Community-based chaos

PHOTO BY DRP

 

CITY JOURNAL

August 20, 2015

 

Community-Based Chaos

by James Panero

 

The de Blasio administration has all the wrong answers on the homeless mentally ill.

 

For New Yorkers who remember the bad old days, the recent reminders of an era when urban pathologies ruled the streets can be jarring. Back when times were tough, residents of my neighborhood on the Upper West Side passed by abandoned graffiti-covered lots, crunched red-capped crack vials under their feet, and worried about when Larry Hogue, the “Wild Man of 96th Street,” would make his next appearance. Now some of this sense of foreboding seems to be coming back.

Late last year outside Pomander Walk, the historic Tudor-style residence on West 95th Street, a custodian sweeping the street was attacked by 29-year-old Jairo DeLeon, who, without provocation, proceeded to stab him with a knife. The handyman sustained severe lacerations to his arm, which he had held up to protect himself as he bled out onto the sidewalk. He was saved by neighbors who staunched the blood with a tourniquet. After police apprehended DeLeon, they learned that he was known as “Little Owl” in a gang called Dominicans Don’t Play and had 29 prior arrests.

In June, on what was, until recently, a leafy stretch of West 94th Street, a 28-year-old man named Jack Kester, deranged and apparently high on drugs, damaged and destroyed several trees with a saw while riding around on a child’s scooter, declaring “I’m king of the world.” When a neighbor confronted him, Kester threatened him with his gardening supplies while exclaiming “You’re a punk-ass bitch,” before fleeing into nearby Riverside Park.

More recently, the New York Post made a cover story out of a 49-year-old homeless man named Monk, a well-known local presence who for years has resided in his own fetid sidewalk encampment of blankets, trash, and crumpled newspapers on Broadway near Zabar’s. The Post featured Monk urinating in the middle of Broadway in broad daylight with the headline20 YEARS OF CLEANING UP NEW YORK CITY PISSED AWAY.

Post columnist John Podhoretz, himself a lifelong Upper West Sider,lamented how “homelessness and empty stores” had become “the new normal in NYC.” The Post ran several follow-ups to the Monk story, and its coverage finally prompted a noticeable police response. After being picked up for psychological evaluation, however, Monk returned to the streets.

Last year, Mayor de Blasio announced that the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, is spearheading a taskforce that will soon unveil a plan to address the problem of the mentally ill homeless by decriminalizing certain pathological behavior and raising the bar for possible arrest and incarceration. “We intend to treat this situation very differently,” de Blasio said. At the same time, city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has also proposed decriminalizing offenses such as the public urination that landed Monk on the cover of the Post. Even police commissioner William J. Bratton, an architect of quality-of-life policing but now beleaguered within de Blasio’s administration—he says he won’t serve in a second de Blasio term—has equivocated on using his officers to address vagrancy. “They have every bit as much right to be in that park as you or I to sit on that bench,” he said of the homeless—though in late July he announced new training for 10,000 officers on how to deal with vagrants.

Without a comprehensive approach to mental illness that includes a fresh look at institutionalization, however, the only idea that de Blasio and liberal homeless advocates can come up with is what they call “community-based solutions”—that is, placing facilities for the homeless, the mentally ill, and even convicted criminals in residential neighborhoods. But by basing treatment in such areas rather than in sequestered settings, these solutions introduce destabilizing populations into functioning communities. They damage the city’s social fabric, further marginalize residents already at risk, and poorly serve those in need. Yet they also enrich certain landlords and homeless-industry insiders, who profit from their incursion.

“Community-based” approaches are already having disturbing effects. In East Williamsburg, former homeless men who have earned a second chance thanks to the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able work program are battling the Department of Homeless Services, which proposes to push them out of the Doe facility and replace them with sex offenders. In outer Brooklyn, the New York Times reported on the operation of community-based facilities for criminals called “residential reentry centers” (RRCs), otherwise known as “halfway houses.” Here, a “politically connected entrepreneur with a checkered history in the halfway-house industry,” Jack A. Brown III, was paid $241,900 in 2010 by his own RRC organization, Community First, which also employed his brother and sister. To operate just one facility called Brooklyn House, Community First was awarded a contract estimated to be worth more than $29 million over a two-year period. Yet as the Times reported, rather than receive assistance in acclimating to life outside prison, inmates lived in squalor and “often have little to do and receive few services . . . Some of them pass the time playing cards, ordering takeout food and watching videos, including pornographic ones. At night, they talk on cellphones, which are supposed to be banned; drink alcohol hidden in water bottles; and smoke synthetic marijuana, called K2 . . . They also flee.” A Department of Justice internal audit of Community First confirmed much of the Times story.

