife (the couple was presented to Queen Victoria in 1861) and built a 30-room mansion in Warwick, N.Y., before retiring to the more modest Ever Rest when the School fell out of style and his fortunes fell, too. He and his wife Maria raised four daughters.

Best known for his richly colored autumn paintings, he also painted European landscapes and allegorical scenes inspired by literature. Cropsey spent time in Vermont, Niagara Falls and the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

During difficult financial times, he fell back on his architectural skills. In 1878, he was chosen to design the 14 stations along the Sixth Avenue elevated subway line in the city. Reviewers praised the artistry of the designs.

The Cropsey art collection's low profile is no accident. Beyond listings in local guidebooks, director Anthony Speiser said the foundation does no marketing. Visitors to Ever Rest must call ahead to schedule a tour.

"You have to be interested in the historic site or paintings to want to come here," he said.

The foundation was founded in 1977 by Barbara Newington, Cropsey's great-granddaughter, and her husband John Newington to preserve the artist's work.

Ever Rest offers a unique window into the artist's life. Past the dining room is a wood-paneled studio that Cropsey designed. It was where he painted and where he and Maria entertained patrons and neighbors.

The studio is a striking room with a windowed square cupola in the center of the ceiling. A rope system allowed for the windows to be opened, early air conditioning. A large oil painting of Niagara Falls dominates one wall. An unﬁnished portrait of Maria, which Cropsey was believed to have been working on when he died, sits on an easel.

Speiser described Cropsey's work schedule -- sketching outside in the summer, spring and fall, and then moving into the studio during the colder months to paint his landscapes from the sketches.

His work is often included in collections of American art of that time period. It can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., the White House and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., which has his seminal 1860 painting "Autumn -- On the Hudson River."

The story behind that painting is that Cropsey created it from memory in his studio in London during one of his European tours. The English were impressed with the rich colors of the foliage but doubted they were authentic. To prove the colors were realistic, Cropsey asked a friend in New York to send him autumn leaves. He displayed them next to his painting.

On Oil Rigs and Art in Midtown

2012-03-09T15:20:42-05:00

The two red and black steel structures at the corner of Eighth Avenue and West 46th Street whir and churn just like rigs in the empty fields of Texas.

In fact, the sculptures (yes, they are works of art) look so much like the real thing that about half the people who stop think someone has struck oil in the heart of congested midtown, said artist Josephine Meckseper.

"They want to know what company we are, whether we found oil," she said during an interview at the site on the fourth day of the exhibit. Her Manhattan Oil Project, erected on an empty dirt lot surrounded by a chain-link fence, continues through May 6.

"The other half, the European tourists, know it's art," she said.

The replica rigs are realistic by design, she said. The project aims to draw attention to society's dependence on natural resources. What better way to get people to think about that dependence than having them stumble upon the unexpected presence of two full-sized oil rigs in the middle of a city block?

The artist said she got her inspiration for the design from visiting Electra, Texas, once the state's oil pump jack capital. The rigs there are now rusted and not in use, she said. Her replicas -- new and freshly painted -- were produced by a machine shop, Pabst Enterprises in Elizabeth, N.J. They are close to carbon copies of the originals, rising 25 feet high.

The proximity of the exhibit to Times Square is not a coincidence. "Times Square wouldn't be lit up" without natural resources, Meckseper said. "It comes with a price."

The exhibit is being presented by the nonprofit Art Production Fund, which helps artists produce large-scale and ambitious works. The location on the so-called "Last Lot," the empty parcel of land at 46th and Eighth, is on loan by the Shubert Organization in conjunction with the Times Square Alliance, the area's business improvement association.

It is perhaps ironic that a hurdle Meckseper faced in setting up the exhibit was finding a power source for the rigs, which simulate a drilling movement. The site, being an empty lot, had no electricity.

Luckily, she found friendly neighbors ready to help. Pointing to a yellow electrical chord that was attached to the fence, she said it continued across a sliver of parking lot to the closest building, housing the Playwright Celtic Pub at 732 Eighth Ave.

