this week in art

HENRY WARD BEECHER MONUMENT

Longtime Brooklyn minister Henry Ward Beecher is honored with statue in Columbus Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Columbus Park
Cadman Plaza near Johnson St.
www.nycgovparks.org
www.mas.org

“It is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich,” American abolitionist, orator, minister, and social reformer Henry Ward Beecher said. The eminently quotable Connecticut native and longtime Brooklynite would most likely have a lot to say about the novel coronavirus, particularly this Easter weekend as many churches around the country remain open, declining suggestions and even local regulations regarding social distancing.

“To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.”

Beecher first served as a Presbyterian minister in Indiana before moving to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in 1847. He advocated for evolution, science, and woman suffrage and against slavery while also generating a spectacular sexual scandal. Beecher was a celebrity preacher, and he got a lot of press; he was even popularized in limericks, such as this fine one from English writer and artist Oliver Herford: “Said a great congregational preacher / To a hen, ‘You’re a beautiful creature.’ / And the hen, just for that, / Laid an egg in his hat, / And thus did the Hen reward Beecher.”

“Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.”

Master sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward, who designed statues of George Washington at Federal Hall, Horace Greeley in City Hall Park, William Earl Dodge in Bryant Park, Roscoe Conkling in Madison Square Park, and William Shakespeare, the Indian Hunter, and the Pilgrim in Central Park, honored Beecher with a monument dedicated at Borough Hall in 1891 and relocated to Columbus Park in 1959; the face was modeled after a death mask Ward made of Beecher on March 8, 1887, when the minister died at the age of seventy-three.

“Law represents the effort of man to organize society; governments, the efforts of selfishness to overthrow liberty.”

In a closed-off grassy area, Ward’s figure of Beecher stands proudly on a Barre granite plinth designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt. Beecher is dressed in an Inverness cloak, arms at his side, staring off into the distance, his eyes on the future. To his right, a young black woman places a palm branch on the pedestal at his feet, while to his left a pair of white children offer a garland. The unpunctuated inscription on the back reads: “The grateful gift of the multitudes of all classes creeds and conditions at home and abroad to honor the great apostle of the brotherhood of man.” The sculpture was restored in 2017 and 2019 as part of the Municipal Art Society of New York’s Adopt-a-Monument/Mural program.

Henry Ward Beecher monument undergoes restoration in 2019 (photo courtesy Municipal Art Society of New York)

“There is no faculty of the human soul so persistent and universal as that of hatred.”

Beecher, the son of Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher and brother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, is surrounded by several other prominent works, including Anneta Duveen’s 1972 bust of Robert F. Kennedy, S. Hemming’s 1973 bas relief of Brooklyn Bridge builder Washington A. Roebling, a 1965 marker paying tribute to former Brooklyn borough president John Cashmore, and Emma Stebbins’s large-scale 1867 statue of park namesake Christopher Columbus, rising atop a giant plinth by architect Aymar Embury II.

“When a nation’s young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.”

Beecher, who is interred at Green-Wood Cemetery, wrote such books as Notes from Plymouth Pulpit, Summer in the Soul, Yale Lectures on Preaching, Evolution and Religion, and the novel Norwood, or Village Life in New England. One can only wonder what he would say today about what is happening in Brooklyn and all over the world as a pandemic rages among the populace and divides people along political and religious lines.

“We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.”

JEAN-MARIE APPRIOU: THE HORSES

Jean Marie-Appriou’s Public Art Fund commission sits at the entrance to Central park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scholars’ Gate, Doris C. Freedman Plaza
Central Park entrance, 60th St. & Fifth Ave.
Through August 30, free
www.publicartfund.org
online slideshow

