Harvest Dome, as the artists hope it will look. Photo illustration by Bronx River Crossing

Thwarted by wind and water in their effort last fall to float a huge dome built of discarded umbrellas from Hunts Point to the Harlem River and upriver to Inwood, the artists behind Harvest Dome have launched an effort to rebuilt their sculpture.

Using the Internet fund-raisng site Kickstarter, Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi are seeking to raise $7,500 by March 10 to rebuild the dome. The first dome foundered at Rikers Island in October and was destroyed by jail personnel.

The pair intended the dome, constructed of umbrellas and floated on pontoons of soda bottles, to call attention to how much debris is found in New York City’s waterways.

Because the currents in the East River off Hunts Point were so unkind to the first project, the artists are planning to build the new dome nearer its final destination in Inwood Hill Park.

Among the rewards offered to contributors are remnants of the wrecked dome.
For more information or to make a contribution, visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/481224446/harvest-dome-20.

Photo by Tim Hetherington/Magnum Photos. This photo is one of a series taken by the late Tim Hetherington as part of an exhibition at the Bronx Documentary Center on Courtlandt Ave.

Gallery shows work of photographer killed in Libya

The inaugural exhibition at the new Bronx Documentary Center on Courtlandt Avenue highlights the final works of a major talent whose life came to a tragic end thousands of miles away – while its founders reflect on the tribute they’ve built for their fallen friend.

Visions: Tim Hetherington is a stirring collection of 16 never-before-seen photographs taken during the conflict in Libya by the late photojournalist who was killed while covering the uprising last spring.

Along with the pictures – including the final image he ever captured – the exhibit includes a multimedia installation with video clips of Hetherington discussing his life’s work.

“People felt excited and we feel we got it right,” said Project Director Danielle Jackson.

“The idea was to have Tim live on,” said Michael Kamber, Heatherington’s close friend, colleague and founder of the new Center.  “To see kids learning and watching videos of Tim, he is.”

The center was initially conceived by award-winning photojournalists Kamber and Hetherington, whose ambition it was to forge a nonprofit educational center and gallery dedicated to the support of documentary projects from around the world.

But their goal went beyond showcasing projects that highlight the intersection of art, ideas and journalism.  Hetherington felt the space was a perfect opportunity to provide the underserved population in the South Bronx with access to documentary projects, along with events and programs for all ages.

“Tim was all about reaching nontraditional audiences,” Kamber explained.

Marty Rogers grew up in the neighborhood and recalled when the site was a candy store in his youth.  He attended the center’s opening and stopped by a few days later to collect promotional flyers to spread the word.

“It’s fabulous and a great resource,” he said.  “They have a message and the skills to help people form ideas about the world.  I’m telling people they have to swing by.  These guys are for real.”

The new venue is a welcome addition that will expose young people from the neighborhood to an art form they have would otherwise have no access to, say the project’s facilitators.

“For many kids, their only exposure to photography is taking pictures for Facebook,” Jackson said.

Hetherington’s final images are being used as a catalyst to educate local youth about basic photography principles and encourage critical thinking, interpretation and discussion about the conflicts he covered around the world.

Kamber first showed Hetherington the ground floor location in January soon after he purchased the recently renovated historical landmark building adorned with ornate white trimmings and a steep mansard roof.  But before Hetherington had a chance to work alongside Kamber on the center, he was killed in Misurata on April 20, 2011.

“When he died we knew we had to do it,” Kamber said. “For a lot of us it was about working out our grief.”

Ideas started to take shape mere weeks after Hetherington’s death.  A dedicated team of volunteers was behind design and construction efforts, supporting their cause primarily “out of our pockets,” Kamber said.

“It was such an amazing effort by so many people,” said Jackson.

Kamber said four soldiers featured in Hetherington’s Academy Award-nominated film “Restrepo” came to New York and helped build the hanging displays for the photographs.  They all shared pizza, beer and stories on the floor of the new venue that evening.

Hetherington’s parents visited the center and helped paint the walls just days before Visions opened.  Kamber said they have also donated Hetherington’s library of books, flap jacket and helmet.