Meckseper said the pub's managers were very enthusiastic about the project and willingly allowed them to tap into their electricity. "Even in the insanity of the city, people are really helping each other out," she said.

With New Exhibit, Subway Artist Takes Stock of His Success

2012-02-13T11:59:39-05:00

Enrico Miguel Thomas takes his moniker, "The Subway Artist of New York," seriously. He sets his easel on platforms and draws as people rush by and the wind from arriving trains whips his canvas.

Lately, he added a new complexity to his work. Instead of plain paper, he uses the official MTA subway map, the one so familiar to regular riders, as his canvas, placing scenes of the underground commuter world or landmark buildings on the spidery network of tracks.

"It just really speaks New York to me," Thomas said during an interview at the City Reliquary, a museum about all things New York in Williamsburg that is showing an exhibit of his map paintings.

Thomas draws with a black Sharpie marker, precise, angular illustrations (people waiting for trains or a homeless man slumped on a bench) that he fills with soft watercolors. It is a dichotomy not unlike his work -- creating art in the gritty subway system.

Thomas with one of his paintings on display at the City Reliquary. Photo by Siemond Chan.

Thomas, 40, who has a degree in fine arts from the Pratt Institute, appears somewhat surprised at having built a career out of his subway art. He says he supports himself on money he makes from selling his paintings, many of them commissioned by riders who see him working in and near the subway. He has a studio in Brooklyn under the Gowanus Expressway and has clients who live in Germany and other places outside the city.

He credits his success to the fact he embraced his identity as a subway artist early on and didn't try to be someone else. Recently, he saw an event about how to create a brand advertised at Pratt's Manhattan campus, and he figured was living that lesson.

"I think that's what it's all about, be about the subway, have your work be about that and don't diverge until it gets catchy," said Thomas, who is also writing a memoir.

And catch on he has. Thomas has been interviewed by Fox television, the newspaper amNewYork and local cable station NY1. He was featured in a documentary, Below New York, by Matt Finlin. The exposure helped build interest in his work.

Thomas started as an unknown artist in 2007, handing out flyers asking for donations as he painted in the Union Square subway stop. He was determined to make a career out of his art and not go back to the type of jobs he had held previously -- selling running shoes, working in fast food restaurants and as a security guard.

He returned to the subway over and over again, even though it wasn't the most welcoming environment. Commuters tripped over his easel, the wind ripped his canvas on occasion and the place was dirty and noisy. Sometimes, random people would stop and criticize his work.

He kept at it, encouraged by commuters who admired his canvases, and his career eventually took off. Asked why the subway serves as his muse, Thomas turns serious and introspective. He says he suffered abuse as a child. He surmises that the physical act of working in a difficult situation allows him to psychologically work through the difficulties he encountered earlier in his life.

"I can somehow heal from the chaotic environment I came from," Thomas said. "It's therapeutic for me just being down there and still producing a piece of art work."

Thomas also had an interest in drawing industrial objects. His thesis exhibit at Pratt was made up of drawings of construction machinery such as tractors and cranes.

That interest in the industrial translated to the subway. He says he saw subway cars as "gigantic sculptures... I saw beauty in their glistening metal exteriors."

A New Vision for Queens Theatre

2011-12-14T11:22:21-05:00

When Ray Cullom, executive director of the Queens Theatre, heard a hint of skepticism in the voice of an interviewer about his certainty that theatergoers would trek from all over New York to see new productions on his stage in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, he was quick to explain.

He pointed out the window of his office -- past the giant steel Unisphere erected for the 1964-1965 World's Fair -- to the Queens Museum, where he recently visited the Panorama of New York City, a detailed diorama of the five boroughs. "If you look at where Queens Theatre is, it's right in the middle of everything," he said.

Cullom, who came to Queens in March from the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Conn., wants to change the Queens Theatre from a venue that mainly booked touring performing arts shows into a staging ground for new productions.

