Also this week in the Omnibus roundup: Kimmelman looks at towers in the park; New York goes convention center crazy; Verdant Power gets a green light for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project; President Obama forsakes infrastructure investment in “An America Built to Last”; the Asian American Writers’ Workshop calls for Creative Nonfiction Fellows; the South Street Seaport Museum reopens; Studio-X hosts a discussion on Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic trash tubes; the DOT calls for public art proposals; and Lead Pencil Studio exhibits in Boston.

“ARCHITECTURE IS NEVER DESTINY”
A viewing of the The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary by Chad Freidrichs, prompted Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, to question the limits of architecture’s role in determining the success of failure of a public housing project. The piece once again confirms the writer’s commitment to interrogating the social and urbanistic implications of the built environment. He contrasts the fates of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis — a complex whose rapid descent from model low-income housing community to a national symbol of urban deprivation and crime led to its demolition in 1972 — with Penn South — an example in Chelsea of the same towers-in-the-park building typology that has, according to the residents Kimmelman interviews, thrived. He notes that part of Penn South’s success has to do with the ways it serves the needs of older residents, which led to its official designation as a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, or NORC, in 1986 (the nation’s first). Using the phenomenon of NORCs as a lens through which to reconsider towers-in-the-park — a typology maligned in the popular imagination specifically because of examples like Pruitt-Igoe – is an argument that the urban design firm Interboro introduced to Omnibus readers in “NORCs in NYC.” Read that feature again, wander by Penn South or some of the other NORCs in the city, and then go see The Pruitt-Igoe Myth at the IFC Center.

WAIT, HOW MANY CONVENTION CENTERS DOES NEW YORK NEED AGAIN?
If the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe signalled an end to a particular philosophy of urban problem-solving, what would the demolition of the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue in Manhattan signify? Especially if Governor Cuomo gets his wish of a replacement venue — intended to be the nation’s largest — at the site of the Aqueduct racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens, a place whose vibrant flea market we visited just before redevelopment plans shut it down for good. Skepticism about the long-term financial viability of a convention center has not dimmed the governor’s enthusiasm for the project. Nor has the new plan changed Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s mind about the need for a second convention center in Willets Point. Critics of both projects cite evidence that this kind of megaproject is rarely the panacea it claims to be, an economic analysis explored in depth in this 2009 article in Next American City.

Power Grid Scenarios | Illustration: Michael Loverich for Urban Omnibus, "East River Power," February 9th, 2009

GREEN LIGHT FOR TIDAL POWER 
The kind of urban infrastructure investment that looks forward rather than looking back is one that capitalizes on New York’s unique assets and seeks to provide viable and affordable energy alternatives. In the hope that tidal power might be the energy source to make that possible, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission awarded Verdant Power Inc. the first license for a tidal energy project for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project, or RITE. Verdant will use the ten year pilot contract to test the commercial viability of the project as well as the environmental impact on fish and the river’s sediment. In an Urban Omnibus feature from way back in 2009, “East River Power,” we looked at some of the questions that the prospect of tidal power raised for New York City’s waterways, and for the framework of energy generation and distribution. As the first grid-tied system of tidal turbines, RITE will hopefully be a sign of things to come. Read more at Bloomberg and Inhabitat.

AN AMERICA BUILT TO LAST, SORT OF
Infrastructure investment was once a policy priority for President Obama, but was all but absent from his State of the Union Speech this week, entitled, “An America Built to Last.” Gone are the promises of high-speed rail included in his 2011 speech; gone was mention of an urban agenda. The President did cite America’s past endeavors to revitalize its economy during the Great Depression through large-scale building projects like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or to knit the nation together through the interstate highway system after World War II. But the larger focus of the address, the point to which he returned again and again, was to try to bridge the chasm between the two parties and redress growing income inequality. Check out more of the coverage at The Atlantic Cities and The Transport Politic.

South Street Seaport Museum | Photo by Andrew Hinderaker via dnainfo.com

EVENTS and TO DOs

OPEN CITY CALL FOR NONFICTION FELLOWS
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is about to start a new year of its Open City project, profiled last year on the Omnibus, for which a competitively selected group of writers documents and reflects on urban change in the three New York Chinatowns. The call for Creative Nonfiction Fellows has just been announced, so if you’re an emerging creative nonfiction writer passionate about New York City neighborhoods, apply today. The application deadline is February 17. Check out the call here.

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM REOPENS
The South Street Seaport Museum is reopening this week after an eight-month hiatus during which the museum was renovated to respond to its expanded scope under the creative direction and management of The Museum of the City of New York, which has thrown its full weight into the project. The re-opened space aims to connect more powerfully with its surrounding neighborhood, avail itself of the top two floors as exhibition space, and make the museum more easily navigable through signage and other measures. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

TRASH TUBES OF THE FUTURE
A couple of years ago we spoke to Juliette Spertus about her exhibition Fast Trash, about the Roosevelt Island AVAC (Automated Vacuum Collection System). Since then, she and Benjamin Miller have been studying the feasibility of upgrading Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system and also expanding the system to Manhattan using existing transportation infrastructure. Join them as they discuss their preliminary findings, followed by a discussion on the future of waste disposal in New York City featuring Vishaan Chakrabarti, Claire Weisz, Marcia Byrstryn, Juliette Spertus and Benjamin Miller. Tuesday, February 7, 6:30-8:30pm, at Studio-X. More information available here or here.

URBAN ART CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The New York City DOT has announced its open call for proposals for their pARTners and Barrier Beautification Projects. Both projects seek to create a more livable city with public art. The Barrier Beautification project asks artists to imagine how they would decorate the barriers that have become necessary in our bike friendly city, separating bikers, pedestrians and drivers from one another. For pARTners, the DOT commissions artists to produce site-responsive art in collaboration with community-based organizations for high priority sites owned by the agency. Check out the full call for proposals.

LEAD PENCIL STUDIO HITS BOSTON
Back in April we spoke to Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio about their firm’s work with LIDAR. For our Boston area readers, Lead Pencil Studio will be in Edifice Amiss: Constructing New Perspectives, an exhibition about the constructed world opening January 30th at the Stephen D. Paine Gallery of MassArt. The works in the exhibition reveal the secret lives of the architectural spaces in which we live and work. More information available here.

Lead Pencil Studio in Edifice Amiss

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The Andrew Freedman Home at 1125 Grand Concourse | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

A large, imposing and seemingly abandoned mansion occupies an entire block on the Grand Concourse between 166th and McClellan Streets in the Bronx. The building — a neo-Renaissance, limestone palazzo behind a black iron fence and a large, tree-shaded lawn — stands apart from the neighboring apartment buildings and the stately street wall of the boulevard. Across from the Bronx Museum and just a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, the Andrew Freedman Home looks, at first glance, like an uninhabited relic forgotten during the decades of the Grand Concourse’s decline from grandeur. But closer inspection reveals a range of community-oriented activities that will be amplified this spring, when No Longer Empty, a young and nomadic cultural institution dedicated to bringing contemporary art to underutilized spaces throughout New York City, invites the public inside to experience a contemporary art exhibition of 30 new works that weave evocations of the building’s unique history into interpretations of contemporary realities in the Bronx.

Andrew Freedman, a self-made millionaire financier who died in 1915, left much of his fortune to build the place as a retirement home for formerly wealthy people who had lost their fortunes, so that these newly indigent could spend their final years in the manner to which they were accustomed: dinners served in banquet halls by servants with white gloves, readings in a wood-paneled library, entertainment in the billiard, card or ball rooms. The Home operated on this vision from 1924 until the 1970s, when mounting operational costs and a dwindling endowment forced it to charge for accommodations. In 1984, the facility was purchased by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council (MBSCC), a non-profit formed by local residents in 1973 to provide direct services to the elderly and disabled that has since grown into a property developer of low- and moderate-income housing with a portfolio of 28 buildings throughout the Bronx and a suite of programs in economic development and children and family services. MBSCC attempted to re-start the retirement home under a more inclusive model in 1985, but the endeavor eventually proved unsustainable, and activity was restricted to the refurbished lower ground floor, where a Head Start program, a day care center and a job resource center operate at a remove from the vestiges of both luxury and penury upstairs. The function rooms on the main floor are recently refurbished. The bedrooms on the higher floors have been abandoned for almost 25 years, and amid the chipping paint and splintering furniture are the personal effects of former residents, from postcards to upright pianos, and the professional equipment of a nursing home, from medical cabinets to beehive hairdryers. It’s not hard to imagine how the combination of grand spaces and ghostly absences could inspire visual artists. And Manon Slome and Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, the founder / president and executive director of No Longer Empty respectively, have been hard at work since last September making that happen.