Most of us rarely see horses without a human on top of them or pulling a carriage. A jockey on a racehorse. A cowboy galloping across the plains. An equestrian jumping at Madison Square Garden. A cop at a parade. At Grand Army Plaza near the Sixtieth St. entrance to Central Park on Fifth Ave., William Tecumseh Sherman sits proudly on his horse Ontario in Augustus Saint Gaudens’s shimmering, gilded 1903 bronze monument of the Civil War hero, rising high on Charles McKim’s granite base, led by the figure of a crowned Victory. Nearby, hansom cab drivers line up to take lovers and families on carriage rides through the park, a controversial profession that continued to operate well into the coronavirus epidemic. “As we face an unprecedented crisis of contagion, it is shocking that carriage drivers still cram tourists into small carriages and give them shared, reused blankets, with the driver seated just inches ahead of them,” Alec Baldwin wrote in a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio when they were still in business. “This reckless disregard may well fuel the spread of the coronavirus to both New Yorkers and unwitting visitors from across the country.” NYC Horse Carriage Rides ultimately announced they were shutting down on March 25.

“Le Guerrier” (“The Warrior”) displays his unique headgear in equine installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Near the troublesome spectacle of the carriages and the majestic equestrian Sherman, French artist Jean Marie-Appriou has installed his first New York City public commission, The Horses at Scholars’ Gate on Doris C. Freedman Plaza, at the start of the path that leads to the zoo. The thirty-three-year-old Paris-based sculptor references multiple aspects of Equus ferus in the cast aluminum work, which consists of three parts that incorporate Symbolism, mythology, and a touch of alchemy.

Jean Marie-Appriou’s The Horses invites visitors to walk under, around, and through them (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The trio of silvery sculptures is centered by “Le Guerrier” (“The Warrior”), a sixteen-foot-high armored horse that has twisted its skinny body to form a gateway into and out of the park. On one side of it is “Les Amants au Bois” (“The Lovers in the Woods”), the bottom half of two horses, melded together, their flat tops like vacant plinths. On the other side is “Le Joueur” (“The Player”), relaxing on the ground like a caped Sphinx waiting to be worshiped. The detail on the horses is impressive, from their hooves to the shaffron and ribcage of horse heads of “Les Amants au Bois,” from the intricate leaves and bugs on “Le Joueur” to the bumps and thumbprints that reveal the hand of the artist and the casting process, which involved clay and foam models.

Detailed inspection of The Horses offers cool surprises (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

“The playful horse, the war horse, they are not horses as they are often represented in art history, as very brave,” Appriou, who has also installed outdoor works in France, Switzerland, and Miami, explains in a Public Art Fund video. “They are crouching, they are a bit scared, they hang their heads as they are approaching the spectator. It’s more like horses stepping down from the base, that do not radiate power, nor are they objects that valorize a soldier or a general.”

Augustus Saint Gaudens’s golden statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman can be seen through “Le Guerrier” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Passersby are encouraged to interact with the horses, even invited to sit on “Le Joueur,” although you should probably avoid that during the coronavirus pandemic. But you can walk under, through, and around them and glory in the sheer beauty and grandeur of the animals. It’s tempting to think about hopping on one of them and riding off into the sunset, like at the end of a Clint Eastwood Western, venturing into another world, far away from the myriad challenges of this one, amid echoes of Richard III crying out, “A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”

JUDITH WELLER: THE GARMENT WORKER

The Garment Worker keeps toiling away at 555 Seventh Avenue Plaza (photo by twi-ny/ees)

555 Seventh Avenue Plaza
Permanent installation
www.publicartfund.org

“Could it be that living through the time of coronavirus will reconfigure the organisation of fashion, fundamentally changing how brands practice their role? I hope it can be so,” Sarah Mower writes in a March 25 article for British Vogue. During the pandemic, many fashionistas, from major corporations to DIY home sewers, have stepped up to make masks, gloves, and other items for health-care workers on the front lines of the battle to stave off the infectious disease known as Covid-19.

