Saturday I attended the opening of Escape From New York, curated by Olympia Lambert and held in Paterson, New Jersey (open weekends through June 19, 2010). When I heard of Oly's idea originally I was interested mainly because I live in New Jersey and thus am naturally interested in events involving New Jersey. Then I saw the list of artists, which turned out to contain the usual suspects from the Denise Bibro-Ed Winkleman-Schroeder Romero axis: Man Bartlett, Boyce Cummings, Jennifer Dalton, Thomas Lendvai, William Powhida. None of whose work I was all that excited about seeing. But then there were a whole pile of other artists in the list, too, most of them unknown to me, to give me some hope.
Not that Paterson needs this influx of New York artists to become an art neighborhood. Paterson, like Newark, has been the beneficiary of many, many years of government money and effort attempting to gentrify it and turn it into the next Greenwich Village or Williamsburg. There's plenty of government-subsidized artist housing and studio space in former industrial buildings renovated with public funds. These efforts have mostly failed to improve these cities, to the extent that recently on my way through Newark I saw a billboard from the new mayor essentially pleading with the citizenry to stop shooting each other.
It's actually somewhat heartening to know that, in a time when there are basically no bad neighborhoods left in Manhattan, there are still parts of the country left poor and unsafe. Although, really, Paterson is only relatively poor and unsafe: Compared to most of the planet across most of its history, Paterson is actually prosperous and comfortable. In fact it's a very energetic city of crowded sidewalks filled with busy people crossing the street at random, bicycles zipping by, blocks full of non-franchise small businesses with signage in English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Turkish and many other less easily identified languages. It reminds me of nothing so much as Times Square in the 1970s and early '80s -- loud and scary but alive. Also a bitch to drive through.
View from the fifth floor. In the foreground is Cianci Park where stands the statue of Lou Costello. Off in the distance is Garrett Mountain.
Lou Costello memorial statue in Paterson, NJ
I personally have a soft spot for Paterson because, hey, you have to like a city with a memorial park and statue in honor of Lou Costello. This is the city of Alexander Hamilton and Allen Ginsberg, the city of "Howl" and Kerouac's On the Road. There is the Great Falls of the Passaic River, the largest waterfall east of Niagara. Being the second largest falls in the eastern U.S. doesn't mean it's really that big, though, and you can drive a hundred yards from the Falls and not even know it's there -- which is one of the things that makes it so amazing. In fact it took me two trips on as many days to find it when I went looking a few years back. But when you do find it it's lovely. Paterson also has its very own mountain -- really a very big basalt hill called Garret Mountain -- with a Victorian-era castle and watchtower (the current background image on my site is a photo taken from the cliff in front of the tower). Paterson's downtown was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution in America and is filled with late Victorian and early 20th century red brick factory buildings. There's something about that style I love, the way the brick matches the cast iron, the windows, the warmth and human scale of it all. Amid those red factories, if local legends are to be believed, the chili dog was invented.
And, as I said, Paterson already has its own artists. I personally know two of them -- in fact we met at an opening in Chelsea, long before I started writing this blog, when one of them overheard me disparaging New Jersey and leaped to its defense. That's the kind of artist bred out here in the rocky, tainted soil: The kind that will gleefully pounce on a stranger for uttering even one discouraging word. Upon finding out that I, too, was from Jersey, they both forgave me and we could make fun of our state together. I still bump into Gerald every now and then and keep in occasional touch with Cory. Since both of them have already escaped from New York, I guess, they're not in the show.
I know Oly knows there are plenty of Paterson artists, too, because that's how she found the venue for this show: At an art show last year. Why she'd feel a need to import so many artists from elsewhere is a bit beyond me. But I suppose I do understand it, really: You work with the people you know. Still, I have to wonder why she didn't reach out to the local artists. There's plenty of room in the building. There's room for some other New York artists: In addition to the Escape From New Yorkers taking up three out of five floors, one floor is filled with a show from Hunter College, although I didn't know this at the time, only found out when corresponding later with Oly, and can find no information about this part of the show at all. And there's space for some imported Jersey artists as well, as the ground floor is given over to Hob'art, a cooperative gallery from Hoboken, New Jersey. Hoboken, of course, is a long way from Paterson, not so much geographically but culturally, since Hoboken went through its long-awaited gentrification starting in the late 1980s and is now a de facto suburb of Manhattan with Brooklyn Heights-level real estate prices. The town of Frank Sinatra and On the Waterfront no longer exists -- in fact large portions of that waterfront fell into the Hudson River.
