Broken Glass

I was reading Monday's online version of the New York Times, and came across a great piece in the Arts section about a new exhibit at The Museum of the City of New York. It is entitled, Broken Glass and is a photography collection of shots of 1980s South Bronx. The photographer, Ray Mortenson, who is from New Jersey, started chronicling urban decay around Passaic, and then decided to move to New York, taking the 5 train up to the Bronx.

His work is eerily empty of life, and he never shot people in his Bronx photography. As the article alludes to, his photos stand as a kind of testament to an abandoned time, place and setting. The bronx, in many of the parts that he went to, is light years different these days, and Mortenson hasn't been back in years. From the article:

Mr. Mortenson said he had not returned to those blocks since he stopped taking photographs in the Bronx in 1984. “I’m ambivalent about it,” he said. “There was something about being there alone, about that time, that I guess I want to keep.”

“It was kind of like being in a horror movie,” he added. “But that was all part of it.”

The title of the exhibit refers to a line from the Grandmaster Flash classic, "The Message."

As Sean Corcoran, curator of prints and photography at The Museum asks in the article, when he looks at the shots of these otherwordly places, he can't help thinking: “How could things get to this point? What political, economic and cultural shifts could lead to such a collapse?”

This is a great question to ask at a time when all over the U.S., as the article notes, peoples' homes, towns and lives look and feel likewise abandoned.

Bronx Beauty

I went to College in the Bronx. Fordham University, on 187th and Fordham Road. I ate pizza for four years in Belmont, at some of the best pizza places in the world. I went to the greatest zoo in the world, The Bronx Zoo. I would go to see the greatest team in the world, the New York Yankees.

What I wouldn't see much of in the Bronx was beautiful subway stations.

If I went down to 81st Street, or Chelsea, or maybe Brooklyn Heights, I could see aesthetically pleasing subway stops, with murals, mosaic art and such. But not my Grand Concourse stop on the D train. It was, and is, grungy and kinda scary.

Things are changing. Art has come to the Bronx subway stations. In an article I just read in the New York Times, "Set in Glass, Artist’s Ode to Bronx Life Is Acclaimed," the story starts with these words:

The Freeman Street subway station, a few blocks south of Crotona Park in the south-central Bronx, could not seem farther from the art gallery precincts of Chelsea, SoHo and Dumbo. So New Yorkers might be surprised to know that a series of colored-glass panels on the elevated subway station has been acclaimed as an exemplary work of public art.

The work, known as “The El,” involves six scenes made of thousands of pieces of faceted glass, which are about an inch thick — far thicker than stained glass — and is held together by epoxy, for durability in harsh outdoor environments. The artist, Daniel Hauben, 52, created the work as a commission for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Arts for Transit project, which has placed artworks throughout the nation’s busiest transit system.

In June, “The El” was one of 40 works of art selected by Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit organization that promotes arts in the United States, for recognition in its annual Year in Review overview of exemplary contemporary public art installations.

This makes me really, really happy. And even though I am sitting in a chair thousands of miles away, in the south of Brazil, I feel a little closer to home when I read about beauty in Bronx subway stations.