The garment industry has been a centerpiece of American ingenuity since the 1800s. An enormous influx of immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century toiled in the industry, often in sweatshops churning out clothing and other items. Israeli-born, New York-based artist Judith Weller honored the immigrant employees with her eight-foot-high statue The Garment Worker, a tribute to her father, a garment industry machine operator. Weller expanded the piece from its original twenty-four-inch height; the large-scale sculpture was commissioned by the Public Art Fund and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and donated to the city of New York by a wide range of garmentos, from Anne Klein, Bill Blass, Ellen Tracy, Liz Claiborne, and Ralph Lauren to the Amalgamated Clothing & Textile Workers Union, the Association of Rain Apparel Contractors, the Jewish Community Fund, the Ladies Apparel Contractors Association, and United Tool, among others. “When I was a little girl, I recall seeing him at work,” Weller said of her father at the time of the installation, which was initially scheduled to run from October 31, 1984, to the following Halloween but is now permanent. “I utilized what I know of him as well as my memory in creating the sculpture.”

Judith Weller honors her Jewish immigrant father with statue (photo by twi-ny/ees

Popular Garment District sculpture reveals skill and determination of fashion industry workers (photo by twi-ny/ees)

The bronze man, wearing a yarmulke, sits determinedly at his sewing machine, carefully stitching fabric. He’s focused on his hands, which delicately push down on the material; the table he works on is open to reveal his legs and feet. The drudgery is apparent on his stern face, as is his dedication to his task. Perhaps today the man would be making masks and gloves to save the lives of New Yorkers and other Americans. “The human figure expresses my struggle, anxiety, frustration, yearning, and hope. It offers unlimited and inexhaustible possibilities,” Weller explains in her artist statement.

The Garment Worker continues to work every day in the shadow of the giant button and needle that lean on the Garment District Information Kiosk at the corner of Thirty-Ninth St. and Seventh Ave. (Fashion Ave.). He is no mere relic of the past but a reminder of who we all are and where we came from, and what we can do to maintain the country’s ever-more-fragile infrastructure.

Judith Weller honors her Jewish immigrant father with statue (photo by twi-ny/ees)

“The big question is whether this spontaneous surge of human spirit, practicality, and creativity will grow strongly enough, for long enough, to turn fashion’s priorities around,” Mower writes in British Vogue. “Will this nightmare time actually become a historic and positive turning point, converting both industry producers and wearers to, literally, a new way of seeing and valuing clothes? There’s a possibility that all these weeks of staying at home will result in discovering a streak of waste-not creativity we never knew we had.” That evaluation is right on the button, hitting the . nail on the head.

BALTO

Heroic sled dog Balto stands ready for action in Central Park (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Central Park
West of East Drive & 67th St.
www.centralparknyc.org
balto slideshow

If only we had a hero like Balto now, a brave sled dog racing to deliver a magic elixir that would save us from the deadly coronavirus. There’s no medicine yet to cure the world of COVID-19, but in 1925, Siberian husky Balto, leading the team of musher Gunnar Kassen, galloped into Nome, Alaska, with a diphtheria antitoxin to help defeat a horrible outbreak of the killer disease.

New York City could use a hero like Balto right about now (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Named after Norwegian Sámi explorer Samuel Johannesen Balto, who traversed Greenland with Fridtjof Nansen in 1888, Balto was born in Nome in 1919 and died in 1933 in Cleveland, where his remains are mounted in the city’s Museum of Natural History. On December 17, 1925, Brooklyn-born sculptor Frederick G. R. Roth’s statue of Balto was dedicated on a small outcropping of rock west of East Dr. and Sixty-Seventh St. in Central Park, near an underpass north of the children’s zoo. The regal dog stands proudly, tongue out, eyes eagerly anticipating his next job, his front paws higher than his back paws, giving him a noble position. His ears, back, and belly have lost some of their original dark color because kids and adults rub them for good luck. Balto himself attended the statue’s unveiling, with Kassen. On the rock below the classy canine is a plaque that reads:

“Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles over rough ice across treacherous waters through arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the winter of 1925. Endurance Fidelity Intelligence.”

