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This Saturday, June 2nd, at 4pm we are celebrating the opening of the Paterson Project, at the Paterson Museum in (you guessed it) Paterson, NJ.
The Flux Factory (an arts collective) will be in residency for six weeks, holding town meetings, group readings of the William Carlos Williams poem Paterson, and otherwise researching and investigating the place. The objective is to create a new monument to Paterson.
I am starting a small community outreach photo project, where I will be giving away disposable cameras to Paterson residents, and displaying the results in the museum as a visual representation of their own Paterson. I’ve found some really great similar projects out there:
The Cameo Project
and
Phototag.org — both tracking disposable cameras as they are handed off on journeys around the world. I love it.
Paterson:
an artistic collaboration between Flux Factory and an entire city
June 2-July 14
At the opening: meet the participants, eat some food, hear about the project, and most importantly…come to Paterson!
For further information, including a schedule of our summer events in Paterson visit:
Phone: 718-707-3362
Email contact: Stefany Anne Golberg, info@fluxfactory.org
Flux Factory is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization
_________________________________________________________________________________
PATERSON PARTICIPANTS
Jean Barberis, Mikey Barringer, Angela Beallor, Jason David Brown, Christine Conforti, Joseph Costa, Giacomo De Stefano, Peter Duyan, Alita Edgar, eteam, Neil Freeman, Dana Gramp, The Ivanhoe Artists Mosaic of Paterson, Suzanne Joelson, Joe Milutis, The Paterson Museum, Leonora Retsas, Joe Ruffilo, Shuli Sade, Ruth Stanford
*Conceived and Organized by Stefany Anne Golberg and Morgan Meis*
Who’s coming on a bike ride with me?
Thursday May 24, 6:30 PM
Meet at: The City Reliquary Museum
370 Metropolitan Ave at Havemeyer
Williamsburgh, Brooklyn
What: Leisurely ride to the Brooklyn Bridge for birthday cake and champagne on the
Brooklyn anchorage in celebration of the bridge’s 124th birthday.
Cost: FREE
from Survival Research Laboratories
When I was in San Francisco over Spring Break, I met a sculptor named Jim Mason through my friend Chicken John. Jim runs the Shipyard, an alternative energy research and art workshop in Berkeley. They have 27 shipping containers in an 11,000 sq ft outdoor space, and have hosted many large-scale art events and produced many ambitious and spectacular works themselves (the latest is the Neverwas Haul: a three-story steam-powered Victorian mansion that drives. Yes, drives.)
The City of Berkeley gave them a 3-day vacate order on the grounds that nothing is permitted or up to code — but shipping containers are not a building material by the city’s definition, and so they cannot be assessed as safe or unsafe (though common sense is that metal containers are about as safe as you can get for welding, storage etc. — they cannot catch on fire.) While the city is concerned about health and safety — no injuries have happened at the Shipyard, and it’s been open for nearly a decade.
Concerned fans and artists in the Bay Area and all over the country have spoken out and the city is holding an emergency meeting Monday, May 21st to decide the Shipyard’s fate.
Shipping containers have been used as shelter in many ways by architects and laypeople. They are cheap, plentiful, modular, cuttable, stackable.
Urban Space Management, a UK retail developer responsible for the holiday markets across NYC and many other projects, created Container City in 2000 to demonstrate how shipping containers can serve as building blocks, and be used as offices, classrooms, live/work space or retail.
“Smart Codes” are a tool used by cities to adapt codes for historic buildings or other special situations like this one. If a city wants to add density without sprawl, for example, they might allow homeowners to build accessory dwelling units over a garage or in a basement, and bend the existing code.