No Longer Empty’s mission, as Slome and Hersson-Ringskog explain in the interview below, is to use the presentation of contemporary art as a mechanism for community revitalization — through partnership with local institutions, increased activity and awareness from non-local visitors, and innovative live programming that engages both. This process corresponds well to MBSCC’s current plans for the site. According to Walter Puryear, who manages much of MBSCC’s real estate and is responsible for the development of several ambitious new programs, in order for the organization to realize its mission of comprehensive community development, the long-term employability of local residents is an urgent priority. The vision for the Andrew Freedman Home includes an array of ambitious workforce development initiatives, including training programs for culinary and hospitality services (in coordination with the opening of a bed and breakfast currently under construction in one wing of the building), a small business incubator, a media center and a green technology training institute. In the meantime, make plans to visit the building in its current state this April, when No Longer Empty’s new exhibition, This Side of Paradise, opens to the public.

- C.S.

The Library at the Andrew Freedman Home

Tell me about No Longer Empty. How did the organization come to be?
Manon Slome: As a curator, my interest has long been the intersection of art and social issues. I founded No Longer Empty in April 2009 and since then we’ve organized 12 exhibitions throughout the boroughs. Before that, I worked at the Guggenheim and at the Chelsea Art Museum, where I was chief curator. But when I started I wasn’t out to set up an organization, I was just thinking about an exhibition and a site for it. It was around the time of Lehman’s collapse and the broader economic crisis, and I was walking down Madison Avenue noticing how many storefronts were empty and how even the active businesses were empty of customers. I began to conceive of an exhibition called Empty, and when I thought about where to do it, an empty storefront seemed like a great space.

A friend offered us a storefront adjacent to the Chelsea Hotel, a former fishing tackle store. We put on a show of ten artists’ work in a very short amount of time, and given the store’s history and the fishing-related artifacts that were left in the space, we worked around a maritime theme. For example, the artist Michael Bevilacqua’s piece referenced the drowning of the economy in nautical terms. We found the notion of responding to the site to be very evocative.

Installation view of "No Longer Empty in Chelsea Hotel," June - July 2009 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

What was most interesting to me was the reaction of people wandering down 23rd Street who popped their heads in and asked questions. We found that people who might not normally go to a gallery or a museum were comfortable coming to see this, and were interested in the work and in engaging in conversation about it. As a curator, there’s very little interaction with visitors built into the traditional processes of an art exhibition. For me, being present and available for conversation with visitors was very interesting.

After that, we were offered a second space in the Meatpacking District. It was a brand new condominium building with a vacant retail space. So, contrary to the fishing tackle store with its rich history, here was a site with no history. So we decided to reference the idea of a community in transition. We called the exhibition Reflecting Transformation and a lot of the works explored the notion of a neighborhood turning over and what that meant.

At that exhibition, we had our first panel discussion with thought leaders in public art, to probe the nature of what we were doing. The notion of a storefront as a semi-private, semi-public space was interesting to us; and orienting the exhibitions towards a wide public was very important for us. This launched our programming, which has since expanded to include children’s programming, artist-led workshops, roundtable discussions with the artists, and more. The programming and the community engagement became as important to us as the exhibitions.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog: The art can have multiple purposes, and every time we go into a new neighborhood, we are actively figuring out how art is going to be used differently in a new context.

Slome: For example, when we held a show in the former Tower Records Store on Broadway and 4th Street, visitors’ nostalgia for the record store where they hung out in college informed their experience of an exhibition curated around themes of music and the changing nature of music distribution.

Hersson-Ringskog: Or when we did a show on Governors Island, at which a lot of visitors remarked on the magic of being brought into a house that was otherwise vacant to see art that referenced the history, the past, the people that lived there, or what the island might be without human inhabitants.

"The Island of Dr Mastrovito" by Andrea Mastrovito at "The Sixth Borough," Governors Island, June - October 2010 | Photo by Kathy Zeiger for No Longer Empty

How does your community research process typically work?
Slome: I come from an arts background and Naomi comes from an urban planning background, so our working together is a fabulous marriage of disciplines for community-based work.

When we go into a neighborhood, the first thing we do is get to know the organizations with deep roots in the community and partner with them to provide programming, to bring new people and new ideas to the community. And often community organizations are strapped financially, so our collaborative process is quite valued.

Take the Andrew Freedman Home as an example, which has a very particular history. All of that influences our ideas of what we might do here. First, you can’t ignore the history. But you also don’t want simply to mirror that history. This enormous abandoned building is a white elephant as it is on the Grand Concourse, so you don’t want merely to accentuate that. Rather, we want the exhibition to merge the history of the Andrew Freedman Home with the current day realities of the Bronx.

A third floor bedroom at the Andrew Freedman Home

Any representations of the Bronx have to contend with the borough’s history of disinvestment and poverty and also the feeling that everything that’s not wanted in Manhattan is pushed onto the Bronx. This led to a good discussion about the title. Poor, in Style was our working title, but then we moved onto This Side of Paradise with all of its associations with F. Scott Fitzgerald, with 1920s ideas of class and the class loyalty that Andrew Freedman embodied, and with the ambiguous, ironic notion that we assume Manhattan is the paradise and the Bronx is something else, so let’s see how we can shift that.

We did a lot of research into the art that’s produced here. We didn’t want to create a show of exclusively Bronx-based artists; we didn’t want to make another kind of ghetto. But we learned about some phenomenal local work. And we learned about some fabulous organizations working in choreography and music. Obviously, the legacy of the Bronx as the birthplace of hip-hop is incredibly important. All that will be reflected in the exhibition.

One of the things we’ve found in the Bronx is that it is a very fragmented borough. It is easier to get from here to Manhattan than it is to get to parts of the South Bronx. So it became very apparent that if we wanted people outside of the immediate vicinity to know about the show, we should partner with cultural organizations in other Bronx neighborhoods and work on transportation and cross-promotion. We’re going to be meeting with the Bronx Tourism Council to think about how we can realistically shuttle people around to various locations.

Beehive hair dryers on the fourth floor of the Andrew Freedman Home

Hersson-Ringskog: We’re exploring whether it’s possible to establish a pilot program that addresses the mobility issues here, like a bike-sharing program. Being able to move between different cultural organizations is an important aspect of having a vibrant arts scene.

An alliance is being formed called the Bronx Cultural Alliance, which will create a structure for collaborations between organizations like Wave Hill in Riverdale, the Point in the South Bronx, Lehman College in Bedford Park, Hostos College in the South Bronx, and others. The point is to create a tighter-knit cultural landscape in the borough.

Tell me about your curatorial process?
Slome: Most works we present, about 70%, are commissioned. The basis of our curatorial work is site-responsive or site-specific. In most cases, we already have interest in the artist to begin with: I’ve done a studio visit; I know the work. And because the sites we go into are non-traditional sites, there’s often phenomenal opportunities for the artists to create outside the box.

Community revitalization is also a part of your mission, how does that factor into your process?
Hersson-Ringskog: We take a potential liability to a neighborhood corridor – an empty building or inactive business can bring down a neighborhood’s quality of life by reducing foot traffic – and activate it with artwork, and with live programs that engage the community: panel discussions, children’s workshops, music or dance performances. In this way, we are advocating for interim use, for a more nimble, flexible and creative city. In addition to curating and producing the exhibition, we also research what’s unique about the area and create cultural maps that indicate to exhibition visitors all of the other cultural opportunities available in the vicinity – from parks to other art organizations to stores or restaurants.

A second floor corridor at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: We encourage our audience to discover the area. So we might arrange some sort of discount to a local restaurant for exhibition visitors, or try other kinds of things to keep foot traffic up and to keep people patronizing local businesses.

Hersson-Ringskog: And we track these effects through head counts, through measuring increased foot traffic and evaluating collaborations. Our research and analysis allows us a distinct and deep understanding of the site, the building details, and the area where it’s located. And we are able to relay some of that understanding back to the property owners. Further down the road, it would be interesting for No Longer Empty to have an arm that could advise on community conscious retailing or to provide other insights into community revitalization that emerge from our process.

In terms of the legacy of the projects we work on, the Bronx Cultural Alliance is a fantastic initiative that will continue forward. Art in Empty Spaces is another legacy project, where we work with Manhattan’s Community Board 3 to take No Longer Empty’s model and scale it up.