Roth also designed the Mother Goose statue, featuring Humpty Dumpty, Old King Cole, Little Jack Horner, Mother Hubbard, and Mary and her little lamb, that resides in front of Rumsey Playfield, as well as the bronze lion at Columbia University’s Baker Field. Balto, who was neutered and therefore could not be bred, has also been immortalized in Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge comic book (as “Barko”), in Alistair MacLean’s 1959 novel Night without End, and in Simon Wells’s 1995 animated live-action film, Balto, in which he’s voiced by Kevin Bacon.

Balto attended the dedication of his statue in Central Park in 1925 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Most of us are sheltered at home, but if you have to go out — as of now, parks are open, and sunshine and fresh air are healthy alternatives to being shut inside, as long as you maintain social distancing — stop by and say hello to Balto, although you’re probably better off not petting him. And just imagine him leading a pack bringing in much-needed gloves, masks, respirators, and ventilators, helping humanity once again in another dramatic health crisis.

COVID-19 & NEW YORK CITY ARTS AND CULTURE

Since May 2001, twi-ny has been recommending cool things to do throughout the five boroughs, popular and under-the-radar events that draw people out of their homes to experience film, theater, dance, art, literature, music, food, comedy, and more as part of a live audience in the most vibrant community on Earth.

With the spread of Covid-19 and the closing of all cultural institutions, sports venues, bars, and restaurants (for dining in), we feel it is our duty to prioritize the health and well-being of our loyal readers. So, for the next several weeks at least, we won’t be covering any public events in which men, women, and children must congregate in groups, a more unlikely scenario day by day anyway.

That said, as George Bernard Shaw once noted, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

Some parks are still open, great places to breathe in fresh air, feel the sunshine, and watch the changing of winter into spring. We will occasionally be pointing out various statues, sculptures, and installations, but check them out only if you are already going outside and will happen to be nearby.

You don’t have to shut yourself away completely for the next weeks and months — for now, you can still go grocery shopping and pick up takeout — but do think of others as you go about your daily life, which is going to be very different for a while. We want each and every one of you to take care of yourselves and your families, follow the guidelines for social distancing, and consider the health and well-being of those around you.

We look forward to seeing you indoors and at festivals and major outdoor events as soon as possible, once New York, America, and the rest of the planet are ready to get back to business. Until then, you can find us every so often under the sun, moon, clouds, and stars, finding respite in this amazing city now in crisis.

FIRST SATURDAY: GEOGRAPHIES OF GENDER

Naima Green will discuss her feminist card game, Pur·suit, after which attendees can play with the decks (photo © Naima Green)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 7, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors Women’s History Month for its free First Saturday March gathering with “Geographies of Gender,” programs dealing with issues of gender, queerness, and color. There will be live performances by Thelma, Christopher Unpezverde Núñez (the autobiographical Yo, Obsolete), Ushamami, DJ Sabine Blaizin, Brown Girls Burlesque (Black Femme Warrior, with Hoodoo Hussy, Chicava Honeychild, Dakota Mayhem, Skye Syren, Genie Adagio, Delysia La Chatte, and Burgandy Jones), Hanae Utamura (A Letter from Future Past [The Pacific]), and Sammus; an artist talk with Naima Green, Caroline Washington, Rin Kim Ni, and Sable Elyse Smith about Green’s Pur·suit, followed by card games using decks with portraits of queer women and trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people; teen apprentice pop-up talks focusing on gender themes in the Arts of Asia galleries; a curator tour of “Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection” led by curators Catherine Morris and Carmen Hermo; a hands-on art workshop where participants can make textile collages inspired by “Out of Place”; a Belladonna* poetry reading with S*an D. Henry-Smith, Giannina Braschi, and Jesse Rice-Evans; and a night market of Brooklyn vendors with goods made by local women and nonbinary artists. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley,” “Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “African Arts — Global Conversations,” “JR: Chronicles,” “Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks,” “Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas,” and more.