(Ray Cullom, Photo Credit: Queens Theatre)

Its central location and relative proximity to Broadway and the high-quality talent it attracts are among the reasons that Cullom believes he can be successful. "As time goes on, we are going to transition from being a presenting house to being almost completely a producing and co-producing house," he said.

Already this fall, Cullom brought to the theater a production of CHIX 6, a rock musical, written by Queens native Lourds Lane, with Broadway aspirations. He said it went over surprisingly well with the theater's audience base, an older crowd used to tamer, revue-style musicals.

"We got more positive comments on that show," Cullom said, adding that it also attracted many people who had never been out to the theater before, which is the whole point of Cullom's plan for its future.

Cullom sees the Queens Theatre -- a round, concrete relic also built for the World's Fair -- as a "gold mine" for its potential as a place to develop new works.

Instead of taking new productions to Boston or Chicago for pre-Broadway runs, producers and directors could work out the kinks on the stage of its main 472-seat theater, he said. New York-based performers would work in the city and "everyone could sleep in their own beds," cutting the cost of the production, he explained.

"I see our niche as being a regional theater within the bounds of New York City," he said. "And the interest we've had so far from commercial ventures, from producers looking for places to develop shows, it seems we're on the right track."

Its next big original production is The Jack Cole Project, which Cullom described as a "theater piece built around dance." Playing May 3-20, it tells the story of Cole, the famed jazz dance choreographer best known for his Hollywood work on films such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and There's No Business Like Show Business.

(Queens Theatre, Photo Credit: Dominick Totino)

Tapping into his deep contacts in the business, Cullom is partnering on Jack Cole with his friend, the choreographer/director Chet Walker, whose WALKERDANCE company is the theater's first dance company in residence.

"This project, which he's had in his head, happened to work very well with our existing audience base," Cullom said. "With the success of CHIX 6, it became a very logical next step for us to do."

He is using a second stage in the building -- a 99-seat black box space called the Studio Theatre -- to institute other changes. The Studio Theatre will be used to develop and showcase new plays and musicals, especially from the first- and second-generation immigrant communities in Queens, he said.

"There's a whole great hotbed of creativity that we're trying to tap into," Cullom said. He hopes to add a translation service, which is still to be worked out, to that stage so that plays written in Spanish or other foreign languages can be performed for an English-speaking audience.

He also is bringing in new material from outside the city. In February, the Studio Theatre will present Spent, a Canadian play Cullom saw at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

"It's a beautiful, poignant piece of theater that I thought needed a bigger audience," he said. "It's about the financial crash of 2008 and its ongoing effects on two 'any-men.' It's just two brilliant performers -- one who is very reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin and one who is very reminiscent of Buster Keaton."

Cullom is not daunted by the theater's location in the middle of a park in the middle of Queens. In the New Year, he plans to open a free trolley service from neighborhoods such as Astoria and Forest Hills as a way to get people to the theater on performance nights.

He said the Brooklyn Academy of Music did something similar when it started -- offering bus service from Manhattan to its performance space -- amid similar skepticism that anyone would ever venture to Fort Greene for a cultural experience. And while he said he was not trying to recreate a BAM in Queens, he did see a parallel.

"I think they were very successful at harnessing the energy of that neighborhood and that borough and reflecting it on their many stages," Cullom said. "And that's our mission, to bring the eyes of the world to Queens and to bring Queens to the rest of the world."

Generations Intersect at Wall Street Protest

2011-10-06T16:01:03-04:00

It was a blip, really. For the briefest of moments, Michael Moore, filmmaker and champion of the underdog over big corporations, on Tuesday went unrecognized in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters are calling attention to many of the same issues Moore does in his documentaries.

The 20-something young man whose job it was to make sure only journalists entered the designated media area in the park stopped Moore to verify that he was in fact a member of the media. Journalists streaming after Moore, hoping to get a quote from him, assured the young man that Moore passed muster.

The scene was hectic and the media gatekeeper had a lot to keep track of, but his failure to recognize Moore, who wore his signature Detroit Tigers baseball cap, was a sign of how a new generation had taken up the protest banner. Another protester made that clear when he called on the crowd to join the next day's union march and show "this is not Woodstock II."