Postcards on a bedroom wall at the Andrew Freedman Home

Slome: The community board learned that storeowners and residents weren’t happy about the vacancy rates in the area. So they asked us to match arts groups up with these empty spaces and then to create a program that would get visitors to visit them. An organization we’ve talked to here in the Bronx is WHEDco, the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, which is working on a new site on Southern Boulevard. WHEDco surveyed how many local dollars are going out of the community because of the lack of stores and services. They’ve asked for our advice on how to activate the storefronts under an elevated rail-line, to get the community to recognize the stores’ existence in order to increase foot traffic and eventually attract the kind of retail they need. If you can draw foot traffic for an exhibition, you can demonstrate the demand for the right kind of retail.

If you produce quality programming, people will come. I’m always very concerned with issue of legacy.

Hersson-Ringskog: And after we conjure up an exhibition and programming, in the long term we are also giving people an opportunity to dream. People come into an exhibition and see a space transformed. I think that’s where, perhaps, crowdsourcing could come in: we could create opportunities for visitors to share their vision for the site or the area.

We are a young organization with a clear mission of knitting a vibrant cultural landscape through art and interim use. We know how to take over empty spaces and turn them into professionally curated art exhibits with programming, but in terms of creating and supporting a cultural landscape that’s sustainable, we’re working towards that, testing and learning different tactics along the way.

An abandoned Christmas tree at the Andrew Freedman Home

Manon Slome (PhD), President and Founder of No Longer Empty, is an independent curator working in New York City. From 2002 to June 2008 she was the Chief Curator of the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. During that time, she curated and oversaw a program of some forty exhibitions, symposia and museum publications as well as monographs and scholarly essays. Ms. Slome became highly involved with the Israeli art scene during her research for the exhibition, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made on, (2005) and has followed and researched the Israeli scene for the last three years. Prior to the CAM, Ms. Slome worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum for seven years and was a holder of a Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study program.

Naomi Hersson-Ringskog, Executive Director of No Longer Empty, has spearheaded community and real estate outreach strategies for No Longer Empty in order to study and measure the effects of art as a tool for re-activating corridors and making a local economic impact. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Masters Program in Urban Planning where she studied urban green sustainability, specifically green roofs. She is also recipient of the William Kinne Fellowship Award. Naomi has also worked for an information architecture firm in Washington DC. Currently serves on the Executive Board of the Columbia University’s Alumni Association.

In 1982, the MTA launched a multi-billion-dollar capital improvement program to rehabilitate the transit system. During that campaign, in 1985, a program was created to introduce original and integrated artworks into MTA stations and spaces and to promote design excellence as part of the rebuilding effort: Arts for Transit. Today, Arts for Transit oversees a number of programs that bring visual art and performance to the MTA network. They are most well-known for the Permanent Art program, which incorporates commissioned works of art into capital construction or renovation projects throughout NYC Transit, Metro-North Railroad, Long Island Rail Road and NYC Bridges & Tunnels. But their work isn’t limited to the permanent, or even the visual. They showcase the work of photographers in rotating temporary exhibitions, fill unused advertising space with posters by illustrators and other visual artists, and present thousands of musical performances annually at 25 subway and train stations.

Last week, we had a chance to speak with Arts for Transit Director Sandra Bloodworth, an artist herself, who first joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager, before becoming deputy director in 1992 and then director in 1996. While sitting in front of the newly-installed Sol LeWitt in the 59th Street-Columbus Circle station, we talked about the power of art to help turn a failing system around, activate spaces of infrastructure, and improve rider experience and quality of life.

- V.S.

Times Square Mural (2002) © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Times Square–42nd Street Station, A, C, E, N, Q, R, S, 1, 2, 3, 7 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell us about Arts for Transit and your role there.
I am the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The role of Arts for Transit is really two-fold. One part is arts — visual and performing, the temporary poster program, the Art Cards, Lightbox, and the larger mission of commissioning permanent art for stations being rehabilitated under a capital program. We have over 230 works of art installed in MTA NYC Transit, Long Island Rail Road, Metro North, and MTA Bridges and Tunnels’ facilities.

The other hat we wear is that of urban design and promoting design excellence in the agency. We advocate that good design does not have to cost more money. In fact, really excellent design can save you money. The best example of how we work in that role is what happened when the MTA decided to implement vending machines for MetroCard sales. The MTA wanted to make sure riders not only accepted the new system, but saw it as a good option, a better option. In conjunction with NYC Transit, Arts for Transit worked with the designers, Antenna Design, to ensure the machines were user friendly, appealing, and not incongruous with the station environment. The machines were installed in 1999 and they have served us quite well. People like them and use them. And they showed that a government agency can change how it does business in a positive way.

Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Clock (1992) © R. M. Fischer, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Paul Warchol.

In a way, the same thing is true with the art installations, though that’s a less definable topic. We started introducing art into the subway environment at a time when the system was on the brink of collapse, in the mid-1980s. The concept of putting art into that environment was a novel idea.

Around that time, New York City’s Percent for Art legislation was passed, which requires that one percent of the budget of capital projects is allocated for art. Even before that was passed into law, the MTA knew it was pending and used that momentum to advance the idea of dramatically changing the underground environment. Ronay Menschel, an MTA board member at the time, was the one who realized this would need to be managed internally and played a key role in establishing Arts for Transit. Wendy Feuer was hired as the founding director. Arts for Transit immediately engaged with the role of aesthetics within the architecture and industrial design of the MTA, and advanced the idea that if we’re going to spend real money on improving the system, let’s be sure to design it well.

What was the intent in installing quality artwork in the transit system? Did you want to enrich the community experience? Did you want to interrupt the routine commute and make people engage with the space?
It engages the public, yes, but it also sends a huge message that someone truly cares about this space and, accordingly, about the riders. People see the MTA as this big, anonymous agency. They might recognize some of the leadership from the press, but they don’t often think about the people that are behind the scenes, the architects, the engineers, the Arts for Transit folks, the designers, the rapid transit guys, all of these people that get up every day to make this all happen, or, in the mid-‘80s and ‘90s, were driven to turn this place around. Introducing quality art tells the public that there are all these people invested in the space.

Blooming (1996) © Elizabeth Murray, Lexington Avenue–59th Street Station, 4, 5, 6, F, N, R lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

These are works by the same artists you see in museums — Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Elizabeth Murray — but now you can see them on your way to the museums. Elizabeth was one of the first major recognized artists that did a project with us. She waived her fee and gave the public a phenomenal project at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. When developing the collection, if you will, we don’t only look to the art world. We also look to who is riding the trains and using these spaces — and those worlds very often overlap. The real challenge is to select works that speak to the ridership, that have a relevance to the place where they are installed. And I mean that in a more conceptual way, I’m not talking about only pictoral images referencing the site, like Heins & LaFarge’s depictions of Columbus’ caravel over on the Columbus Circle IRT platform — it’s a myth, by the way, that the caravels were meant to provide station information to people who couldn’t read the name tablet. They were purely ornamental.

We’re sitting in front of the perfect example of how the art can be about the people and the place, Sol LeWitt’s “Whirls and twirls (MTA)” at 59th Street-Columbus Circle. LeWitt captured the movement of the subway, the flow of people through the station. When you look at this artwork, you feel the motion around you, the energy — and the riders get it, it’s intuitive, we don’t have to explain it.

We’ve always felt that it’s not our role to be a gallery. We are creating work that becomes a daily part of people’s lives, as they travel their same route every day — or, when they take a different route, we want them to be excited about seeing something new.

Whirls and twirls (MTA) (2009) © Sol LeWitt, 59th Street-Columbus Circle Station, A, B, C, D, 1 lines, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

How do you identify the artists you want to work with? The commissions range from the renowned, like LeWitt, to the lesser known. What’s the selection process?
At 59th Street-Columbus Circle, we had the opportunity to invite Sol LeWitt to create one of his wall drawings for this station. However, the vast majority of our projects are the result of an extensive selection process defined by MTA policy, with the understanding that we’re procuring artwork.

Every time we do a project we invite artists to submit through an open call on our website. Now, because everything is digital, we keep a bank of entries and review all artists for every project, though we ask artists to notify us if they are particularly interested in any specific commission.

We then have two meetings with a selection panel, which changes each time and is comprised of arts and cultural professionals and community advisors. In conjunction with our government and community relations staff, we work closely with the local community boards, to help us understand what the community wants, and to help us communicate how our work relates to them.

We narrow down the field of artists to about four finalists, who then come in for an orientation on the project. We ground them in the space, the architects provide an overview of the design of the station, and we visit the site. Then, they come back to us with a formal proposal. The voting panel selects the proposed artwork they think is right for that location, work that speaks to the community and is of the highest quality.