Small donations and fundraising have also helped with the launch, and Jackson said A Kickstarter.com campaign was planned for the coming weeks.  One group that is providing financial assistance for Visions is the Committee to Protect Journalists – one of three organizations designated to receive donations in Hetherington’s honor.

“It’s a strong means to showcase what journalism is about, the risks it entails and the understanding it engenders,” said Gypsy Guillén Kaiser, the director of advocacy and communications for the organization.

Melrose resident Elina Taft said she was moved by Hetherington’s photographs .

“We take life for granted,” she said while looking at an image of two young Libyan boys and an older man holding explosives.  She said she planned to return soon with her 21-year-old son.

“I’m hoping it enlightens and empowers people to learn more about the world, she said. “Not just for the kids, but also adults.”

 Visions: Tim Hetherington is scheduled to run through December 2.

Milteri Tucker

A physical injury may cause some workers to question a career choice, but it gave Milteri Tucker the drive to pursue two.

Tucker, a professional dancer, was left unable to practice after a not so graceful landing from a grand jete (split -in -the -air) during a practice for her first solo performance more than a decade ago.

Frustrated by what she referred to as “lack of urgency” from the doctor to get her back on the dance floor, she realized that not only did she want to dance, she wanted to be able to treat injuries too.

“Our body is our only instrument, she said. “And we have to take care of it.”

Eight months after that experience, at the age of 17, Tucker decided to leave her native Puerto Rico and move to the Bronx to pursue undergraduate degrees in both dance and biology.

Before starting college Tucker only visited New York City to see her grandmother and Broadway shows.

She has come a long way from the 11-year-old girl who was always shy about being the only tall, black Latina in everything she did in dancing.

Today Milteri Tucker performs in three dance companies, including her own Bomba Bombazo Dance Company. She also puts her skills in the sciences to use in the dance classes she prepares for senior citizens.

Tucker has just wrapped up a Bomba workshop at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance in Hunts Point where she said the goal of her six-week class was to do more than teach the moves of the dance. She wanted the students to learn the culture and history of the people through dance in its purest form, folkloric.

She has brought a fusion of the traditional Puerto Rican dance Bomba with a modern twist from the Bronx to the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and back. She has also performed locally at Hostos Theatre on the Grand Concourse, among other venues. 

“Dance is power,” she said. “It is the canvas and we are the paint, so we have to embody the form in order to take someone to another world for the duration of a performance.”

The fall workshop began with the three elements of the Afro- Puerto Rican folkloric art form, which are song, rhythm and dance. Bomba is characterized by the communication between dancer and drummer. The dancer makes a series of movements to which the drummer responds with a synchronized beat. It is the drummer that tries to follow the movement of the dancer, not the other way around.

The workshop started just months after a successful performance at the Pregones Theater on Walton Ave. this past summer.

Prior to that Tucker was selected to perform her Bomba choreography for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company at the Citigroup Theater in Manhattan in 2010.

She began teaching Bomba workshops at her Alma Mater, Hunter College, as a guest instructor in 2004, less than three years after completing dual degrees in Dance and Biology. She found a sense of identity through this dance form, something that this Puerto Rican native says she did not have at the time.

Tucker is a powerful force on the dance floor whose intense brown eyes seem to study every move in the reflection of the dance studio’s mirror in order to execute it with precision. Her 5- foot-7 inch frame often appears elongated when she moves her arms or neck to get a step just right.

She was accepted into medical school, but those plans are on the back burner as her focus is on dance.

Her mother, Majarita Concepcion knew that the arts were for Milteri before she even started grade school.

“She used to walk on her tip-toes always and I took her for an analysis because I thought something was wrong, maybe the calfs or the hamstrings, but everything was fine. She just liked to dance from the age of two,” said Concepcion, who lives in Puerto Rico, but often travels to New York in support of her daughter’s dance career.

One of Tucker’s mentors, acclaimed Latin choreographer and performer Maria Torres, said Tucker will continue to be successful.

“She is willing to study and do the work,” said Torres. “She has the persistence and passion, so how far she goes is up to her.”

Now, at 29 years old Tucker has been performing across the Tri-State area, Puerto Rico and in Europe for more than a decade and still has plans to practice medicine.

“If I’m 90 and look back, I would like to be known for both dance and medicine and as a person who pioneered a new form and a new way of looking at something that has been done for years,” Tucker said. “I want to give back to the community and dance community what it has given to me.”