(Filmmaker Michael Moore talks to journalists at the Occupy Wall Street protest on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011. Photo by Vera Haller)

Many of the protesters in the park and those arrested last weekend on the Brooklyn Bridge likely were born in the late 1980s and early 1990s when Moore already was making movies that questioned the practices of big business. In Roger and Me (1989), Moore tries to track down General Motors CEO Roger Smith to ask why the company was closing plants in Flint, Mich., putting autoworkers out of work.

Campers in Zuccotti Park are asking a broader range of questions, about taxes paid by the wealthy, how banks treat the middle class and poor and how college students can bear the burden of tuition.

Moore made it clear that he supported the new movement. To the television cameras gathered around him, he criticized a cable news report that he said made light of the protesters.

"People here have lost their homes. People here have no health insurance. Students here are going to be saddled with incredible debt for the next 20 years of their lives. To come down here and ridicule them -- why not just report what you see?" he asked.

"I am a citizen and a participant in this," he said. "I am an equal with everyone here."

And while the news crews treated Moore like a celebrity, most everyone else who was camped out in the park went about business as usual. Several weeks into the protest, a certain routine seemed to have taken hold.

(At the Occupy Wall Street protest on Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2011. Photo by Siemond Chan)

At a food station, volunteers handed out slices of pizza and other donated food. Other protesters lounged on sleeping bags (one couple had an air mattress) or sat cross-legged on the pavement, writing slogans on pizza cartons like "Make Wall Street Pay! Tax the Rich." Someone played a banjo, another thumped a bongo.

All through the park conversations hummed -- reporters interviewing protesters, tourists sharing points of view and most of all, young people talking among themselves, energized and excited, to be part of this movement.

On 9/11, Museums and Memories

2011-09-09T18:07:23-04:00

Tom Hennes, whose Thinc Design firm creates interior exhibits for museums, came to the Sept. 11 project with experience in subject matter that evoked painful emotions and memories.

He was working on a reconciliation memorial in South Africa in 2007 when he -- along with a multimedia production firm, Local Projects -- was named lead exhibition designer for the National September 11 Museum. The museum, which will be located by the memorial pools in the World Trade Center plaza, opens in September 2012, a year after Sunday's 10th anniversary commemorations.

Hennes and the others working on the Sept. 11 museum have had to contend with issues not typical of museums -- terrible pain and the knowledge that the terrorist attack's place in history was still being debated.

Yet he was drawn to the Trade Center project by the very challenges it posed. He was moved by the complexities of the Freedom Park memorial in Pretoria, a gathering point where people are invited to envision a future South Africa free from the aftereffects of the devastating apartheid era.

"In a sense, I was applying lessons I had learned in South Africa back at home in a really important national project," he said.

Tom Hennes at the offices of Thinc Design. (Photo by Siemond Chan)

"Something I felt acutely after 9/11 was that this country got jostled in a very severe way," Hennes said during a recent interview in his downtown offices. "And one of the things that interested me when I heard about this project was to be able to contribute to a place where different communities in the United States could gain broader perspectives on what this event meant, and what it means to us on an ongoing basis."

Hennes said his biggest priority was being sensitive while staying true to the events. Keeping the presentation straightforward turned out to be the best approach, he said.

"For the museum to take a particular position with respect to this emotion or that emotion actually could undermine the way people feel the experience," he said. "Visitors must feel the way the events are presented is valid, that it has a sense of felt reality to it and truth. So to the greatest extent possible, we've tried to let the material speak for itself."

"The pain that people had felt there is emotion enough without exploiting it," Hennes said.

He said the space of the museum itself will provide a powerful place of remembrance. Visitors will descend down a ramp to the bedrock on which the original towers stood.

A description on the museum's website says: "Visitors will be able to stand between the locations of the original Twin Towers and experience their scale, which will be referenced by two metal-clad, ethereal volumes."