The process has served us well. We have an amazing collection from a diverse group of artists, both emerging and established.

Given the quality of the artwork, which you talk about as a true collection, what is your approach to maintenance or conservation, especially considering the pieces are installed in highly-trafficked sites that are difficult to keep clean?
We have always known that there would be limited resources to maintain this collection. So we have been rigid in what we allow to be installed into the system, with some exceptions to allow us to reach beyond what we know. Mosaics, ceramics, glass mosaics, those are durable materials. We’ve seen examples where pieces have lasted for over 100 years. So that was a logical direction to take. Many of our works, certainly our underground works, are ceramics or mosaics.

We also work closely with our Stations Department on how they maintain the pieces, and if there’s ever any question, they call us and we work as a consultant. Arts for Transit maintains and repairs things that we can do ourselves. Beyond that, we just want to make sure that we’re keeping our eyes on everything we’ve installed. Staff members are responsible for visiting a portion of the collection bi-annually to do condition reports. We want to be sure that the art is always in the best shape it can be.

You mentioned that you make some exceptions in the type of work you commission, to learn new things and experiment with different materials and media. What are some examples of that? I know that Leo Villareal will be installing his LED light sculpture “Hive” in the renovated Bleecker Street station…
Leo’s piece is a very good example of the kind of exception I was talking about. We worked with our Chief Electrical Engineer Stan Karoly to make sure that the work is durable and can be maintained routinely. The engineers were very excited about his piece, because it really celebrates their field. So yes, we are trying it out as a pilot, to see what our limits are. We probably can’t have twenty projects like Leo’s, but we can have one!

Union Square in Motion (2011) © Anezka Sebek and Joshua Spodek, with Jeanne Kelly, Hilal Koyuncu, Rose Maison, Umut Ozover, Josefina Santos, and Jaqi Vigil. Lightbox project commissioned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Rob Wilson.

Tell me about some of the temporary projects that fall under the purview of Arts for Transit.
We have a few special projects. For example, we just installed a zoetrope underneath Union Square that was designed by a group of Parsons students. In some ways it is a pilot for us to activate unused advertising space and illustrate how dynamic it can be, and to experiment with new media.

We also have a number of temporary projects that we do on a more routine basis. We have our Transit Poster program and our Art Cards that you see in the trains, which are often created by illustrators and graphic designers. Then we have our Lightbox photography project, which showcases the work of photographers that either relates to transportation, the system or to the local community. Those are on view on the lower level of Grand Central, at the 42nd Street and 6th Avenue station, at Atlantic/Pacific and Bowling Green.

Traveling Dinosaur Chicks (2010) © Takayo Noda. Art Card commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit.

How do you view the interface between the Arts for Transit works and station advertising? Especially as some ads, through technology or design, hover in a more ambiguous creative space — I’m thinking of things like the new 60-foot digital video wall on the other side of this station, currently being used by an Asics ad, or the large MoMA poster installation in the Atlantic/Pacific subway station in 2009.
Yes, advertising is blurring the lines. Those are both 100% advertising campaigns. Some of it is very exciting, but it can be a double-edged sword. We hope that we can capture some of that technology and energy and bring more interactive, video-based works to the public on a limited basis. And it’s no secret that the MTA needs to capture every dollar in order to provide the best service we can. And if any institution has the budget, the funds, to do a campaign, then we support the MTA capturing those dollars.

Also, the visual interface is more than just the advertising and the art. The MTA’s signage is so present in the world’s perception of New York City. If you ask people to visualize words of New York, they’re probably going to see them in Helvetica. We’re an icon of New York now, and it’s important that we keep that in mind when we think about how people interact with these spaces.

Music Under New York performance at 42nd Street-Grand Central

Tell me about the Arts for Transit music program Music Under New York.
There are a lot of myths about Music Under New York. We are not giving licenses or permits to people to play in the subway. Any musician — anyone, really — can go into a subway station and play music or do what they want, as long as they respect the rules of conduct. We are presenting a roster of musicians daily, over 7,000 performances annually, in 25 locations throughout our system, which we identified with our station personnel to make sure we don’t interfere with transit needs. We simply want to present quality music on a regular basis.

We hold auditions every May in Grand Central, and we hold a roster of about 100 acts at any given time. Once you’re in the program, you’re in. For many different reasons musicians move on, so every year we lose about 25 and add about 25.

What are some of the other projects in the works?
We have a number of projects coming up on the Pelham line in the Bronx, and in the Rockaways, either just installed or in the middle of installation. Jason Rohlf will be installing a piece at the Mott Avenue A station. Barbara Grygutis recently did the Whitlock Avenue 6 stop in the Bronx, which received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society’s MASterworks this year — it’s a remarkable project. Barbara designed sculptural furniture that exists within the windscreen. And, of course, the mega-projects: Jean Shin and Sarah Sze are both doing projects in stations along the new 2nd Avenue line, and Xenobia Bailey is doing a piece for the new 7 station at 34th Street. And James Carpenter collaborated with Grimshaw Architects to create a cable net to bring light into the Fulton Transit Center.

Bronx River View (2010) © Barbara Grygutis, Whitlock Avenue Station, 6 line, MTA New York City Transit. Commissioned and owned by Metropolitan Transportation Authority Arts for Transit. Photo: Peter Peirce.

You are an artist yourself and you’ve worked with Arts for Transit for 23 years now. How do you define public art? What does it mean to you?
I started working, and still work, in public art because of the engagement between the built environment and the people who are in that environment — myself included. I’m an artist, so I was engaged with this environment before I worked for the MTA, but I felt it would be an incredible opportunity to be part of a team that affects the way your space looks.

People love to beat up on the MTA. But I’m still amazed to be part of an organization that has accomplished this type of change in the public environment. I believe public art changes the quality of life for everyone that walks through here. Maybe they are not aware of how or why, but ultimately it makes people feel good that someone makes this space a place where they might want to be.

And I think it has changed the perception of the New York subway. Plenty of people who ride the subway now don’t remember it when it was in really bad shape. But I remember when it was a sign of hope that if you could turn around the subway, you could change what was happening aboveground too. I believe that those went hand in hand. A lot of credit is given to a lot of different things for how New York turned around. But I believe there was no way it would have happened without the changes underground.

Sandra Bloodworth is the director of Arts for Transit and Urban Design at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. As director, she is responsible for the Arts for Transit programs, whose mission it is to commission public art that enhances the transportation environment. In addition to the Arts for Transit award-winning permanent art program, she is responsible for Music Under New York, the Transit Poster program and the Lightbox Project. She represents the MTA on station aesthetics and urban design issues, with a focus on promoting design excellence. She joined Arts for Transit in 1988 as a manager and became deputy director in 1992 and director in 1996. She is the co-author of Along the Way: MTA Arts for Transit. Her previous experience includes working as a development associate for the Studio in a School Association. Sandra has taught Visual Art and Urban Design in the Department of Art and Arts Professions graduate program at New York University and studio classes in the fine arts departments at Florida State University and the University of Mississippi. Bloodworth is an artist and holds a B.S. from Mississippi College, an M.A. from the University of Mississippi and an M.F.A. from Florida State University. Bloodworth received the Fund for the City of New York’s 2005 Sloan Public Service Award in recognition of her work in the field of public art.

Om Sai Mandir, 45-11 Smart Street, Flushing, Queens

Matilde Cassani is an architect and artist whose most recent exhibition Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings is currently in its final week on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture. For this project, Cassani has amassed an impressively comprehensive archive of sites of worship in the five boroughs that are located in residential, commercial or otherwise non-religious buildings, many of which serve recent immigrant populations whose demand for faith-based community facilities far outstrips supply. The architectural improvisations that respond to this increased demand constitute one subject of Cassani’s detailed documentary study. But she’s equally interested in the urban-scale implications of this phenomenon: the distribution of religious activity throughout the city and how this maps onto a contemporary urban reality of displacement and adaptation. She has produced a series of books that represent the archive and exhibited them alongside a set of Spiritual Devices, beguilingly simple sculptural installations that attempt to distill the elements of individual spiritual practice to the commonplace yet symbolic objects — prayer mats, icons, beads or candles — that help convert secular space into something both sacred and profound. The exhibition closes this Saturday, so be sure to check it out soon. First, read on to hear Cassani’s thoughts on what a city’s sacred spaces reveal about the complex relationship of religious praxis, cultural identity and urban life. -C.S.