Ray Lopez's "8 and a half" was among the works of four 'outsider' artists at BronxArtSpace through August.

An exhibition at Mott Haven’s BronxArtSpace gallery in August showed off the work of four local artists who have used different art forms to transcend stereotypes about people with disabilities.

Jose Rivera grew up an orphan on the streets of San Juan. At the age of 14 he enrolled at  the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, where he received scholarships to study before graduating with a degree in fine arts.

Rivera, who now lives in Soundview, is bipolar and suffers from gout, which causes him to walk with a cane he carved himself. As a “found artist” he scours the streets to find the perfect materials to put together his multimedia work – yarn, playing cards, metal, wood – and strives to overcome the stigma connected with his diagnoses.

“Instead of people knowing who I am through my art, they know me as the crazy person,” Rivera said. “I’m here today to prove that I’m worth something.”

The August exhibition was called “Outsiders Inside the Bronx” to draw attention to the fact the four artists’ disabilities lend their work an originality that separates it from that of more mainstream artists.

Rivera and his three colleagues, Chen Carrasco, Ray Lopez and Augustine Cruz, came to know one another while working together over the years at the Point CDC in Hunts Point.

Rivera’s found art, Lopez’ drawings, Cruz’ wood sculptures, and Carrasco’s urban portraits were all on display over the month of August.

“This was an opportunity to show four really great artists in depth,” said Carey Clark, the show’s curator. “I thought it was a huge success.”

Carrasco, a Hunts Point resident, says the Point is a place where the artists can collaborate in a safe environment.

“We socialize, we paint, we discuss art and we share,” he said.

Clark said they each of the artists sold a few pieces at the show, and they gave free art classes at the gallery for young people residents of the neighborhood, something Carrasco says he wishes he could have had access to when he was younger.

“There was no direction when I was small,” Carrasco said. “My parents were poor. They didn’t have any structure.”

Augustine Cruz, another resident of Hunts Point, suffers from epilepsy, and has been sculpting with wood since he was a teenager. Now 62, his pieces include a large bald eagle with its wings spread, and busts of presidents Bill Clinton and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Each of his pieces, he says, takes months to complete.

“It does take patience,” Cruz said. “If I didn’t have that patience, I may not be where I am right now.”

Cruz’ brother, Edwin Cruz, who was at the show, says he’s proud of his older sibling’s abilities.

“I’m glad he’s getting some type of recognition,” Edwin Cruz said. “I grew up with him, and this is all he’s done. He’s really devoted to his art.”

On opening night, the artists explained their own artistic processes and inspirations to the patrons.

“There’s something for everyone,” said Andrea Hegeman, 57, who came to see the art.

“I think it’s great,” said Nina Soto, 44. “You can see the talent. It brings a wonderful thing to the Bronx.”

This Thursday, Sept. 1, the documentary “Fernando Nation” by director Cruz Angeles from LA will be shown, tracing the career of Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, who hailed from the northern Mexican state of Sonora and burst onto the scene as an unheralded rookie.

Nicknamed “El Toro” by his fans, Valenzuela’s success helped unite the city, and was a source of pride for the local Chicano community.

The film will be followed with a Q&A with the director.

The Documentary Center, located at 614 Courtlandt Ave at the corner of 151st St., is a project of non-profit arts organization Fractured Atlas. The center can be reached at 646-696-1655, or info@bronxdoc.org for future films and other events.

This oil painting, courtesy of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation, depicts an auto parts yard on the corner of Hunts Point Ave and Randall Ave from the late 1980s..

Emilio Sanchez made his first trek down Hunts Point’s Food Center Drive in 1988, when he was 67, to an art gallery in the caverns of the Krasdale Foods complex where his art was being shown.

His friend Sig Balka, general attorney for Krasdale and art connoisseur, was showing Sanchez’s work in the gallery he runs, a hidden art enclave across from the Hunts Point Meat Market.

Passing through the urban landscape of the commercial and industrial district, Sanchez was struck by what he saw.

Over the next few years, he returned often, camera in hand, to snap photos that would become the basis for nearly a hundred works, a Caribbean-flavored catalogue of South Bronx commerce. He captured the industrial drab of the neighborhood in a bright and idyllic way, revealing life behind the dingy walls.