Other exhibits will show objects recovered from Ground Zero, including damaged fire and police vehicles and personal artifacts left behind, as well as sections where visitors can listen to oral histories of people who were there that day. Also included in the museum will be the "Survivor Stairs," a remnant of the Vesey Street staircase that thousands of people used to escape the attack.

Working with the museum, Hennes said the exhibit design team did an exercise early on to imagine the spectrum of visitors. "We tried to consider the people who lost family members," he said. "We tried to consider people who feel they've just had too much of this and they just don't want to hear about it any more, the people who feel they need to have some kind of spiritual experience or people who need to go there to find out the facts."

The result of the exercise was the decision to design the space in a way that allowed people to choose how detailed they wanted to get, Hennes said. For one visitor, it might be enough just to visit the space. Another visitor might want to spend time listening to the recordings of first responders or of the pilots on Flight 93, which was hijacked and crashed in Shanksville, Pa.

"We are allowing people to choose that depth of experience by designing it in such a way that people don't get surprised by something they didn't expect, that people can move deeper into the material and that the space signals that," Hennes said.

For example, if a space contains sensitive material, that will be indicated outside and people will have to choose to enter. Once inside, "it's not like going into a room and closing a door and not being able to get out," Hennes said. The space will include safe exits and sidelines "that allow people access to emotional relief." Tissue boxes will be placed in "strategic places where we anticipate people will need the permission to feel emotional," he said.

At the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum Preview Site on Vesey Street.(Photo by Siemond Chan)

Until the full museum opens, people can visit a preview site about the memorial and museum at 20 Vesey St., which will operate into 2012. On a recent weekday afternoon, the small space was packed with people who studied artifacts and photos and models of the pools and museum space.

Arthur Vergados, of Jersey City, N.J., said he found the experience gratifying. "It helps to put a human face on all that transpired. We remember they were our sisters, brothers, mothers and friends."

For Shakespeare Company, All New York's a Stage

2011-08-04T13:49:13-04:00

This summer is truly the season of the Brits in New York City. Not only has the Murdoch hacking scandal brought England and its institutions -- the Scotland Yard, Fleet Street and Downing Street -- to our headlines, but the fine actors of Britannia are ruling the city's summer theatrical scene as well.  

The six-week run by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Park Avenue Armory, which ends Aug. 14, has proven to be hugely successful. According to the Lincoln Center Festival, which is presenting the company at the armory, 31 of 44 scheduled performances sold out as of last week, and just a handful of tickets remain for the others.

  "Only six weeks and everyone wants to seem them," said a man sitting behind me as the lights went down on the July 20th performance of As You Like It in an intimate, three-level theater, a replica of the troupe's Stratford-Upon-Avon home that was erected inside the armory's massive drill hall.  

What followed was a charming production which transported audience members far from the oppressive heat wave happening outside. The actors guided us into the chilly confines of the Forest of Arden where the romantic shenanigans of Orlando, Rosalind and the others played out.  

At one point, stagehands sprinkled fake snow from the rafters, imaginary balm on a night when New Yorkers were flocking to any place with air conditioning.  

For the presenters, which also include the armory and Ohio State University, the popularity of the RSC run shows there is room for more Shakespeare in the city even during summer months when New Yorkers have any number of local productions to choose from, many of them free and staged outside.   

Most famously is the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park, which this season presented Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.  

But as ticket sales for the Royal Shakespeare Company showed, the presence of a top-flight troupe based in the playwright's hometown seems to be lure enough for audiences seeking a summer Shakespeare fix.  

"The level of interest in this engagement has been tremendous," said Peter Duffin, Lincoln Center's vice president of brand and marketing. Tickets range from $25, available through a weekly lottery, to a top price of $215.  

"New Yorkers have a tremendous appetite and affinity for Shakespeare," said Rebecca Robertson, president of the Park Avenue Armory, a hunger the venue was banking on to fill seats during the residency.  

