Revisiting the Creativity Rising Public Art Project.
One of the most memorable works of art I’ve ever seen was inside a sweaty boxing gym in Brooklyn. It was the legendary Gleason’s Gym, and the whole place was tense with the scent of grease and aggression. Everywhere there were rock ‘n’ roll posters plastered on red brick walls, and men with fists the size of hams ducking and weaving around the center ring. I walked to the back, past the dummies being pummeled, and opened a locker: inside, a pair of boxing gloves stared me down.
My experience was part of a massive public scavenger hunt called Key to the City, put on last year by the art organization Creative Time and the artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. I was lucky to have gotten my hands on one of a few thousand keys that unlocked carefully selected doors all over New York just for this project, allowing key-holders special access to secret or little-known places that make the city and its neighborhoods unique. Ramirez-Jonas referred to the project as his attempt to create a “portrait of the city.”
On the day that I had that key, I wound up at a few dead-ends. But despite my occasional bad timing or bad navigation, my journey led me to discover new streets and neighborhoods of New York that I had never visited. When my key didn’t unlock the side entrance of a public library in Coney Island (apparently it was closed on Sundays), I walked across the street to the boardwalk and had my fortune read by the old Madame Zoltar machine. She told me I would have nightmares that night. Then it was on to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in the Upper West Side. I’m not sure what my key was supposed to unlock there, but the friezes filled with thousands of animal faces provided enough of a reward.
I had a similar experience recently with a public art project in Louisville called Creativity Rising. Curated by Aron Conaway, the twelve works that make up Creativity Rising weren’t set up to be a scavenger hunt per se when they were installed in 2010. Instead, they were intended to be a series of public works conceived as an alternative to the work in the walled gallery spaces several blocks away in the downtown Louisville gallery district. But for me, the experience became akin to a hunt when I decided to track all of them down one morning this September, over a year after their creation. The work was intended to have approximately a one-year lifespan, and that date recently passed. At least three of the works are simply gone. The other nine have survived, and of those, some are in good condition, while others did not fare so well. It made me think of my experience with the Key to the City project, because my discoveries (or lack thereof) made the project in Louisville feel like a work of relational aesthetics. And it made me wonder: Do these works in Phoenix Hill paint a portrait of the neighborhood, à la Paul Ramirez Jonas? If so, what kind of portrait do the ones in disrepair paint, or the ones lost?
As in New York City, my foraging for absent artwork in Phoenix Hill led me to a few happy surprises. When I wasn’t able to find Brook White’s blown-glass chandelier on the corner of Market and Campbell, I walked into the Flame Run hot shop across the street and watched artists blow glass as they told me how part of it was stolen. And as I drove around in circles trying to read the Creativity Rising project map, I almost drove right into the Food Truckus Ruckus—a monthly food truck gathering where I was able to sit and plot out my next moves while sampling Cuban delicacies and listening to a funky cover of “Purple Rain.” Next door, the sound of a crowing rooster drew me for the first time onto the premises of Fresh Start Grower’s Supply, a rambling farming and gardening store in the middle of that so-called urban food desert. Not all the pieces were still standing, but Creativity Rising was welcoming me to the neighborhood.
Lisa Simon took inspiration from the old iron stars on early Louisville houses in the area, and created an explosion of colorful metal stars on the side of The Lounge on Madison Street. Sean Garrison’s painting on Baxter Avenue is a supernatural interpretation of the epic bike races that used to take place along that corridor in the 19th century, and is still inexplicably vibrant (and phallic) after a year of public exposure. The informative audio tour of the neighborhood provided by Skylar Smith is still accessible by calling 502-554-9169. Most poignantly, Todd Smith’s wooden raft on Chestnut Street still hangs at the level of the 1937 flood that devastated Louisville. At first glance, it looks like part of a crude tree house abandoned by children many years ago. It is a playful commemoration and celebration of life, on top of being eerily foreboding about what, after all, could always come again.
The remaining works that I found in less favorable conditions did not have as many obvious historical connections to the neighborhood as the ones in good shape, but they still offered unique, if sometimes bizarre, perspectives of place. I found Denise Furnish’s bleached-out Home Sweet Home text sewn into the fence of the UofL medical center parking lot. Placing that phrase in such a context stirred some unsettling notions for me about illness and final resting places. Gwen Kelly’s Serenity Seat Shrine may or may not be basically defunct now: a soft pink seat on the sidewalk that invites pedestrians to sit and have a moment of stillness and serenity—a few yards away from two city benches. On the corner of Campbell and Marshall, photographer Mary Yates had installed photographs of fresh fruit on a fence around a tree, intending to remind the low-income urban community about the importance of attaining healthy food options. Titled Fresh Grasp, the photographs are now stained brown and curling out of their frames, their plastic laminate peeling and scattering across the grass. The work is clearly past its prime, but in an odd way, it may deliver the artist’s message even more urgently than before.
The most significant thing about art that exists outdoors isn’t that it is so vulnerable, or that it’s free and accessible to the public (anyone can walk into 21c Museum Hotel a mile away or almost any other art gallery on earth and look at art for free, too). Its real virtue seems to be that it strives to be a part of the panorama of people’s daily lives. Not that the walls of a gallery prevent the viewer from having a profound experience with art, but there is also something to be said for the living context that can be found only outside the white walls. That context can be a powerful player in the way art functions and communicates. Like much of the work that was placed on the streets of Phoenix Hill, art out in the open can be disruptive in the best possible way. It can transform the banal into the absurd (Thaniel Ion Lee’s golden wheelchair on a faux-marble pedestal) or it may interrupt a routine (Russel Hulsey’s cryptic text imbedded along a brick wall). It can raise questions, subvert, confront, be reverential, be beautiful, or just make people stop and take a second look around.
Outdoor public art will always risk perishing at the hands of the elements or vandals or time. The bloom may be gone from a few of the Creativity Rising project artworks, but as the elements wore them away, they became a study in the ephemeral nature of this kind of art. Seeing Mary Yates’ photographs in particular made me think about the work that was missing from Creativity Rising, and what I was missing by getting to these transient works too late. If Fresh Grasp had been fresh when I arrived, would I have seen the street corner differently? Would I have had a different conception of the neighborhood if I had been able to see Thea Lura’s or Andy Cook’s work before they were removed? I thought about all the people and events that existed at one time and then ceased to exist in that neighborhood—or any other neighborhood. To see Todd Smith’s poetic acknowledgement of the flood is to recognize the amazing grit of Depression-era Louisville. And Skylar Smith’s explanation (via the historian Tom Owen) of the former glory of Phoenix Hill Tavern gives listeners a richer understanding of a familiar landscape. Then again, maybe people don’t always need to know about those ghosts. Some neighborhood histories, like some works of art, will simply fade away and leave space for new ones to rise, like that proverbial bird.
–Julie Leidner
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