HENRY CHALFANT: ART vs. TRANSIT, 1977-1987

Henry Chalfant’s train photos fill up a wall and more at Bronx Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St.
Through March 8, free
718-681-6000
www.bronxmuseum.org

In 1985, the MTA began its Arts for Transit and Urban Design program (now known as MTA Arts & Design), connecting art with public transportation. But before that, art and transit went together like oil and water; hence the name of a fab exhibit that continues at the Bronx Museum through March 8, “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977–1987,” the title of which was also inspired by the late graffiti artist SHY147. After arriving in New York City from Pittsburgh in 1973 and beginning as a sculptor, Chalfant was quickly enamored with street art, train graffiti, and hip-hop culture and started documenting it. Since train graffiti was impermanent — in addition to the MTA relentlessly trying to clean trains, other taggers and writers would spray paint right over existing tags — his photographs often became the only evidence of the work, so much so that soon graffiti artists would call him up to ask him to take pictures of trains and buildings they’d tagged. Chalfant would go to aboveground stations such as Intervale Avenue and East Tremont on the 2 and 5 lines and take multiple photos with his 35mm camera as trains whizzed by; he would then develop the photos and splice them together to create panoramic shots of full trains.

Duster UA visits re-creation of Henry Chalfant’s SoHo studio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

This first US museum retrospective, which was curated by Spanish graffiti artist SUSO33 for the Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente in Madrid, includes dozens of Chalfant’s long, rectangular photographs, hung on the walls one above another, from floor to ceiling, exploding in a glorious blaze of colors and shapes, with wild lettering and cartoonish characters. Among the artists whose work he preserved on film are Dondi, Futura, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Blade, Crash, DAZE, Dez, Kel, Mare, SEEN, Skeme, and T-Kid, some of whom are interviewed for a short film made by multimedia, multidisciplinary artist, producer, and chronicler Sacha Jenkins. I was fortunate enough to watch the film, which is screened continuously within a re-creation of Chalfant’s SoHo studio, alongside a graffiti artist who added biting commentary about some of the figures in the film and pointed out one of his pieces as it passed by.

Life-size cloth murals are arranged like train cars at the Bronx museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In the back room, a series of wooden structures are covered with full-length cloth murals to replicate spray-painted subway cars at actual size, while dozens of Chalfant’s photos are projected at the top of a wall at one end of the room, roaring into the station, then pulling out, complete with sound effects. Also on view are some of Chalfant’s notebooks and more than a hundred photographs of the burgeoning street hip-hop culture as well as newspaper and magazine articles and other ephemera. “The story of the neglected children of NYC, victims of poverty, racism, poor schools lacking art and music instruction who overcame their circumstances with creative expression, is a powerful and inspiring one,” Chalfant says in the beautiful bilingual catalog. “There are plenty of examples in the various cultures that emerged from the mean streets of New York that have been a powerful inspiration to youth everywhere. I’m happy and proud to be bringing it home.” The catalog also features essays by Jenkins, Sharp, SUSO33, and Carlos Mare.

Chalfant, a Stanford grad whose 1984 collaboration with Martha Cooper, Subway Art, is the bible of the genre and who coproduced with director Tony Silver the seminal 1983 documentary Style Wars, did the world a great service by capturing these works of art, which turned drab silver train cars into canvases of free expression, where men and women on the margins could scream out for all to experience. Be on the lookout for such photos as “Dondi,” “EYE JAMMIE by AOne,” “Mad (by Seen),” “Style Wars by Noc 167,” and “Stop the Bomb.”

Exhibit extends past New York and into other cities where hip-hop and graffiti blossomed (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

On March 6, the Bronx Museum will host a free screening of Chalfant’s award-winning 2006 documentary, From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale; advance registration is recommended here. Also at the museum is the eye-opening “José Parlá: It’s Yours,” a major solo show by the Miami-born, longtime Bronx resident and former street artist known as “Ease”; his dazzling paintings and collages require up-close viewing to fully experience his exploration of gentrification and systemic racism while also celebrating street art and the Bronx.