What makes the experience even more special, Robertson said, is the staging in the replica theater, which the company brought from England and assembled here. Entering the drill hall, theatergoers are directed up ramps. Once inside, you quickly forget you are sitting in a temporary structure built inside a 55,000-square-foot drill hall that has served as host to tennis matches, antique fairs and art installations.  "

There is no other place where one can see the Royal Shakespeare Company as you would in their own home -- where every seat is no more than 15 meters from the stage and where the audience feels as though they are part of the action -- unless you travel to England," Robertson said.   

And how are the actors faring in New York? A New York Daily News article described how they spent a day off at a Mets game, making their stay in New York a true cultural exchange.

Behind the Beekeeping Buzz

2011-06-17T17:21:33-04:00

Where would you find the city's most in-demand beekeeper on a day he's not rescuing a swarm of wayward bees and fielding a million news media inquiries about the finer points of the urban apiary?

This past Wednesday, like most Wednesdays, Andrew Cote, head of the New York City Beekeepers Association, was selling honey, a product of his beekeeping ways, at the Union Square greenmarket. The honey was made, as one sign on his stall read, on "rooftops, balconies and community gardens in Manhattan, Brooklyn & Queens."

Andrew Cote of the New York City Beekeepers Association sells honey at the Union Square greenmarket on June 15, 2011. (Photo by Siemond Chan)

Yet Cote found himself fielding yet another media query about recent swarming events as he handed out samples of whipped honey to shoppers at the Union Square market, a symbol like no other of the local food movement.

Asked why so many bees, he said an increase in the number of New Yorkers who kept them -- 250 he knows about, and likely more he doesn't know -- was partly attributable to a desire of people to be a part of that movement, to know the source of their food and not leave a big footprint in the environment while getting it to the table.

But making their own honey is not the only reason residents get into beekeeping. Some use it as an opportunity to get closer to nature or to pollinate a garden, he added. All this became more doable after the city lifted a prohibition on beekeeping in April 2010.

Cote surmised that some of these novice beekeepers could be behind the highly publicized incidents of bee swarms on city streets that prompted stories on local blogs, television stations, newspapers and even NPR.

Cote has become one of several go-to men in these situations, called to help rescue the bees and then providing context in interviews with journalists covering the events. He said he was at the scene of a bee swarm in a tree outside the Bulgari store on Fifth Avenue and East 57th Street on June 8, a swarm around a mailbox in Little Italy on May 31 and another swarm on a light post in Chinatown on June 13.

The swarms set off the city's usual fascination with unexpected interactions with wildlife. Just recently, New Yorkers displayed this fascination in a Twitter sensation that grew around a snake missing from the Bronx Zoo, and they oohed over the oh-so-cute photos of a seal that found its way to a Hudson River beach in upper Manhattan. The examples from years past are numerous -- hawks on the Upper East Side and a coyote in Central Park.

Cote explained the bee phenomenon in simple, real estate terms. Bees -- like New Yorkers -- outgrow their homes. Take a couple who has kids, who then grow up and have kids of their own. They would never all fit in the original apartment. Same thing happens to bees, except they need their keepers to provide the additional space. Poor ventilation in a hive also can cause swarming.

If the keepers are inexperienced or not paying attention, some bees may look for a new place on their own. The ideal spot for bees, according to Cote, would be a rooftop location, a few stories up, with dappled sunlight, southeast exposure for maximum morning sun and a windbreak from the northeast to protect the bees from the winter cold.

It sounds almost as impossible to find as that nice two-bedroom apartment in a good school district.

The point is that urban beekeeping is not something to be done lightly. The beekeepers association's website carries a five-page "best management practices for safe urban beekeeping." Beekeepers are also required to register with the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Among the association's recommendations: read at least three beekeeping guides before starting, "make sure that neighbors are not working or relaxing outdoors" when opening hives, provide lots of fresh water to prevent bees from looking for it elsewhere and choose a queen bee with a gentle disposition.

The association also provides beekeeping classes, which is where Vivian Wang, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, found herself after she became interested in the subject while working on a case about a pesticide that was potentially harmful to the honeybee.