If you’d like to speak out on behalf of the Shipyard and its population of displaced artists, here’s the contact information of Berkeley officials:
Orth, David dorth@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Joan MacQuarrie JMacQuarrie@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Mark Rhoades MRhoades@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Phil Kamlarz pkamlarz@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Manuela Albuquerque malbuquerque@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Deborah Pryor dpryor@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Dan Marks dmarks@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Nabil Al-Hadithy nalhadithy@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Zach Cowan zcowan@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Laura McKinney lmckinney@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Michael Caplan mcaplan@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Jim Hynes jhynes@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Gregory Daniel gdaniel@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Malcolm Prince mprince@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Greg Powell gpowell@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Maurice Norrise mnorrise@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Greg Heidenreich gheidenreich@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Mayor Tom Bates mayor@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Linda Maio lmaio@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Darryl Moore dmoore@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Maxwell Anderson manderson@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Dona Spring spring@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Laurie Capitelli lcapitelli@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Betty Olds olds@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Kriss Worthington kworthington@ci.berkeley.ca.us
Gordon Wozniak GWozniak@ci.berkeley.ca.us
clerk@ci.berkeley.ca.us
image borrowed from the excellent galleryofamericadocumentia.blogspot.com
I went to a panel discussion hosted by the New York Preservation Archive Project last night at the Graduate Center of CUNY. The lineup was pretty fierce — preservation rockstars like Tony Tung, author of Preserving the World’s Great Cities, Anthony Wood of the New York Preservation Archive Project, the inimitable Tom Wolfe, William Higgins, of Higgins Quasebarth & Partners, LLC (the premier preservation consulting firm in NYC) and Julia Vitullo-Martin, the director of the Center for Rethinking Development, Manhattan Institute.
Each went around and gave a short talk on the character and makeup of the preservation movement, with an emphasis on the past, and unfortunately not too directive about the future. Tony Tung’s slideshow illustrated the extreme perspective you get when you look at preservation laws and efforts from a macro level, making a strong case to preserve ambitiously. He also shamed New York City under its Republican mayors for falling so far behind New Orleans, which post-Katrina has changed its City Council and is now designating productively. He finished his slideshow by featuring an Amsterdam-based community development group which is reconstructing centuries-old buildings for affordable housing — seemingly indicating that the future of preservation may not lie in landmarking, but in community action tied to existing needs.
Tom Wolfe was charming and extolled the virtues of his native Richmond, VA, where people are too genteel to tear anything down. He proposed rather tongue-in-cheek that since artists are the forerunners of gentrification/revitalization, they should be given $50-a-month apartments in Manhattan (“so they won’t have to live in Jersey City”!!) and sent (presumably in some kind of task force?) to downtrodden and struggling areas of the city.
I found this pretty funny as my friends the Flux Factory and I are launching a large-scale project in Paterson, NJ, which has suffered much blight in the vein of Newark and Trenton, NJ, in early June.
Also after months of work for my Pratt planning studio class in Cypress Hills, it’s obvious to me that it would take a brave and foolhardy soul to propose sending in the artists to get the place on track. I do deeply believe that artists are a vital part of any community, and would contribute greatly by fixing up one of the gorgeous old architectural treasures of the neighborhood which are standing empty in Cypress Hills today. But any effort of that kind would have to come up from the neighborhood itself, and grow harmoniously and with a keen awareness of who it is serving and why — and many great examples out there of arts spaces that have done it. Flux Factory is one.
Originally uploaded by Reversible Skirt.
An H.H. Richardson building that was one of the era of huge state-run mental hospitals, that were closed in the 1970s among scandals of abuse…
The building has had many wings added on and sits right in the middle of a college campus. How strange that they couldn’t invest in maintaining it, and use it for dorms (maybe too haunted for that!) or any of the other needs of a college. It is a national landmark.
Today it’s surrounded by trees that were damaged in the big snowstorm last winter, and has a few crumbling spots, but is mostly sealed up pretty tightly.
I’m in Buffalo, NY this weekend working on a project called Ghost Train: an Industrial Seance.
A number of artists from SF, NYC and here in Buffalo have installed pieces, including a wooden train car replica, fake spirit photography, a bike pump-powered train horn, and a giant Ouija board with a planchette you can ride.
The setting is the amazing Central Terminal, an Art Deco landmark that has been out of use for many years.
Here’s a Spencer Tunick shot.
We have also been checking out some of the other amazing abandoned buildings nearby with a little guidance from sites like http://www.buffaloexploration.com. We could definitely use a local guide and a more definitive source on what is out there and where it is! Some of these buildings have dropped out of use so long ago, and people have forgotten they are there. Today we plan to look for old grain elevators and a malt factory near Niagara Falls — it will also be my first trip to our neighbor to the north.
Keyring 