Matilde Cassani with one of the five books of the Sacred Spaces archive installed at Storefront for Art and Architecture.

How did Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings come about?
The idea for the project was born three years ago, when I started asking myself where recent immigrants to contemporary cities were praying. I started looking around Italy and the first place I started investigating was actually a small village called Novellara, in a rural part of Regio Emilia. This village is the home of a lot of recent immigrants to Italy who are increasingly doing agricultural work in Italian farms, especially in the dairy farms that produce the milk for parmesan cheese.

This village has a population of no more than 12,000 people, but I found many different sacred spaces. And every year, the village plays host to a huge Sikh harvest festival, the Vaisakhi feast. Sikhs from all over Central Europe congregate in Novellara for this event.

After documenting this festival and the sacred spaces of this village, I started doing similar research and documentation in Milan, Palermo, Barcelona, Stuttgart, and then I came to New York. These days, whenever I find myself in a new city, I immediately start looking around to find sacred spaces.

How do you define what “sacred spaces in profane buildings” are?
For me, sacred spaces in profane buildings are places of worship in non-traditional sites, in buildings that have undergone a transformation of function. Many of these buildings are invisible from the outside. The interiors are what has been altered most to accommodate the needs of a particular religion’s worship practices. That improvised transformation fascinates me.

The word “profane” in this context refers the buildings being non-traditional or non-sacred. I was raised as a Roman Catholic with the idea that sacred space – the churches I would visit as a child – was always born as sacred, in a location that is precisely selected and central, with an architecture that makes it highly visible. “Profane” refers to sites not selected in this way.

Soho Synagogue, 38 Crosby Street, Manhattan

What do you think distinguishes New York City’s sacred spaces from similar environments you’ve studied in other cities?
At the beginning, I thought that since New York City has a completely different urban texture and a completely different immigrant story, its sacred spaces in profane buildings would be completely distinct from what I’ve found elsewhere. But actually the architecture of the places I found was very similar to what I found in Europe. The main difference is that in New York, there are so many more of these kinds of sacred spaces.

I’ve also noticed that New Yorkers seem more curious about their city than people are in other cities. I’ve received a lot of positive feedback from New Yorkers about this project. People here seem to be excited about seeing something they’ve never seen before. And the communities whose places of worship were documented in the project were happy to find someone deeply interested in their communities and cultural practices.

What do you think a city’s sacred spaces reveal about that city?
I think these spaces reveal the ways displaced people maintain their identity after moving from one country to another. Cultural identity is not only food and customs; religion builds identity in ways that make the sacred space a community’s common point of reference. So it’s not only religious space, it’s much more: a community center, a café, many different things together in one multi-layered space.

So what’s more important for you, the spaces or how people use them?
Both. I think the spaces reflect what people are doing inside them in interesting ways. These places are sacred and profane at the same time, public and private spaces at the same time. They are religious places but also something else.

Spiritual Devices

Tell me about the Spiritual Devices.
The Spiritual Devices are foldable and transportable boxes that contain the kinds of objects I would find during my visits to sacred spaces all over New York: cheap clocks, tape on the floor to indicate the direction to Mecca, aluminum dishes, a camping stove.

I started making the Spiritual Devices while doing an artist residency in Germany. The goal was to evoke the fact that sacred space is not necessarily stable. It’s temporary. It migrates along with the people who use it. The temporary nature of these places and the symbolic value of the objects that inhabit them – many of which are cheap, mass-produced objects you might find in a supermarket – reflect some of the displacement and exile of immigration.

There seems to be a tension between the individual scale of the Spiritual Devices and the community scale of the documentation of Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings.
Yes. Somehow, there is a kind of contradiction between these community places – which exist for small groups of people to come together at a particular point in a day – and the individual practice of one person building his or her own identity.

The exhibition at Storefront is the first time I have shown both of these projects together. They are related, of course, but I think it’s helpful to look at them separately, to look first at the research and then to experience the Spiritual Devices.

The research process for this exhibition began when I first arrived in New York. I decided that instead of looking for sacred spaces myself, I would ask citizens to report on where sacred spaces could be found. I built a very simple website and asked people to upload pictures and different stories about these sacred spaces. I received a lot of different kinds of material: from simple snapshots taken by passersby to fascinating stories about memories of particular buildings. Some of these memories explained how it used to be a bakery or a bank; others were personal stories about going to a place to pray or to see friends. One interesting case study is the synagogue on Crosby Street that used to be a flagship Gucci store. Another interesting case is an entire street that is full of temples; a huge, religious boulevard in Flushing, Queens called Bowne Street. In some ways the street is one enlarged, sacred space that is also differentiated: Catholic Korean churches, Catholic Chinese churches, Catholic South American churches, Hindu temples, Sai Baba temples… So many communities seem to have a point of reference there.

Sacred Spaces around Bowne Street, Flushing, Queens

While people were submitting information about sacred spaces all over the city, I started to look closely at these places. Another example is one of my favorite places that I visited, the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard in Flushing. It’s in a formerly residential brick building, but the interior is amazingly transformed and truly beautiful. When you walk in the door you face a long corridor. At the end of the corridor is a place to store your shoes and a big box containing turbans to wear if you don’t have your own. The proper sacred space has a deep red carpeted floor that leads you to the altar, which is surrounded by musical instruments.

Downstairs you have the canteen with a huge kitchen that serves everybody who enters the temple. The third floor has rooms for some of the spiritual leaders of the congregation, and then you have another room that contains the sacred book, the Granth Sahib. In the Sikh religion, the sacred book is revered, so the way the book is treated is very important. The room where the book “lives” is actually the best, most precious and most recently refurbished room of the house. There are two beds, and it looks like a normal bedroom for humans — but it’s not for humans, it’s for the sacred books. Every day, one of the books is brought downstairs, read from beginning to end, and then taken back upstairs and put to bed.

Sikh Center, Flushing, Queens. Bottom image: the room where the Granth Sahib (Sikh holy book) is kept.

So how did you represent your research in an exhibition context?
I produced five books; each one is a survey at a different scale. The first book maps the whole city and I’ve simply listed all the sacred spaces I found, in order to investigate the dimension of the phenomenon, the relative invisibility of the sacred spaces. The second book questions the profanity or the non-traditionality of the places. It includes information about the location and context of these places, with Google Maps images and their addresses. An address like Apartment #4N really tells you something about the architecture and original function of a particular place. The third book is a collection of stories and images submitted through the website. The fourth is a reflection on the different typologies and how the sacred is adapting in different ways. In some cases the sacred space is a small flat inside a commercial building; in others an entire residential building is transformed for various activities related to worship, like the temple’s canteen, the temple itself, the apartments of the monks or priests, communal spaces, storage, etc. And the fifth book is an in-depth case study of the Sikh Center on Parsons Boulevard that I described. For the exhibition, I mounted each of the books on a pedestal and arranged a series of the Spiritual Devices on the floor, in particular relationships to the wall, the street and the books. In this way, I tried to transform Storefront’s gallery into a kind of sacred space, a system that unveils something that is both sacred and not so sacred at the same time.

An excerpt of a geographical listing of Brooklyn mosques from Book 2 of the Sacred Spaces in Profane Buildings archive. Click to enlarge.

As an architect, what do you see as the contemporary role of architecture in religious practice?
It’s very difficult to say, because it’s contradictory in many ways: these places are outside of what we consider to be architecture; they are rarely designed by architects. Yet, I think architects must reflect on the fragmentation of religious space in cities. Religious spaces are no longer a big point of reference in the centers of neighborhoods. We need to consider what that means for our cities and communities. It’s not just about the small scale of transformed interiors; it’s an urban-scale phenomenon.

In complex environments like cities, architecture becomes a container of different things, and the same is happening to traditionally sacred spaces. I’ve seen examples of communities buying what used to be, say, an Orthodox church and converting it into a Hindu temple.

Masjid Manhattan, 33 Cliff Street, Manhattan

So what do you see as the role of the city in contemporary religious practice?
I think cities are only beginning to digest what the proliferation of all these sacred spaces means. On the one hand, the increased demand for religious spaces seems to show that there’s not enough space designated for these purposes. Cities, therefore, are in the role of enveloping sacred spaces that have emerged on their own inside of non-traditional buildings. On the other hand, the fragmentation and dispersal of sacred space is making the whole city more sacred in a way. It’s no longer secular.

I think this is one of the most interesting parts of the phenomenon. Because, as I’ve said, these spaces are more than just places of worship; they are community facilities, social spaces, but also the container of a certain kind of sacredness.

