It's a busy fall semester for us, teaching seven classes six days a week at four colleges. Today, for example, we teach a composition class at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 8:30 to 9:45 a.m. and then have to get to Hunter College to teach American literature from 11:10 a.m. to 12:25 p.m. (and we later today substituted for a Baruch College professor, teaching some of our favorite Yeats poems from 5:50 to 7:05 p.m.) -- but we stopped in mid-morning on our way to the M66 bus on its crosstown crawl from Broadway through Central Park to the East Side to admire Peter Woytuk's bronze "Falling Apples" at the north apex of the Dante Park triangle. This is one of many of Peter Woytuk's terrific sculptures being presented by the Broadway Mall Association between Columbus Circle and Harlem.
We took the 5:57 p.m. Q59 bus at Union and Metropolitan Avenues through scenic Williamsburg over to South 5th Street and Wythe and walked over to Kent Avenue to see the North Brookyn Public Art Coalition (nbART), the Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn (OSA), and the New York City Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Urban Art Program unveiling of Plan Ahead, a 600-square-foot knitted installation by internationally recognized Knit Graffiti artist Magda Sayeg.
Here's the press release stuff:
Plan Ahead was selected through a competitive process as part of the Urban Art Program’s pARTners track, which is designed to connect artists and community organizations to neighborhoods to create site-specific art for the public realm.
The Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn provided additional support. Sayeg first participated in the DOT pARTners track in May 2009 when a team of local knitters covered 69 parking meters along Montague Street with knitted cozies. That Brooklyn public art project was commissioned by the Montague Street Business Improvement District.
Magda Sayeg, founder of Knitta, has taken knitting out of the home and into the streets.
The simple juxtaposition of woven material and the urban environments in which she places it, has inspired an entirely new a new approach to knitting. One that questions the assumptions of a traditional craft while adding a previously unused material to the world of street art.
When Magda began Knitta in 2005, it was her response to the dehumanizing qualities of an urban environment. By inserting handmade art into a landscape of concrete and steel, she adds a human quality that otherwise rarely exists.
Her work has been recognized or its influence on street art as well as the craft of knitting. Magda Sayeg is based in Austin, Texas.
Though the last unveiling we attended was for our late great-uncle Abe and took place at New Montefiore Cemetery, we've seen knitting in art projects before, mostly by Agata Oleksiak, who goes by the name of Olek and has a lot of work in New York City. We last saw Olek's work at the Festival of Ideas for the New City in June on the Bowery.
Magda Sayeg, though, is considered by many to be "the mother of yarn bombing.” In 2005 she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the door handle of her shop in Houston, and it proved so popular that she began knitting lamp posts and stops signs, and then there was no stopping her, we guess.
We couldn't attend the reception that followed the unveiling. It was at IndieScreen (not the Knitting Factory?), but we were on our way up Kent Avenue to hear what we could hear of Real Estate, Dr. Dog and Bright Eyes from the soccer fields of Bushwick Inlet Park.
We didn't have tickets but we planned ahead and didn't have to squoosh together our final A and D.
We just had to walk away.
Walking up West Street in Greenpoint this afternoon, we followed the arrows to the India Street Arts Festival, an almost full-day event presented by Northside Open Studios with the North Brooklyn Public Arts Coalition, Councilmember Stephen Levin, and New York Waterway, whose new East River Ferry has a pier for its local stop right at the foot of India Street. India Street, of course, is the home of the India Street murals, which have been praised to the skies, and today there were all kinds of activities and performances on the waterfront block. Various bands performed at the block's end, just before the waterfront and pier. We were lucky enough to catch Snowmine and Appomattox. The elegantly dressed Mr. Teacher (aka Ryan Fitzgerald) enticed rubes into a fixed carnival game and Tracy Candido did Food Tarot, combining the culture of tarot reading with tea drinking, both of which encourage dialogue, sharing and social interaction as well as a contemplative mindset and a need to urinate. These two classy ladies at the pier were The Sunbathers, Sherry Aliberti and Rose Sambrato, who spent most of the day lying out in lawn chairs in their vintage bathing suits, floppy sun hats and classic fingerwave hairdos. There were all kinds of other activities, art projects, booths, and food available. It was a great way to see stuff, listen to music and just hang out and spend the waning hours of the beautiful final spring afternoon in Greenpoint. We're grateful we got to the India Street Arts Festival.