Last year, after a doubling of smash-and-grab break-ins of cars parked along Riverside Drive, along with an 82 percent uptick in robberies in the area, police from the 24th precinct raided the Freedom House Shelter on 95th Street and arrested 22 residents who, it turned out, had outstanding warrants. The homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless held a rally at the shelter to protest the raid and called for more “effective community-based solutions.” And Bratton proceeded to criticize the raid, seeing it as “well-intended, but [not] something I’m . . . supportive of . . . That policy of that precinct has ended.”

If there was any doubt that de Blasio intends to expand his community-based approach, look to his robocalls earlier this year to landlords,offering them incentives to take in more city homeless. Such a push is a win first and foremost for the mayor’s allies in the homeless-shelter industry and a payback for campaign support. “Homeless shelter landlords bet big on de Blasio,” Andrew Rice reported in New York in 2013. “During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to de Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards.” Rice reports that most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels converted into shelters with “sky-high rents” by an organization called Housing Solutions USA, formerly known as Aguila, run by Robert Hess, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s one-time commissioner of homeless services. Hess even held a fundraiser at his home for candidate de Blasio that included Alan Lapes, “one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.”

It so happens that Lapes is the owner and Hess the operator of Freedom House, the raided shelter on West 95th Street—from which DeLeon was departing when he stabbed the super of Pomander Walk.

Gallery Chronicle (January 2015)

Fox Gallery installation view with work by Claire Seidl and Kim Uchiyama

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2015

Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero

On “Claire Seidl and Kim Uchiyama: Plain Sight, Selected Paintings, Prints and Photographs” at Fox Gallery, "Eleventh Street Arts: Inaugural Group Show" at the Grand Central Atelier, "Tom Goldenberg: Landscapes” at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, and “Todd Gordon, Tom Goldenberg” at George Billis Gallery.

An apartment gallery is just what it sounds like: a gallery in an apartment. The concept barely needs explaining, but the obviousness of it only became apparent to me in recent years. Of course, the traditional commercial gallery as we know it—that storefront of art, now almost always stripped down to a white cube—is, in fact, a modern creation. Art has been decorating the places where we live since before the first cave drawings at Lascaux. No doubt someone sometime in the Pleistocene was the first to trade a zigzag clam carving kept beside a stone pillow for entrails from the mammoth hunt. Hence the first apartment gallery sale was made.

But for whatever reason, from perhaps 15,000 years ago until sometime in 2008, apartment galleries have been far too exotic for most of us to pay them much mind. It could be that some prehistoric prohibition exists in mixing commercial transactions with a place of domicile; the art on the walls where you live should reside on the walls where you live and shouldn’t be up for sale. Most municipalities indeed have some regulations against operating a commercial space from home, and presumably this includes an art gallery. I wouldn’t want Gagosian West run out of the apartment across the hall from where I live, either. Yet there have been many famous and wonderful apartment galleries that worked out just fine for everyone. In January 2012, I wrote about the “ ’temporary Museum of Painting (and Drawing)” that the painter Cathy Nan Quinlan ran out of her loft in Williamsburg. These have largely been alternatives to the mainstream; out-there spaces not for everyone (although, in fact, they could be far more inviting than chilly white-box storefronts).

This all changed with the declining fortunes of the art world after 2008. As the economics of all but the largest commercial galleries suffered setbacks, the nimble apartment gallery, often artist-driven, often in unusual locations, took on a new leading role. It might be added that social media, the flattening of information, Google Maps, and a new appreciation for the “sharing economy” all played a role in these developments. Apartment galleries in Bushwick such as Norte Maar and Centotto began rigorous and regular exhibition programs in the wall spaces next to the kitchen and above the bed. But more importantly these changes in venue brought with them a sense of liberation. With gallery costs presumably now covered through other means—the best of them are living spaces first and exhibition spaces second—the lights stay on whether anything sells or not. So apartment gallerists (if we can call them that) have the freedom to show what they want, not what they need to sell.