Now, some of his works are being shown in an exhibition called Urban Archives: Emilio Sanchez in the Bronx, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Eight pieces will be on display until September, when the full show opens.

In all, 27 oils, watercolors, and drawings, as well as photographs from the museum’s permanent collection, will be shown. The architectural portraits portray commercial and industrial buildings with clean lines, harsh shadows, and stark perspective.

“He was inspired by the area,” said Balka, who had become friends with Sanchez through mutual artistic interests. “And he felt related to the people of a similar Hispanic origin.”

Hunts Point was not the artist’s only South Bronx stomping ground. Some of his paintings also reflect his interest in Mott Haven. One painting depicts a deli at the corner of Lincoln Ave and 136^th St. The green awning shown in the piece is long gone, as are the former owners, where a bodega now stands.

Sanchez was born in Cuba in 1921, and received his primary education in boarding schools around the United States. In 1944 he came to the city to study at the Art Students League, and stayed until his death in 1999.

“This period in the late eighties he seems to have devoted to the Bronx,” said Ann Koll, executive director of the Emilio Sanchez Foundation in Manhattan. The foundation donated a selection of works to the museum earlier this year.

“I love the educational value of his work,” said Sergio Bessa, program director at the Bronx Museum. “It’s simple, clean, and dramatic.”

Bessa plans to bring students from South Bronx schools to the exhibition later this year.

A video by artist Laura Napier showing some of the buildings Sanchez portrayed in his paintings, along with an interpretation of his works, will also be shown.

“You can see that Sanchez reconstructs the buildings,” said Napier. “He didn’t just paint the photos.”

To supplement the artwork, teens from the museum’s summer youth program are producing audio podcasts of interviews they conducted with people from Hunts Point.

“It’s nice to see his interpretation of the Bronx,” said Elliott Harris, 15, a participant in the youth program. “It’s not the way the media portrays it.”

Alfred Rivera, who moved to Hunts Point with his family when he was three in 1945, remembers when the triangular building on the corner of Hunts Point Avenue and Faile Street was a pickle factory. “I remember stealing one or two when we’d pass by as kids,” he said.

Rivera, who bought the building in 1971 for $25,000, opened the liquor store seen on the corner in Sanchez’s painting. “I’d recognize it in a heartbeat,” he said. “That’s my color, I picked the red because I thought it’d attract attention.”

Tony Serrano works across the street from the yellow-walled Auto Parts yard depicted by one of Sanchez’s paintings. The yard is still there, on Hunts Point and Randall Avenues, but the wall is no longer yellow.

“I was here when it was the worst,” said Serrano, looking at a print of the painting and thinking back on his 40 years in Hunts Point. “I need to see this, it makes me proud to still be here,” he said.

“It really jumps at you,” said Trudy Sanchez, a Hunts Point resident who came to the neighborhood in 1957. “I love the vibrant colors, the brightness,” she said, leaning over the counter of MOgridder’s BBQ truck, where she works.

“His work encompassed his spirit,” said Balka. “It was flamboyant but restrained.”

“It’s an industrial setting viewed through an optimistic lens,” said Bessa. “Not the color pallet you expect.

Photo by Erika Rojas. Pregones Theater's ensemble performed Aloha Boricua, part of their award-winning repertoire.

Two stalwarts of the arts in the South Bronx received prestigious Neighborhood Achievement Awards from the mayor’s office in July.

The Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education in Hunts Point and Pregones Theater near Mott Haven were among fourteen organizations and individuals citywide to get the 2011 award at a ceremony at Gracie Mansion, honoring their contributions to the neighborhoods.

Casita Maria was granted the Norman Buchbinder Placemaking award for helping raise the profile of Hunts Point “by highlighting and enhancing its look and feel, thereby increasing visitation or economic activity,” according to Robert W. Walsh, commissioner of the city’s Small Business Services office, which co-sponsors the annual award along with the mayor’s office.

Casita Maria has served Hunts Point and the South Bronx since 1961, after moving from East Harlem where it had been located for over a quarter-century. The recently completed six-story building on the corner of Simpson St. and E. 163^rd St. houses a school, after-school programs, an art gallery and a 375-seat theater, and serves as a gathering place for artists and arts patrons from the Bronx and beyond.

