Archive: Jun 2019

How are big stories told in small spaces? How do small stories get lost in big spaces? Take a walk down Cortlandt Alley in TriBeCa and if you’re staring at your phone, you’ll miss a tiny room that contains huge significance. Mmuseumm at 3 Cortlandt Alley (between White and Franklin Streets) is 36 square feet–6 feet 3 inches tall, 6 feet deep, 6 feet wide–and abundant with stories. Since 2012, the museum has displayed a rotating collection of “modern-day artifacts,” engaging relevant contemporary issues through object-based storytelling. The objects, carefully curated by Alex Kalman, ask the viewer to endow significance onto them to glean clarity about human nature and our world in this moment. The room is rich with meaning, but you have to look for it. Once you’re in the museum, an audio tour is accessible toll-free through your…

New York’s history is abundant with public demonstration. Particularly in the past 100 years, empowered New Yorkers and their allies have organized in public parks, outside government buildings, across bridges and tunnels and boroughs, in support of issues from Women’s Suffrage in 1920 to Environmental Sustainability in 2019. Public assembly is a pervasive response to injustice and tragedy: a key strategy that innumerable activists have employed to fight what they believe in and change the course of history. But information about these ambitious motivated New Yorkers and the things they cared about is often hidden in narratives of a larger historical moment. Whose job is it to remember the stories of the protests/public actions that shaped the city we live in today? New York City’s LBGTQIA+ community is the most visible in the month of June and if you’re in Lower…

What do we miss when don’t remain curious? Where are stories hidden in obscure pockets of Manhattan? Whose work tells the story of the City? Whether you’re a New Yorker or a visitor, you’ve probably passed through the 14th Street subway station at 8th avenue. Home to the A, C, E, and L trains, the station spans 2 blocks north and contains an inconspicuous, mystical work of art that thousands of commuters miss each day while staring at our phones. Where did it come from? What’s the point? This subway station was renovated in the 1990s, at which point $200,000–1% of the station renovation budget–was allotted to the commission of a unique project by Arts for Transit. The MTA’s Arts for Transit program commissions permanent public art in MTA-owned transit hubs; Life Underground is among the most famous and widely-publicized…

Is large-scale art expected to speak for a neighborhood or community? York Avenue–named after US Army Sergeant Alvin York for honorable actions in World War II and grounding the neighborhood in its German roots–has rapidly gentrified in the recent decades. Yorkville, or the Upper East Side, continues to shift and evolve; it’s structures, residents, and community look different today than it has in the past. When a neighborhood changes, is its history threatened? How much should developers consider a neighborhood’s past when contributing to its future? In the early 2000’s, a 28-story condo building was being developed on 83rd and York. The new building’s lobby faces a 6-story tenement on the opposite corner and at the time, that building was covered in graffiti. Fielding complaints from soon-to-be residents, the developer made a deal with the tenement building’s owner to hire artist…