And each one is different. Some are very private; some are very public. Some open, some closed. And the interiors are totally fascinating: the materials and objects found inside are often quite cheap, yet there is so much care and attention paid to these environments. It’s really impressive and often very beautiful. And in some of the older sacred spaces, you can see the story of their gradual transformation and growth in the details.

Shan Xiu Taoist Temple, 128 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

All images courtesy of Matilde Cassani and Storefront for Art and Architecture

Matilde Cassani is an architect and researcher who lives and works in Milan, Italy

For all the griping about tourist crowds, corporate control or inauthentic sanitization, no one can doubt Times Square’s status as iconic, legendary and spectacular. In an excerpt from his 2006 book On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square, Marshall Berman, a scholar whose Marxist readings of urban history might lead one to expect a dismissal of the area’s redevelopment in the 1990s, writes, “it isn’t as bad, as antiseptic, as suburban, as many of us feared. It’s nice to see that Rudolph Giuliani’s project of turning the keys to the city over to Disney hasn’t turned the city into Disneyland. The thrill’s not gone.”

Of course, much of that thrill comes from the dazzling electric signs, the teeming crowds, the overwhelming sensory experience of the place. But the group responsible for its upkeep, the Times Square Alliance – which was originally formed as a Business Improvement District in 1992 to provide additional security and to clean the streets, and subsequently grew to produce New Year’s Eve, Broadway on Broadway and other large events – also sees Times Square as a fertile canvas for contemporary artists, a unique opportunity to bring individual, creative visions to bear on a popular landscape that we think we know. So Times Square Alliance president Tim Tompkins hired Glenn Weiss, a veteran arts administrator and curator with a diverse body of work that has ranged from putting on shows at Storefront for Art and Architecture and PS1 in the 1980s to implementing local government public art programs in Seattle and south Florida, to bring public art to Times Square.

Business Improvement Districts are more commonly known for putting on events (alongside traditional maintenance activities) than they are for robust public art programs. Weiss cites other examples, like the Downtown Alliance, the Madison Park Conservancy or the Chicago Loop, as examples of local or community-based groups committed to public art. But few places can claim the sheer number of visitors or the indescribable energy of Times Square. With those unique characteristics in mind, we took Weiss on a walk through Times Square to talk about the place, the role of public art in civic life and some of the art works he has facilitated over the past three and a half years. It was one of his last days on the job, as he prepares to move to Houston to take on yet another exciting challenge at the intersection of community engagement, urban placemaking and contemporary art practice.

– C.S.

What do you do?
For the past three and a half years, I’ve been the manager of public art and design for Times Square. We look for the very best in contemporary arts in all mediums and all forms, and we invite artists to come in and diversify the activities and reputation of Times Square as it is today. We want Times Square to be seen as part of New York as a whole. And since the best in contemporary art and design is part of that whole, we want that to be in Times Square.

I see myself primarily as an arts administrator who also does curatorial work rather than the other way around. The difference is that my goal is to facilitate creative people to do their best work. I’m less concerned with evaluating whether the work is excellent to present or whether it advances the field, I’m evaluating whether or not I can help an artist do something special in a particular place with a particular community. And in Times Square, that community is the 300,000 people who pass through here every day.

Times Square is the most amazing document of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

How did this job come about for you?
When I first heard about this opportunity in Times Square, I was living in Florida, where I managed a public art program and worked in urban design and planning for a suburban, planned community called Coral Springs. I think part of what qualified me for this position – in addition to my experience as a curator in alternative art spaces and as an arts administrator in local government – was a blog about public art I’d been writing for the previous two years or so for ArtsJournal. There were not many people writing consistently on public art at that time.

So you’ve worked with public art in a wide variety of contexts.
When I moved here for this job in 2008, it wasn’t my first time in New York. In the ‘80s, I studied architecture at Columbia, and during that time I became friends with a lot of great artists in the East Village, one of whom is Kyong Park, who founded Storefront for Art and Architecture in 1982. We worked together for two years running Storefront, and we became very engaged in how artists and architects are able to make an impact with their work. We did several major public projects: one dealt with homelessness and how to build shelters, another was our attempt to save Adam Purple’s Garden in the Lower East Side. We didn’t think to label these projects as “public art,” we just thought of ourselves as doing stuff out in the world. To be here, doing that, during those early years was an exceptional experience in my life.

After that, I moved to Seattle, but I simultaneously became the architecture curator at PS1, so I would return to New York to manage the exhibitions I organized up until 1990. When I first moved to Seattle, I curated a series of outdoor exhibitions on people’s front yards. Then I was hired to be the manager of the public art program for King County, which surrounds and includes Seattle. So that’s where I “learned” public art in an official sense.

I’ve heard your early work described as political in nature. Do you think about your work in public art as political?
I don’t. In the ‘80s, in Seattle as well as at PS1 or at Storefront, my work was very clearly political: I wanted to change the world, I wanted to find artists and architects that were interested in changing the world and I wanted to work with them.

In Seattle, after running the public art program for King County, I decided I wanted to be a community activist in my neighborhood, which was a very low income and very diverse community. And what happens when you dedicate yourself to the community is that all those abstract ideas about who is to blame for various kinds of social injustice suddenly seem not to function very well. Not only do you have to work with real people who have wonderfully different ways of doing things, but you also have to start making compromises in order to effect change within your community. When you start to do that, the strategy of being aggressive toward the powerful doesn’t function as well any more.

Given the trajectory of your career — moving from being a curator in the vanguard of art and culture to a role in municipal government instituting public art policy — what does “public art” mean to you? How would you define it?
Public art, as I see it, began as an idea that architecture had failed to humanize its environment, that the bad modernism and strip-down economics of government buildings had left public architecture bereft of any human intimacy. Public art as we think of it today emerged from a passionate urge to bring back that sense of human intimacy.

But these days, architects are finding ways to bring that intimacy into our built environment. So public art, when it works well, becomes about finding ways for artists, administrators and curators to work together – in  collaboration with communities of people who use or visit a particular place – to create the conditions for some new thing to be born.

What does Times Square mean to you?
From 1990 until I moved back here in 2008, I hardly ever visited New York. And in 1990, Times Square was a very different place than it is today! Even when I did live in New York in the ‘80s, I would rarely ever come to Times Square. 42nd Street was very active, whether it was with movies or porn or drugs, but Times Square itself was very quiet. There weren’t even very many electric signs at that time. Other than when people came to see Broadway shows, there was a sense of emptiness.

When I came back for the first time in 2008, it was completely surprising to see the number of people, the number of stores, the kind of transformation to a place that seemed more normal in a way but also not normal at all. Times Square is the most amazing document of 21st century entertainment, of the kind of interfaces we create between ourselves and what we broadcast to ourselves.

There is no other place like it, maybe in the world. Times Square is a place of visceral experience; it is not a place of thought. And making that connection in an artwork – to experience, rather than to thought – can be extremely difficult.

So what was the process for presenting public art in that context?
We started by identifying the public space throughout Times Square, both the plazas and the privately-owned public spaces. We did two open calls for ideas, one in 2009 and one in 2010. Basically we just said “give us your ideas about what you would like to do and we will evaluate the quality of the proposal and the feasibility of actually making it happen within that space.” Our criteria for selection, beyond making sure every proposal considered was functional and safe, prioritized projects that somehow spoke to Times Square and the people who would be here.

When I first came, we started out at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with Tattfoo Tan’s giant mural on the front of the bus terminal and then a smaller mural on a fence on 8th Avenue by Kai McBride. Our idea was to go from all these corners because, here in Times Square itself, there is very little space. When the Mayor closed Broadway to traffic, then everything changed.

"Nature Matching System" mural at the Port Authority Bus Terminal | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

How has the public art program interfaced with the urban design changes that happened over the past few years, if at all?
Tim Tompkins is very concerned, and rightly so, that Times Square be a great public space with valuable civic events and people on the ground. The Times Square Alliance did not want Times Square to be just left as an empty plaza or open only to corporate events. The public art program became a kind of demonstration project to show how these plazas could be a benefit to the general public. Remember: on an average day, 300,000 people pass through Times Square.

One thing about Times Square is that an audience is always here, in a way that does not exist when you are in, say, Madison Square Park or in front of the County Court House. So one of the main objectives for artists or designers is to figure out what to do with that audience. How do you engage them, where do they physically place themselves? How do they as a group go in and out?

