Talk Bronx New York

Artists Leap Into the Moment

“Living Room,” 2008, drawn animation and wire, by Jeanne Verdoux. More Photos >

“La Lutxona” (“The Go-Getter”), 2007, an embroidery by Blanka Amezkua. More Photos »

Sometimes an art exhibition is just an art exhibition. If its focus is contemporary, it is also a mass of symptoms that reveal strengths or failings of the current art world.

“How Soon Is Now?” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts is almost nothing but symptoms reflecting almost nothing but failings. Yet this show of amateurish and derivative work by 36 emerging artists also says a lot about the competition among art mediums, the latest trickle-down trends in art making and the shortcomings of higher art education. In answer to the show’s catchy title, for many of the artists here, “now” may never come.

“How Soon Is Now?” is the 28th version of the annual culmination of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace, or AIM, program. It is held twice a year with 18 participants per session and is followed by a summer exhibition of work by the previous year’s participants, who are chosen from about 600 applicants by a review panel of museum staff and AIM alumni. There is no age limit, but artists must live in the New York metropolitan area and truly be emerging; they cannot have gallery representation. While they are participating in AIM, they cannot be enrolled in a degree-granting B.F.A. or M.F.A. program anywhere or in a similar “professional development program.”

The show is a cacophony of mediums, materials and styles. The only relief, initially, are a few paintings or painting-like objects. In this rather undifferentiated morass of feints at video, photography, sculpture and above all earnestly political, identity-based Conceptual Art, the paintings spring out like little oases of personal thought, concentration and effort. Some nonpainting efforts come into focus with time, but the first impression is a telling lesson in why painting doesn’t die; it is at the very least a good way for young artists to grasp the kind of density of expression that any art medium requires. (It helps to remember that most of the first generation Conceptualists were educated and began their careers as painters.)

Giuseppe Luciani for example, uses oil on canvas to encapsulate the mundane views of backyards and buildings outside his Brooklyn apartment; his tough little compositions broadcast radiant color and brusque surfaces. They are stylistically similar to the work of better known contemporary painters, especially Sarah McEneaney, despite Mr. Luciani’s statement that he is deliberately working in an “anachronistic” style. Blanka Amezkua appropriates the female protagonists from Mexican comic books, converting their fierce images into large, robust embroideries that exude a fiery formal wit without being overly beholden to Roy Lichtenstein. Negar Ahkami’s quirky fusion of figuration, feminism and Islamic patterning needs development, but it still stands out, as does Cosme Herrera’s ambiguous landscape on routed and painted wood.

Perhaps an overfamiliarity with Conceptual Art and especially the theories it inspired can leave young artists with no sense of how to make an artwork that holds together as an experience. You can sense the lack of connection to either materials or self in their statements, which appear on the wall labels beside the work. They mix overblown, one-size-fits-all artspeak with quite a bit of wishful thinking about their work’s impact, as if they could control the meaning or effect of their work. Different artists claim that their efforts “contend with codes of power, authority, race and class,” “question man-made constructs,” “challenge the anthropological categorizations of early photography” or “reveal the latent power of the public’s collective intelligence.” A few statements manage to locate the art in the vicinity of the artist’s life. “My work focuses on Pakistani-American social and cultural customs and growing up in a working class Muslim family,” one artist says, a reminder that art comes from highly specific contexts. Unfortunately these words accompany a completely generic work involving the hair of the artist and her mother.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Construction Workers in Bronx Split $1.23 Million in Back Pay

Two hundred and eighty-four construction workers in the Bronx will receive a total of $1.23 million in back pay as part of a settlement over unpaid overtime, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday.

Mr. Cuomo said the construction workers had not received time and a half for the overtime they had worked while renovating a dozen apartment buildings on the Grand Concourse, Gerard Avenue and elsewhere in the Bronx. He said the workers had received straight pay, regardless of how many hours they worked above 40 each week.

Mr. Cuomo’s office reached a settlement with two companies, J. Siebold Construction and Finkelstein-Morgan, which owns and manages real estate, without bringing a lawsuit against them.

“New York’s construction workers are the backbone of this city’s economy, but these companies sought to stiff almost 300 Bronx construction workers out of the overtime pay they earned and deserve,” Mr. Cuomo said.

“Today’s settlement will turn over $1.2 million to these workers and also send a serious message to employers across the state: Time-and-a-half pay for work over 40 hours a week is the law in New York State, and if an employer ignores that law, we will take action.”

The settlement is part of efforts by the attorney general and the State Labor Department to crack down on wage theft, which includes forcing employees to work off the clock, erasing hours they have worked and not paying time and a half for overtime.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Bronx Museum Leads Borough’s Renaissance

UPTOWN WORLD Holly Block in front of a mural, ‘Activism is Never Over,’ created for the ‘Making It Together’ exhibition by graffiti writer Lady Pink.