"Once I started reading about their importance to our food system and the complex world inside the hive, I got hooked on these amazing little insects," Wang said. "Bees and other pollinators are in trouble -- their numbers have been declining because of habitat loss, pesticide use, disease, and other stressors."

So about two years ago, she took the beekeeping class and set up three hives on the roof of the 12-story building in Chelsea that houses her office. The bees have a view of the Empire State Building.

Vivian Wang, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, cares for her bees on the roof of her office building in Chelsea. (Photo by Matthew Cohen, courtesy of the National Resources Defense Council)

Wang -- who partners with Let It Bee Apiaries, with hives in Westchester County and the Upper West Side -- slips upstairs to care for the bees between meetings and conference calls. She said beekeeping provides a break from the city's frenetic pace.

"The hive has an energy and order of its own, and the hum of the bees is a welcome contrast to the taxicabs' honking and subways' clanking," she said.

When asked about all the news coverage of the swarms, Wang responded, "I think it's good for reporters to remind the public that while a buzzing clump of bees may look threatening, swarms are actually quite gentle because they have no hive to defend."

Other beekeepers voiced similar sentiments. Paulo Anjoul, who learned beekeeping from his grandfather while growing up in Monkey's Eyebrow, KY, has three colonies on the Lower East Side. "The swarms happened so it is fair to report them, but to make it appear that they are a danger or menace is a problem," he said. "It is not realistic and fear-mongering in my opinion."

Arts Thrive in Bushwick

2011-06-08T15:25:31-04:00

"You can't stop change" is a truism applicable to any New York City neighborhood, especially those that are attractive to the young, hip and creative.

Take, for example, Bushwick in Brooklyn, where last weekend an open studio event showed off the work of the many artists who live or who rent workspace there.

At 1 Grattan St., an old factory building, four sprawling floors have been turned into a warren of artist studios, many of which had opened their doors for the Bushwick Open Studios event. Visitors wandered from room to room, floor to floor, checking out the paintings, sculptures, photographs, light installations and other creations -- and mingling with the artists.

One room held a group of paper sheep by artist Kyu Seok Oh, part of a herd that earlier this year was shown in Times Square. Another held sculptures made to look like huge strips of realistic-looking tree bark, some adorned with fungi, by artist Eric Lindveit.

Studios with views looked over industrial Brooklyn toward Manhattan and Queens, where many of the artists got their starts. Some spoke of earlier studio rentals in Tribeca and Long Island City.

The two-day open studio event, which also included musical performances and a film festival, underscored the fact that Bushwick houses a rich artistic vein that is growing in influence.

In its first year, 2007, 75 studios took part, said organizer Chloe Bass. This year, 383 exhibits were registered. Bass, a 26-year-old performance artist who lives in Bushwick, said the group estimates that 2,000 to 3,000 artists were represented at this year's event. (She said the number was not exact because organizers had not accounted for artists who showed at more than one venue.)

But even with those impressive indicators of growth, Bass was quick to quell talk about Bushwick being "the next Williamsburg." She distanced herself from that neighborhood's story, where gentrification forced many artists who had left Manhattan for the cheaper shores of Brooklyn to yet again seek out affordable space in outlying places like Bushwick.

Gentrification is "the last thing in the world" she wants for Bushwick, Bass said. She would like to see the neighborhood retain its current character -- artistic, yes, but still a real neighborhood with a variety of races and socioeconomic levels represented.

On that Saturday of the open studio event, people taking a break from art could be seen sipping iced coffees on sidewalk benches, and stopping in a bar that served microbrewery draft beers. Are these small signs of change?

Bass said she hoped that the artists of Bushwick would raise their "amplified voices" against the kind of high-end development that pushed up real estate prices in Williamsburg.

Having a bad economy doesn't hurt either. A slump in the city's real estate market could be a good thing, she said. Bass pointed out that until all those newly built apartments in Williamsburg were sold or rented, developers probably wouldn't turn their sights on Bushwick.