Another discovery of apartment gallery-going is how interesting it can be to see art in a domestic setting. You can just about put anything in a white-box gallery and it will seem like art as it takes on the artificial aura of the venerated space around it. In a home, art must rise to the occasion. The art that passes this test looks even bigger and better than on a whitebox gallery wall. This is incredibly helpful, of course, in deciding if this is art you want to live with yourself. Apartment galleries also give us a sense for the seller’s own taste, ideas for our own home, and a more direct connection (too direct, for some people) with the creative community we might be buying into.

These thoughts went through my head as I visited Fox Gallery NYC, an apartment gallery run by Annette Fox since 2009. Located in her apartment at 101st Street and West End Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and open by appointment, Fox Gallery delights from the street. Just look up at the intricate and now forlorn Art Nouveau façade of one of George & Edward Blum’s signature apartment buildings from a century ago. The faded Gilded Age grandeur continues through the apartments inside, where a hundred years of landlord paint has built up over the picture moldings and French doors.

Watercolors by Kim Uchiyama, Fox Gallery NYC

In Fox’s apartment, this frosty white craquelure only adds to the texture of the space and resonates with the bold abstract paintings now on view by Claire Seidl and Kim Uchiyama.1 Both painters create an enigmatic sense of color, layer, and light—Uchiyama through horizontal bands; Seidl in a scumble of scrapes and lines. As natural light fills much of this classical living space, their work breathes and converses like exotic figures lounging in the living room or sitting with you at the dining room table. The Swing of Things, an aqueous square canvas by Seidl at the end of the entry hallway, invites a deep dive in. A set of matching watercolors by Uchiyama finds her horizontal bands bending and resting against one another and connecting through the panels in the series. Fox effortlessly folds her own excellent collection in this mix while also showing the range of each of these artists’ output: in the hallway, print editions by Uchiyama; in the bedroom, haunting long-exposure black-and-white photographs by Seidl of cabin dinners and lake swimming. This art settles us into a special place, like this gallery, where you just want to linger.

Jacob Collins in his new Grand Central Atelier

When most artists want to learn to paint, they enroll in school. When he couldn’t find a school to teach him, Jacob Collins created his own. For over twenty years, a scion of intellectual New York—he is related to Meyer Schapiro (1904–1996), the Columbia professor and one of America’s most formidable art historians—Collins has developed his own teachers, peer group, and disciples as he seeks to revive the teachings of the Beaux Arts and unlock the secrets of the Old Masters. From Water Street in Brooklyn to his home studio on the Upper East Side to a floor in the General Society and Tradesmen Building just west of Grand Central Terminal, the School of Collins has grown into a movement.

Installation view of GCA's Eleventh Street Arts; landscapes by Jacob Collins

This fall, Collins opened his newest and biggest campus in a converted warehouse in Long Island City, a block from the MOMA satellite PS1, on 11th Street and 46th Avenue. At 12,500 square feet, four times larger than his previous location, Collins’s Grand Central Atelier, as it’s now called, is an art school, an art incubator, and an artist clubhouse for fifty or more painters who have come out of Collins’s intense multi-year program and the hundreds of students who now flock to their classes.

      

Devin Cecil-Wishing's cast drawing of Saint Jerome and painting of a playing card and egg at Eleventh Street Arts

In the front rooms of the new school is a gallery for their work called Eleventh Street Arts. Through January, open with regular hours on weekends, Collins has mounted an “Inaugural Group Show” for the new space.(2) The venue is less than abundantly marked—the letters “GCA” are unremarkably stenciled on the front door—but the unassuming exterior makes what’s inside seem all the more remarkable. The hundred-odd works here include some of Collins’s own landscapes and demonstrate the intense skills he has promulgated. Many of the names will be familiar to those who have followed Collins through the years, as his best students have gone on to become teachers themselves. This is especially true of Joshua LaRock, a young apprentice when I first met him some years ago who has gone on to paint portraits that could be straight out of the Northern Renaissance. Edward Minoff and Tony Curanaj, former graffiti artists who became some of Collins’s earliest students, now paint singular seascapes and trompe-l’oeil miniatures. Another trompe-l’oeil artist on display is Devin Cecil-Wishing, who displays what might be the finest technique of the whole ensemble in a cast drawing of Saint Jerome that seems to float in space and a painting of a playing card and egg seemingly perched in a shadow box. Anthony Baus was new to me; he creates exquisite drawings of architecture. I also liked Sam Worley’s Study in Yellow (2011) and Patricia Watwood’s Fallen Angel (2012) for bringing their own candor in mixing old and new—Worley with a still life of a yellow soap bottle next to ancient glass, and Watwood with a modern angel smoked out of a blackened urban sky. Like this new school in the heart of industrial Queens, these works of timeless technique fully inhabit the present day.