I had my friend Cory meet me at the show and as we walked around we met up with friends of his from the neighborhood. Cory lives in a loft one building away from the building housing Escape (with a 15-year-old chihuahua and the Six Million Dollar Man pinball machine he refurbished himself) and of course knows a lot about what's happening with different buildings in the area -- which ones have been renovated, which have been condemned, which need better parking. As we wandered we found Christine Conforti also making the rounds.
Christine is a true Paterson native. She grew up in the city and still lives there. Her mother worked sewing coats together in the very building in which we were standing. Back when I said Paterson had been on the receiving end of years of money and effort? Christine is one of the people who's been making that effort for the past couple of decades. And she is pissed. Not at Oly specifically but at the politics that led to a horde from way over in New York City invading Paterson and getting exhibit space, without inviting or even so much as contacting the local artists and arts organizations. Obviously I can't begin to understand or summarize what sounds like a complex situation after talking to a few people for ten minutes, but the gist of it seems to be that Paterson politicians are playing various arts organizations against each other while attempting to sell out to real estate developers. As I suspected there are people on the ground in Paterson who've been working and organizing and protesting and fighting to improve things -- to get space for artists to live and work, to keep them safe (from old factory chemical residues and from crime), to prevent the demolition of landmarks. Meanwhile a bunch of people from New York and Hoboken can swoop right in and set up shop without even asking any of those people to drop by for a visit.
Christine is the executive director of Ivanhoe Artists, an organization doing the hard work of getting sponsors, dealing with politicians, and generally fighting the good fight for artists. Ivanhoe organizes an annual art walk through downtown Paterson. In fact Cory had thought, when I invited him along, that this was going to be part of the art walk. As the three of us talked he got angrier and angrier that this huge art event had been put together without any local involvement. Parking lots being opened! Shuttle buses being run! All the things that never happen for actual residents suddenly happening for these carpetbaggers!
It all seems rather unfortunate but that's politics for you.
In the hopes of improving communcation in the future I introduced Christine to Oly. That's politics too, but the good kind.
Now let's drag the slider control back to the beginning, before the politics were more than just a glimmer, and enter the former Fabricolor factory. On the ground floor you can't see what you're in for: The front room's been modernized and renovated, and while it's still rough, it's relatively civilized with a dropped ceiling and real walls and windows. The room is large but not much bigger than many Chelsea galleries. The art here, as I mentioned earlier, is all from Hoboken-based cooperative Hob'art and therefore entirely different and unrelated to Escape upstairs.
(I'd like to mention here that I actually took notes as I went through the building. I almost never take any kind of notes but this was too much for my tiny brain to handle. I am absolutely, certainly going to skip artists and pieces: Anything that didn't catch my eye (for being good or bad) I'm going to ignore, skip right over, not even mention. If you want a complete listing of everything in the shows, I'm afraid you're going to have to rely on the shows' Websites themselves.)
The Hob'art show, as you might expect, is more traditional than the work upstairs, more of what regular non-Chelsea people would consider art. I actually liked it for that. Hob'art artists live in a world without installation and video, where Picasso and Pollock have only just been digested. It's a pleasant world to visit. The first piece that caught my eye, in fact, could almost be mistaken for a Van Gogh copy. And you really don't see anyone trying to copy Van Gogh in Chelsea. Ann Kinney's painting is wonderful in its naivete, her willingness to just go for broke and work in a Post-Impressionist style. And Louise Gale's swirly blue abstracts owe a large debt to old Vincent as well. Both of them bring energy and brightness to the room.
In a similar way Maria Castillo embraces color with Fauvist gusto. Her energetic all-over abstractions are quite good. Stan Lindwasser explores washy acrylics like a damp Abstract Expressionist -- and I mean that in a good way. His colors are sharp and vibrant. Meredeth Turshen is the most classic of them all: Her pastels (possibly over monoprints) have a very handmade 1930s look to them, with a classic earth pigment color scheme as old as cave painting.
Escape From New York, second floor installation view, 2010 (photo courtesy Jason Varone)
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