“The Center is a place where the creative talents of the community can be cultivated and showcased,” Walsh said. He added that “Casita’s arts program brings hundreds of people to Hunts Point for free performances and engaging exhibitions,” and said the center “is making the neighborhood safer, encouraging people from other boroughs to visit the South Bronx and encouraging the neighborhood’s cultural revival.”

Pregones Theater, which has gained national recognition as one of the country’s top theatrical and musical interpreters of Latino culture during its 32-year existence, won this year’s Cultural Award. The honor is given to people and groups that Walsh said generate “economic activity and the growth of small business while employing local workers and adding to the artistic and educational fabric of New York City.”

Walsh called Pregones “home to a vital network of professional Latino actors, musicians, dancers, writers, directors, designers, and technicians,” and employs nearly two-dozen Bronxites.

Pregones’ cozy 130-seat theater on Walton Ave. one block from the Grand Concourse at E. 149^th St. opened in 2005. The ensemble has produced close to 70 premieres in English and Spanish over the years.

Jorge Pichardo, 17, stands with his mother Nyrka next to a self-portrait he took of the two at home.

Camera offers students a new way of seeing their neighborhood

When Geancarlo Jordan moved to the United States from Ecuador two years ago, his only experience with a camera was to point it at something and hit the shutter button.

But over the last four months, Jordan, 17, estimates he has taken thousands of photos as part of a new workshop at his school, which has pushed him not only to become a better photographer, but also to learn more about his adopted neighborhood.

He no longer relies on those basic point-and-shoot techniques.

Every picture that I take, I have to be inspired,” Jordan said.

Jordan’s photos, and those taken by 14 other students from the High School of World Cultures, were part of an exhibit called “Eyes and Angles: Our Life in the Bronx” at the Bronx Documentary Center, on Courtland Avenue at East 151st Street. The exhibit, sponsored by the non-profit Envision Foundation for Photography and Digital Media, prompts students to document their communities by photographing them.

Last semester, teachers showed students the fundamentals of photography in the school’s twice-a-week hands-on course.

First, the teachers assigned each student to create a self-portrait, followed by a portrait of one of their classmates. Then the students had to take a photo that told a story about their school.

James Estrin, a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer from The New York Times and co-founder of the Envision Foundation, said the purpose was to teach the teens to become active community participants.

“I see this not so much about photography,” Estrin said. “I want young people to feel like a part of their community.”

For a final project the instructors asked their students to go out and find the beauty in their neighborhood, an assignment that photography teacher Thérèse De Belder said was their most challenging.

Jordan took a blurred photo of a speeding train passing his subway stop. One student took a photo of a chain-link fence, another of a game of dominos.

For her fourth assignment, 16-year-old Crissel Concepcion from the Dominican Republic decided to tell a story about family. She followed her brother as he got a haircut.

“I was in the barbershop and I said, ‘Oh, let me just take a picture of you,’ “ Concepcion said. “And I just love it. I don’t know why.”

“It’s pushing them as photographers to get out of their comfort zones,” De Belder said. “That, for them, is a very big job.”

The partnership between the Envision Foundation and the High School of World Culture was set up by Replications, Inc., a non-profit organization that helps schools in under-served communities. After hearing Estrin’s plan, Principal Ramon Namnun decided to select students from the school’s multicultural class, which focuses on teaching students about globalization and cultural acceptance.

In addition to the Bronx school, the program is operating in Haiti and China, and three schools in Mexico will be added in the fall. Until now it has consisted of 45-minute workshops over a semester, but will soon be expanded into a year-long course of two-hour classes, in which each class will partner with a sister school in one of the other participating cities.

Pediatrician Nelly Maseda, 48, related to the way the students documented life in the city.

“I grew up with a single mother in Washington Heights,” Maseda said. “It’s not all houses in the suburbs and white picket fences.”

Portraying their community “clicked,” Namnun said, adding, “It gives the kids a different perspective.”

Nerys Jimenez, a 17-year-old student from the Dominican Republic, says she’s recognized that shift in perspective. Jimenez has been writing poetry her entire life, and had to learn how to communicate through photography the same way she does through her writing.