One of the great projects from Performa in 2009 was Arto Lindsay’s dance performance where a line of fifty dancers slowly made their way through Times Square. I loved the way the crowd dealt with how to keep up with the performance. They had to keep running around ahead of the dancers. So you have the dancers in a line, but the people move in blobs and waves as they try to keep up with the the dancers — and the strange phenomenon is that the crowd didn’t give the dancers any space. They would keep crowding around them again and again, so the crowds become part of the interactive potential for the artist.

Here is another type of interactive project, a piece called Performer by Adam Frank, installed in Anita’s Way, which is the name for the pedestrian passageway of the Bank of America Tower. Adam calls this a “self-affirmation piece.” If you stand in this spotlight on the ground, your presence triggers the sound of beautiful applause for you and only you.

Passersby triggering applause at "Performer" by Adam Frank

Tell me about some other artists and artworks that you brought to Times Square, and how they responded the context they found here.
One of the major ways that visitors to Times Square engage with the place comes from photography and the public’s desire to make a visual record of themselves experiencing something new. As an artist, how do you take advantage of that?

"Valentine Heart" by Gage / Clemenceau | Photos courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

In 2009, Gage / Clemenceau Architects attempted to do just that with Valentine Heart. They made a sculpture of a heart and also designed a little stage in front of the sculpture with up-lights. People waited in line to have their picture taken on the stage with the heart. Gage / Clemenceau understood what people wanted to do and how to create a setting for it in Times Square.

The first and only time we tried using the three billboards at the southern end of Times Square — the NASDAQ, the Reuters, and what was then Panasonic News, which is now the Sony News — was two years ago during Performa ’09. For a piece called Snorks, the artist Loris Greaud had all three screens playing images of fireworks for 20 minutes that relate to a complicated project of underwater animals and fireworks in Abu Dhabi.

We did a piece with the Cuban artist Alexander Arrechea on the NASDAQ Board right after the economic crisis, which was a giant animation of a wrecking ball smashing against the NASDAQ sign. Not only did the public not really recognize what was happening, but even NASDAQ did not necessarily recognize the relationship between the piece and what was going on in the world.

What we found is that for the artists as well as the people who come to Times Square on a daily basis, the memory of being in Times Square and the projection of being in Times Square is almost as important as actually doing the work in Times Square.

"Black Sun" by Alexander Arrechea | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

That seems to reflect what you were saying about people’s primary point of engagement being photos of themselves in this place, the desire to create a memory of having been in a place seems a primary reason that a lot of people come.
People come here to experience the center of New York. For example, my wife’s relatives are from Argentina. When they come to New York, they don’t think about whether or not they might come to Times Square. They have to come to Times Square on a visit to New York.

Another thing that interests me about Times Square is that a lot of the social services remain. Right in front of us is the Woodstock Hotel, which provides services for very low-income seniors, and there are facilities for the homeless nearby. These types of uses may no longer be considered to be part of the character of the place in the way they might have been in the ‘80s or early ‘90s, but the living legacy of the senior center in the Woodstock Hotel is just as much a part of Times Square as the history of the Paramount Theatre, the site of the first youth fan craze for a musician, for Benny Goodman in the ’30s. Years later there was an actual riot for Frank Sinatra, with teen girls fainting as he arrived to perform. These historical moments become part of the density of the experience.

Do you consider the billboards and signs themselves to be a form of public art?
No, I don’t. They are very infrequently used to engage or empower an individual community or to bring the artist and the community together. But I do think what makes Times Square unique is the way that it fills up your whole cone of vision and your peripheral vision: everywhere you look, there’s this lighting and this crazy energy that you don’t experience in physical space anywhere else in the world. When you’re here, you feel the space of it as opposed to a combination of the particular buildings or other individual components.

But, speaking of billboards, a little known fact is that 1 Times Square on the southern end has no occupants, aside from a Walgreens on the ground floor. It is completely economically supported by the advertising from the billboards.

Public art by the Red Stairs | Photo courtesy of the Times Square Alliance

You’ve worked at the county level in Seattle, at the town level in south Florida, and in Times Square you are working at the relatively small scale of a district, albeit one of the most iconic districts in the world. In terms of having a coherent, influential or successful public art program, do you like working at the district level?
I think the great public art administrators and curators in the country are those that have a single place of operation where they continue to work over and over again. Of course there are groups like Creative Time that do great work pretty much everywhere. But, for me, a sustained effort will produce better results than what’s possible in a county or a large city or a state, where you would have to come into a community one time, learn once, listen once, and then leave. I think it’s far more difficult at larger scales to do work that’s the same level of quality, unless you are very lucky or have the benefit of an artist’s sheer determination to do a great job.

What’s next for you?
I’m going to run the Art League Houston, which is an art center near downtown Houston. My goal is to expand its capabilities in serving the artist community and those people who want to make art – fusing adult education with community engagement. I have this idea in my head, after being here in the land of the virtual, to get back to something my parents dreamed of in the ’50′s and ’60s, which was for people to make art together. In their generation they called it a hobby; in ours we call it Do-It-Yourself; but whatever we call it, there’s a desire for physical and collaborative activities, for people to come together and make art together. I’d like to try to help create space for that in Houston.

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Glenn Weiss has maintained a diverse professional practice assisting governments and civic organizations with physical transformations of cities and neighborhoods through urban planning, architecture, landscape and public art. Since May 2008, Glenn Weiss has developed and managed the new public art program for the NYC Business Improvement District responsible for Times Square and the Broadway Theater District. He is currently the executive director the Art League Houston. 

From the Topographical Atlas of the City of New York, 1874 | via nypl.org

FIND OF THE DAY: MAPS
Do you like maps? We do! The New York Public Library has compiled digital versions of some of the oldest and most beautiful maps of the city on its website — 7,100 pages from 124 historical atlases of New York. The list includes fire insurance maps, topographic, zoning and property maps and more. Browse through the digital gallery here and click through to purchase prints of many of them in the NYPL store. (via @urbnscl)

Mediamesh | via ag4 mediatecture

.MEDIAMESH WRAPS PORT AUTHORITY
By the end of June, the Port Authority Bus Terminal will be wrapped in Mediamesh, a metal weave peppered with LED lights developed by GKD-USA, a joint effort of a German lighting engineer firm and an American metal manufacturer. This new “fabric” can be wrapped around buildings without disrupting interior views to the outside and, in the case of the Port Authority, will allow permeability for exhaust fumes to escape. Mediamesh can be used as advertising space or for art installations and, as the Architect’s Newspaper’s A/N Blog notes, its concealment of the terminal’s façade is seen by many as a bonus.

EVENTS & TO DOs:

KNOW YOUR LINES: Next Wednesday, May 18th, head over to McNally Jackson Bookstore at 7pm for a talk on the Center for Urban Pedagogy’s Making Policy Public Series with CUP Executive Director Christine Gaspar and Erika Wood, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, moderated by our own Cassim Shepard. The latest iteration of the series is Know Your Lines, a look at the largely invisible redistricting process and why it matters. For more information about Making Policy Public, which uses graphic design to explore and explain complex urban policy, check out CUP’s MPP website or look back at two Omnibus features on previous editions: Vendor Power! and Predatory Equity.
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Haas&Hann proposal for New York City

PAINTING URBANISM: Dutch artists Haas&Hann are known for their bold, colorful, large-scale murals and favela paintings that aim to activate the urban fabric through public art created by the residents of the communities themselves. Their urban interventions are now being featured in an exhibition, opening tonight at Storefront for Art and Architecture, titled “Painting Urbanism: Learning from Rio.” Paintings, documentary footage, pictures, sketches and plans of past, present and future projects — including a series of proposals for New York City, Paris and Cairo — will be on display at Storefront through July 30th.
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PARSONS FESTIVAL: Parsons New School for Design launched its first art and design festival on May 7th. The festival, with over 200 events, is going on through May 23rd and includes a day-long block party on Saturday, May 21, from 11am to 5pm on West 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Some upcoming talks include: scientists, scholars, and technology experts talking about where Transhumanism Meets Design (May 14-15), a symposium on technology’s potential to radically transform the human condition; Water Fight: Fracking, Food, Art and Economy (May 16), in which a panel, moderated by Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, will address industrial hydrofracking (drilling rock formations for oil and natural gas) and tools for protecting ecosystems and building a green economy; and many, many more. See the full schedule here.
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Roberto Mollá Ricochet at CHRISTINA RAY

RICOCHET: Check out Valencia-based artist Roberta Mollá’s latest exhibition, Ricochet, at the CHRISTINA RAY gallery. This new series of paintings marks the first major presentation of Mollá’s work on canvas. For more information about Mollá’s work, look back at our Omnibus artist interview with him: Symmetrical Mud and the Floating World. (May 12th – June 12th)
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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Stephen Mallon is a photographer invested in capturing extraordinary moments in the industrial landscape and the surreal beauty of the machines and sites that populate it. But the projects Mallon documents aren’t your everyday construction sites. “Next Stop Atlantic” follows an MTA recycling program that uses retired subway cars, stripped and cleaned, to rebuild underwater reefs along the eastern seabed. “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549″ documents the recovery of the US Airways airbus, piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, that landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese resulted in engine failure. In “A Bridge Delivered,” one of his time-lapse projects, Mallon shows us the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge, crossing the Harlem River to connect Manhattan and the Bronx. Most recently, Mallon completed “Volare,” a series of images following the construction of a new roller coaster on Coney Island. We recently had an opportunity to talk to Mallon about his work, the underappreciated beauty of engineering and how photography can provoke contemplation of industry and our natural environment — and their unexpected convergences.