Sam Worley Study in Yellow (2011) at Eleventh Street Arts

For all we can see on the walls of our museums, there’s much more that rarely makes it onto public view, mainly staying in the storage of permanent collections. This can especially be the case for works on paper. New York has a vast archive of historical material, but most never makes it out of the flat files. It’s true that intimate works on paper don’t lend themselves to the light and space requirements of modern public viewing. Yet what few of us realize (until recently, myself included) is that much of this work, even at our most esteemed museums, can be viewed by appointment in their drawing libraries.

For over a decade the artist Tom Goldenberg has led a peripatetic class called “Drawing on Collections” that has organized small groups to gather and discuss these works behind closed doors. Visiting the drawing library of a different museum or private collection each week, magnifying glass in hand, he and his students call up, pore over, and talk through the lines and marks. As someone who has tagged along for a handful of these workshops, I can report that seeing such works laid out on a table, without the separation of glass, just a few inches from your eye, conveys a unique appreciation of the artist’s touch and left me with an uncanny impression of what I’d been shown.

Tom Goldenberg Digital Trees at The Graduate Center

Back in his studio, Goldenberg has worked through similar impressions in his own landscapes. A display of his drawings is now on view in “Tom Goldenberg: Landscapes” in the Exhibition Hallway of The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.3 At the same time, at George Billis Gallery in Chelsea, Goldenberg is showing the latest selection of his large painted landscapes.4

Occupying a long set of cases in a busy hallway, the exhibition at The Graduate Center demands close viewing. Concentrating on the rural hills, fields, streams, and vegetation of upstate New York, Goldenberg employs a wide range of perspective, materials, and techniques—charcoal, walnut ink, pastels—that clearly draws on those classical collections.

Yet with a background in abstraction, Goldenberg seems to remain just as interested in his mark-making as what he’s made. Many of his best drawings hinge at the point of recognition, where a thicket of lines and a section of empty space come together to reveal the reflections of light in a wooded brook. This impulse is now even more apparent at George Billis, where Goldenberg has stepped back from his verdant realism to test his experiments-on-paper writ large.

Tom Goldenberg, Smithfield at George Billis Gallery

Here George Billis smartly contrasts Goldenberg’s rural intimacy with the hardscrabble cityscapes of Todd Gordon. In Gordon’s work, it is hard not to see the painter Rackstraw Downes, who also employs snaking train tracks and fish-eye realism to give sight to the urban unseen. Yet Gordon stands on his own, especially in a painting such as The Green Barn, a scene of corrugated metal siding and graffiti that has the transporting sense of a modern ruin.

For Goldenberg, his latest paintings are more like drawn canvases, with layered sketches on a pulpy painted ground. Of course, the mechanics of drawing on paper do not automatically translate to oil on canvas. A handful of paintings here feel unfinished, while in others the dashing lines and bold colors may distract from the overall image. But the best, such as Sandro’s Hill, convey both an image and the sense of an image. Here is a perfect layering of impressions, drawn out over time and space.

1 “Claire Seidl and Kim Uchiyama: Plain Sight, Selected Paintings, Prints and Photographs” opened at Fox Gallery NYC on October 22, 2014 and remains on view through January 31, 2015.

2 "Eleventh Street Arts: Inaugural Group Show" opened at the Grand Central Atelier, Queens, on December 5, 2014 and remains on view through January 25, 2015.

3 “Tom Goldenberg: Landscapes” opened at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, on September 22, 2014 and remains on view through January 18, 2015.

4 “Todd Gordon, Tom Goldenberg” opened at George Billis Gallery, New York, on December 16, 2014 and remains on view through January 24, 2015.

You've Got Elevator

James writes:

In today's Crain's New York Business, I tell the story of preserving an elevator made famous by the movie "You've Got Mail." It also happens to be my favorite elevator in my favorite building in New York. Thanks to Dan Geiger and Ken Christensen of Crain's for the terrific video.