“What do I see? What do I want people to see?” Jimenez said. “When you write something, you have a lot of words, and you put them together. When you have a camera you do the same thing. You try and put a lot of different things into a photo.”

Memorial murals are leading South Bronx art form

By Dan Rosenblum
rosemblum@motthavenherald.com

A tradition that started in the Bronx’s deadliest days, when homicide was an everyday occurrence, still marks the borough’s streets. As blood fell on the pavement, paint rose on the walls.

Beginning in the early 1990s, memorial murals began to appear in Mott Haven and other South Bronx neighborhoods as vibrant reminders of those lost in the community and to honor the lives of neighbors who died.

There are brightly painted murals on many Mott Haven blocks, memorials of people like Manuel Contes, who died in 1994, or Kevin Freeman, 25, who was killed in a shootout at the Patterson Houses in the summer of 2004.

“In a way, it’s like still having a person still on the block,” says Hector Nazario a member of the mural painters Tats Cru who signs his work Nicer.

The tradition grew from the graffiti painters who bombed subways and walls in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The South Bronx, and particularly Mott Haven, has a storied past in the history of graffiti, according to Eric Felisbret, who painted as DEAL CIA, and who has dedicated countless hours to documenting graffiti tags, street art and murals across New York, culminating in the book “Graffiti New York” published in 2009.

The subway station at Third Avenue and 149th Street was once the center of the South Bronx graffiti scene, Felisbret recalled in an interview. There, painters would meet up, network and decide where to go.

Around 1989, as the city began to crack down on graffiti in the subways, the messages came up from underground and began spreading in the sunlight. Felisbret traces the earliest memorial murals to that time, when artists like Anthony “Chico” Garcia began painting them on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Garcia painted one notable mural when a friend’s little sister, Julissa Rivera, was stabbed in Brooklyn’s Albee Square Mall.

“It helped my grieving process and I know it did for the family as well,” Felisbret said.

Tats Cru, based at The Point Community Development Corporation in Hunts Point, has long been one of the leading forces in painting memorial walls. There’s even a mural at their studio dedicated to Marcos Ortiz, who died of cancer in 1997.

In the early days, the muralists almost ended up in the middle of the violence, according to Soltero Ortiz, who signs his work BG 183. He recalled one winter when Tats Cru was painting a commissioned mural. Because it started to snow, the group left for the day. Later on, their subject’s family was murdered.

“Maybe someone up there liked us and sent that snow down,” Ortiz said. “We were blessed that day.”

Much of the violence has subsided, and murder rates in Mott Haven and citywide have fallen dramatically. The demand for murals has fallen, as well, but some continue to be painted.

Alfredo Oyague Jr., who does murals as PER1 with the FXCrew, said the murals are a dying culture, due in part to the bad economy and in part to the declining murder rate. He said many young people in New York are losing their interest in the time-consuming art of mural making, while the trend is spreading around Europe and the rest of the world.

“Over there, they’re just catching the fever,” said Oyague. “Here, we’re almost done with it.”

What started as a makeshift process has gone legit. Murals can cost from $800 for just a face to $1,600 for a large, elaborate mural scene, depending on the size and amount of detail. Ortiz said they take four to eight hours to paint.

And making murals nowadays means getting permission from a landlord to be sure the murals won’t get painted over. Owners of a Laundromat refused permission for a mural on their building, Oyague said, because they think it brings the spirit of the dead. He said he wasn’t sure he believed that, but there was one incident that stuck with him.

He remembers a funeral procession for a Bronx boy named Jonathan when he was hit by a car. Doves representing a free spirit flew from his casket, but some of them remained by the newly-painted mural and wouldn’t leave.

After that FXCrew added two doves to the mural to remember that moment.

Sometimes publicly marking grief is controversial. Critics of the murals say some of them memorialize gang violence. But the artists insist most of those whose memories the murals keep alive died of natural causes.

“It has nothing to do with society or making a statement,” said Tats Cru’s Nazario. “It’s really more about just dealing with death amongst family and friends.”

“It’s all about the neighborhood.”

A version of this story appeared in the June/July issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

Brothers Anthony and Paul Ramirez (from left) talk to a potential custom at the From the Bronx Pop Up SHop and Exhibition.