When Holly Block left the downtown arts venue Art in General to run the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2006, many of her friends told her she was crazy. The museum was in serious trouble: It had almost no base of private support, had been running deficits for three years, and was about to open a new building that it didn’t have the funds to operate.

But Ms. Block, who had worked at the museum as a curator in the late 1980s, believed strongly in its mission of collecting Latin-American, Asian-American, African-American, and Bronx-based artists. After 18 years at Art in General, she was ready for a change and believed she could help turn the museum’s fortunes around.

Two years later, she has worked little less than a miracle: The new building, designed by the Miami firm Arquitectonica, is open and running. The museum has more than quadrupled its private fund raising and has run surpluses for two years in a row. This year’s gala, in May, raised $140,000 — an almost 40% increase over last year. The museum’s re-energized board, expanded to 19 members from 14, donated an additional $100,000.

“Holly’s amazing,” the board chairman, Douglass Rice, said. “She’s well-respected; she’s smart; she has incredible contacts. Where she goes, a lot of funders want to follow.”

The road to financial stability wasn’t easy. In her first few months, Ms. Block had to cut the museum’s staff to 22 from 28 and only program in part of the new building.

“That time period was the worst,” Ms. Block said of the fall of 2006.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

New York promotes the Bronx’s parks and gardens

Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is blooming!

Despite its urban image, the Bronx has 7,000 acres of park land, about 25% of its total area. In addition to Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo, the borough’s green spaces include the New York Botanical Garden; a 19th century garden overlooking the Hudson River called Wave Hill; and Van Cortlandt and Pelham Bay parks, where you can bird-watch, play golf and ride horses.

New York City is touting the Bronx’s green attractions in a new promotion. “Most people don’t think of the Bronx like that. We want to open their eyes to the actual physical beauty of the Bronx,” said George Fertitta, CEO of NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism organization.

CITY GUIDE: Where to sleep, eat and shop in New York

It’s quite a turnaround for a place that once symbolized urban decay. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning,” sportscaster Howard Cosell famously said during a 1977 Yankees game, as footage aired of a building in flames near the stadium. An epidemic of arson plagued the city at the time.

New York is a different place now, billed as America’s safest big city and attracting a record 46 million tourists last year. Many of those tourists are repeat visitors, and “their appetite for something other than Times Square and the Statue of Liberty is enormous,” said Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr., who got an enthusiastic reception talking up the Bronx at a recent tourism conference in Berlin.

Green spaces only comprise part of the Bronx’s attractions. There is also Italian food on Arthur Avenue, a hip-hop music tour, a bed-and-breakfast called Le Refuge Inn, and saltwater swimming at Orchard Beach. For more information, visit the Bronx Tourism Council website at www.ilovethebronx.com or NYC & Company at www.nycvisit.com/bronx. Meanwhile, here are some highlights.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post

Edgar Allen Poe’s home in the Bronx to be restored

Poe Cottage, the Bronx home of writer Edgar Allan Poe, will close this winter for restoration

A new, $3.2 million visitor center, seen in an artist’s conception, is slated to open in 2009.

There may not be ravens rapping at the door of Edgar Allan Poe’s final home in the Bronx.

But with a planned $250,000 fix-up and a new visitor center, thousands more tourists are expected to make the pilgrimage to Poe Cottage.

After two moves and years of being shaken by cars on the Grand Concourse and the nearby subway, the house of the famed poet and writer is in bad shape. Paint is peeling, the plaster is cracked and there are cobwebs on the rain-damaged windows.

Once restored, the house will have a fresh coat of paint, new green shutters, a ramp for the handicapped and, ideally, a projected increase of 6,000 tourists a year, said Kathleen McCauley, manager of the cottage in Poe Park, at the Concourse and Kingsbridge Road.

“It’s gone through a lot of transformations,” she said. “Poe would have liked that.”

The design of the new, $3.2 million, 2,000-square-foot visitor center was inspired by Poe’s poem, “The Raven.”

The slate shingles are meant to look like feathers, and the roof sweeps down like bird wings. The bathroom walls will have an abstract picture of Poe’s face.

Repairs and the visitor center are being funded by a combination of federal and city dollars and from donations to the Bronx Historical Society, which operates the facility. The city Parks Department owns it.

The visitor center is due to open in August 2009, while the cottage will be closed for repairs sometime this winter and reopened in 2010.

The cottage, where Poe spent the last years of his life and wrote “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells,” and “Eldorado,” now sees about 4,000 visitors annually.

Read more..

(No Ratings Yet)
 Loading ...
 Email This Post