An exhibition of Mallon’s series “Next Stop Atlantic” will be presented at the Look3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville in June 2011, and will also be on display at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey later this summer. In spring 2012, “Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549” will be exhibited at Webster University in St. Louis. “A Bridge Delivered” has been selected for inclusion in this summer’s Rooftop Films Summer Series here in New York City.

Volare, Coney Island | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How do you conceive of or identify your projects? What does it mean to you to be an “industrial photographer,” as you’ve described yourself in the past?

I am attracted to a lot of different subjects in the industrial world. I just finished a project documenting the construction of a new roller coaster for the Wall Street Journal. It’s the first new coaster in Coney Island in over 50 years. A few months ago, I was in Brazil on a commission to photograph on an offshore drilling platform for a series titled “Petrobras.”

I am hoping to be in a number of recycling plants over the coming months. I move from commission to commission, along with continuing my long term project “American Reclamation,” which is a series of images about material and space reuse in the 50 states.

But I am actually getting away from identifying myself as “an industrial photographer.” I realized, after framing my work that way, that people saw me as someone who was shooting only the box on a conveyor belt.

It seems that you have a particular interest in recycling and salvage. How did that interest develop?

I have been shooting industrial landscape work for almost all of my life. I got away from it during university, but in the late ’90s I started finding the antenna and the oil container really appealing again. After a meeting with a book agent to publish a collection of my work, I realized I needed a project to focus on. Recycling was a natural fit!

Next Stop Atlantic | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

Tell us about “Next Stop Atlantic.” This series documents an MTA program that recycles retired subway cars by using them to create artificial reefs — “moments of violent recycling,” as you’ve described it. How did you find out about the project?

I was out scouting a location for a portrait in New Jersey when I recognized a barge loaded with subway cars sitting in a shipyard in Bayonne. The yard was owned by maritime contractor Weeks Marine. I sent them information about my recycling project, and the MTA and Weeks let me follow the subway cars out into the Atlantic Ocean. I spent just shy of three years going out on multiple trips.

The moment the car hits the water there’s this Titanic-esque moment when the water overtakes the car as it sinks. It’s incredibly fast — from the moment it’s picked up and thrown overboard for the fishes. The change from seeing steel lying on a barge out in the Atlantic to watching water rush in as it hits the ocean is quite dramatic.

Brace for Impact: The Salvage of Flight 1549 | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

In a lot of your work, bodies of water play an important role. In your series “Flight 1549,” you document the recovery of the US Airways airbus that famously landed in the Hudson River in 2009 after a collision with a flock of geese caused its engines to fail. Are you particularly attracted to maritime industrial subject matter?

It just keeps calling my name. Similar to shooting objects placed on a white background or against the sky, water isolates the machine.

How did you get interested in creating “A Bridge Delivered,” your time-lapse video of the delivery and installation of the new Willis Avenue Bridge? Did you know immediately that you wanted to document it?

Weeks Marine has a construction division and they gave me a call last summer to see if I would want to come out to shoot it. I knew immediately that I wanted to document it!

A Bridge Delivered from stephen mallon on Vimeo.

Over 30,000 images comprise “A Bridge Delivered,” but in your still photographs the individual moments you capture are very precise. Did you think about these two projects very differently, or did your photographs suggest how best to portray the idea?

Yes, the process of telling a story in motion has been a change for me. I used to look for one or a few images to encapsulate the event. Now I am looking for clips, longer moments in time to keep the viewer engaged and the story running.

Practically speaking, how do you negotiate such immediate access to your subjects? How do you get as close as you do?

Having the existing body of work has made clients and locations much more comfortable. They see that other people have trusted and commissioned me in the past, which boosts their confidence.

American Reclamation | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

How would like your photography to affect or inform the way your viewing public sees or considers the city and its infrastructure?

Some people are horrified about the artificial reef program, but I think it’s because they don’t know the details about how it is designed to help the environment. I am fortunate that I have been able to photograph these historical projects that are all tied to New York — my interest is in making unique images of historical moments. The response to these projects has been amazing and I am truly grateful.

What types of projects are you working on now?

I’m designing a remote camera that will let me shoot hi-res time-lapse footage from any location for an extended period of time — I’ll have more details soon! I am also conceptualizing my own proposal for an artificial reef. But that is going to take some time!

Man and the Machine | Click on any image to see more of Mallon’s work

All photos courtesy of and copyright Stephen Mallon

Most people look at work sites and machinery and see nothing more than concrete and steel. Stephen Mallon looks at them and sees both a surreal beauty and the wonder of their engineering. His work has been exhibited widely and featured on numerous websites, in print and on TV and radio, including National Public Radio, Flavorwire, The Atlantic, Fast Company, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Wired, New York Magazine, NBC, Vanity Fair and CBS News. Stephen has traveled everywhere from Africa to Brazil, searching out artificial landscapes and industrial footprints. He has also been commissioned by a wide range of clients, including the Sunday London Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Publicis, Sudler & Hennessey, and MAYTAG. Mallon’s photos have been honored by Communication Arts 2008 and 2009, the New York Photo Festival 2009 and the Lucie Awards 2009. Since 2002, he has been a board member of the New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers and served as president from 2006 to 2009. He lives in New York with his wife and their young daughter.

53rd Street on a weeknight evening is witness to a medley of pedestrians: midtown commuters bustling to the subway, visitors departing MoMA and tourists heading to ogle 5th Avenue storefronts. Most move briskly through the stretch between 5th and 6th Avenues because, let’s be honest, why linger? For the past month though, an unexpected display of colors, textures and medias have claimed the windows of the former Donnell Library and arrested the attention of passersby. “Pantheon: A History of Art from the Streets of NYC” chronicles a timeline of New York’s underground art and artists through an exhibition of their work, encapsulating street art’s multifarious forms as well as the progression of the movement with a rough-around-the-edges vibrancy that is a refreshing contrast to the neighborhood’s Seagram Building sleekness.

At the Donnell Library exhibition, curators have found a way to bring the “the art of trespassing” – as a stenciled piece by John Feckner states – into sanctioned public space. With the help of Chashama (a non-profit group that finds spaces for emerging artists to display their work by recycling vacant properties throughout the city), Pantheon creates alternative uses for unused spaces in time when real estate is being reevaluated. Not only does this tie into a trend of pop-up spaces, repurposed storefronts and communal gallery spaces, it sends a message about the potential for public institutions like libraries to assist emerging artists and foster creative activity in the city – and in an area not known for DIY aspirations to boot.

A sampling of graffiti, murals and sculpture, Pantheon creates a palette of the many styles, shades and artistic intentions that have been writ large on city streets in the past decade. Of course, displaying this work in such a manner removes it from the context of its surreptitious urban site, and limits the large scale many graffiti artists and muralists work in. But change of venue brings a new message — making visible the creative conversation between street artists and even allowing viewers to engage in that conversation themselves.

In the final window of Donnell Library, Jessie Bowers (a.k.a. Cypha) can be found working on his portion of the installation — a three-walled painting entitled “Muze” inspired by the influence of hip-hop and soul music in the city. People stop and watch Bowers working, sometimes snapping photos or talking to the artist when he ambles out on to the street. Marking the trajectory of street art, and including the artist at work in its end, communicates that the movement isn’t about sneaking around. It is about working with a community, and still, in an unexpected library window, about the element of surprise.

This is the final weekend of Pantheon: A History of Art from the Streets of NYC. The exhibition closes on Sunday, May 1.

All images courtesy of Caitlin Blanchfield.

Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer residing in New York City.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.