Artists say change defines their relationship with Mott Haven

Hatuey Ramos Fermin sits in the most famous apartment in Mott Haven, recording a podcast called “South Bronx Filter.”

Fermin is the current tenant of Apartment 3A at 309 Alexander Avenue, which housed the Blue Bedroom where for two years his friend Blanka Amezkua displayed the work of contemporary artists who agreed in exchange for the show to offer a workshop or discussion in the neighborhood.

Hatuey Ramos Fermín sits in front of the Blue Bedroom

For people like the seven artists gathered around Fermin’s dining table to record the first of his “Hubs and Spokes Conversation Series,” the turnover in Apartment 3A symbolizes the Mott Haven art scene.

They say that galleries and artists may come and go, but the creative energy remains.

“The Bronx is very transient place,” says Ellen Pollen, director of the Bronx Council on the Arts South Bronx Cultural Corridor.  “People come here on their way to other places a lot.”

After six years of showcasing local work, the Haven Gallery on Bruckner Boulevard closed in 2009.

More recently, noted Pollen, who runs the Bronx Council’s Culture Trolley, the Iron Works Gallery, at 259 East 134th Street, closed. But, she emphasized, a short time later the trolley added LDR Studio on Alexander Avenue to its itinerary.

“To run a gallery takes a lot of time, and money,” said Barry Kostrinsky, founder of the Haven Gallery, who said the weak economy after the real estate bubble burst hurt. But Kostrinsky can now be found at the Bruckner Bar & Grill on Monday evenings, offering a version of the life drawing classes that used to be a staple at the Haven.

Bronx Arts Space, on East 140th Street, opened a year ago, and draws artists from outside Mott Haven. Avery Syrig, a sculpture and jewelry designer, found it through craigslist.

“It’s looking different, from a newer perspective than a lot of things I see in Manhattan,” she said.

“There seems to be a commitment to get people out to see different work, and not just visual arts,” said Amee Pollock, who displayed pop-up books at Bronx Arts Space during the Bronx Council on the Arts Fifth Open Studio Tour, where sculptures, photographs, video installations and a jazz performance, were highlights.

In May, a new kind of showcase was born, when Bronx artists displayed their work for four days in a pop-up museum created by the Mott Haven-based business From the Bronx in a renovated landmark building on Courtland Avenue in Melrose.

“There’s an emerging sense about culture and people,” says Bill Aguado, who headed the Bronx Council on the Arts for three decades. “What’s important is we have alternative spaces.”

Mott Haven also continues to attract artists to live or work in the neighborhood. When Fermin gathered seven of them to inaugurate his conversation series, the relationship of artists to the community was one of their subjects.

Fermin, a multimedia artist and educator at the Teen Council Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and Hostos Community College, devised the South Bronx Filter as a way for Bronx-based artists to express themselves in their own voices. He says he was inspired by Bronx hip-hop photographer, Joe Conzo, who advised:  never let outsiders document you.

Recorded in Fermin’s living room, as the open windows captured the noise of cars whizzing by and sirens from the nearby 40^th Precinct, the conversation included Libertad Guerra and Monxo Lopez of Spanic Attack, Rayzer Sharp and Yelimara Concepción of the Welfare Poets, and artists Elizabeth Hamby and Laura Napier, the curator of the first Hubs broadcast.

Napier vigorously disputed the notion that when artists arrive, gentrification arrives with them. A white woman who has lived in the Bronx for seven years, she said she’s constantly encountering and fighting against being stereotyped. Too often, she feels “I don’t exist anymore; it’s about the larger social issues,” she said.

Interviews with Bronx based artists, many of whom live or work in former warehouses and manufacturing spaces near Bruckner Boulevard, and with curators and gallery owners showed that they’re fed up with the label SoBro, conceived by real estate sales people to attract clients looking for a hip placed to live.

Recognize us for our work, not our location, they say.

The faces and spaces may change, but the networks forged by artists through the Culture Trolley and Open Studio Tour remain “the social capital” of the Bronx, Pollen contends.

“Artists are looking for community, and take advantage of it when they find it,” she says.

A version of this story appeared in the June/July 2011 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.