Tonight we took the fabulous G train north two stops from Metropolitan Avenue to the India Street exit of the Greenpoint Avenue stop. On India Street, between West Street and the riverfront are the new India Street murals, which were the site of the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition's first of four biweekly Monday night Moviehouse presentations on India Street. This screening series, ending on September 21, features projections by filmmakers, animators, and documentarians - mostly local artists - on the blocklong wall on which the five murals were created. With the wonderful view of the Manhattan skyline to our left, tonight we watched several funny and poignant animated films and listened to two of the animators, Catherine Chao and Kieran O’Hare, discuss their work. (It was too dark by then to see them.) It was a nice way to spend an hour on a sultry evening. The murals, a joint project of the North Brooklyn Public Art Coalition (NBPAC) with Moviehouse, which has as its main base the great space 3rd Ward in Bushwick/East Wiliamsburg - and the invaluable Open Space Alliance, are quite striking, and they'll be the subject of the September 8 show in this screening series:
The new-painted mural will literally [sic] come alive on September 8 when six local filmmakers Lam Thuy Vo, Joshua Carrero, Sarah Pirozek, Vanara Taing, Nathan Punwar, Hiram Becker, and Chris King present the movies they created to capture the artists– Ali Aschman, Eve Biddle & Josh Frankel, Chris Soria, Joshua Abram Howard, Robert Seng, and Skewville– as they spent the month of June turning a common white wall into a master work of public art. Each of the wall’s five empty spaces will simultaneously turn into a screen, inviting the audience into the world of the artists. After the screenings, the filmmakers and artists will speak with each other and the audience about the creative process that went into creating the mural and the films.
In the other two screening sessions, Moviehouse at India Street will feature selections from the Bushwick Film Festival and two documentaries - Up on the Roof, about our area's local pigeon-keepers
and Uncertain Industry about the decline of manufacturing in New York City, like this Brooklyn umbrella factory in our neighborhood.
We got there early enough to score one of the 18 folding chairs (three rows of three chairs each, with an enormous sinkhole filled with water in the center "aisle"). At 8:30 p.m., Chris Henderson of Moviehouse went up to the front of where the movie was projected and introduced the evening's event of animated shorts by the prolific Patrick White as well as Catherine Chao and Kieran O'Hare, and a Pterodactyl music video. Chris also thanked NBPAC and some people who were also there: Rami Metal, the Greenpoint/Williamsburg liaison for Councilmember David Yassky, who helped make this project possible; Ciara McKeown, who also coordinated the mural project; Austin, on sound; and those of us who came. Chris also alerted us to coming events, like the August 26 CinemaParque screening at the Sternberg Park handball courts, the last in a series of six summer events there. (We mostly go to Sternberg Park to use the bathroom between the time we get off the J train and wait for the B48 bus, but it's really a nice place). We have no expertise in animation except for teaching yearlong writing and literature to animation majors at the fabulous School of Visual Arts for the past three years, but we have heard of New York animator Patrick Smith, whose sly and funny Handshake was the first film projected on the wall. Smith's hand-drawn work - he uses computer animation work for coloration only - is stylistically reminiscent of Berke Breathed's Bloom County, and Handshake's literal entanglements are a metaphor for the perils of romantic relationships. It was interesting to see the films with the cracks on the wall (visible in our pics here) as part of the "screen." Kieran O'Hare's "3 Boys" is a memoir, though in the Q&A section afterward, Kieran did say that it was fictionalized. Three boys about ten (they think condoms prevent guys from peeing into girls) go looking in the woods for a stash of Playboy magazines. Instead, they come upon a dead cat that looks like one owned by the protagonist's family. And he's confronted with his own mortality amid the magazines. It's a neat, understated little film. Catherine Chao's animated film uses Barbie and Ken dolls in real filmed settings to explore the nature of sexuality. There's a great Ken-on-another-Ken graphic sex scene. During the Q & A, we asked Catherine if she was familiar with the Carpenters film using Barbie dolls. She wasn't. A senior moment kept us from remembering the director, though we feel less bad that even a moviemeister like Chris didn't know, only that the director went on to become famous. Ordinarily, we're old and grumpy enough to expect artists and especially all the young writers who get credit for "pioneering" stuff that other innovators did in the, ahem, 1970s and 1920s and eighteenth century (we told you we'd end up sounding Sterne) - but Catherine had a good reason for not seeing Todd Haynes' - yes, that Todd Haynes - Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Mattel is so notoriously litigious that that was our inspiration during our first year of law school (we came across them in Torts) for "Twelve Step Barbie," a story that first appeared in the groundbreaking Barbiecentric anthology Mondo Barbie. (The story is reprinted in our just-published I Hate of All You on This L Train.) And, true to form, Mattel's attorneys made Mondo Barbie's editors Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole and publisher St. Martin's remove a photo of the doll from the original cover of the book. They'll undoubtedly stop further screenings of Catherine's film, so we won't tell anyone about it. Anyway, Mattel was going to halt the distribution of Haynes's Barbie-based Karen Carpenter film, only the equally litigious Richard Carpenter (the film hints that he was gay and doesn't bother hinting that he was a horrible brother) beat them to it - though he won the suit on violation of copyright for the unauthorized use of the music. However, until Mattel's in-house counsel threatens us, here's Todd Haynes's movie:
The final film up was the Pterodactyl music video featuring a war between two boxes of matches, one with blue tips, the other green tips. It was very nicely done. Pterodactyl, whom we admire a lot, has done other stuff with its music and inanimate objects too. Finally, Catherine and Kieran went to the front with Chris, who asked them some questions about their work and elicited some interesting responses. An obnoxious old man in the back row also asked a couple of questions that were mostly annoying, but we hope that didn't spoil anyone's enjoyment of the event. We're sure the next three Moviehouse screenings at the India Street murals will be just as good. Thanks to everyone concerned.
