For once, without comment!
Excerpted from “Ghosts in the Network – Reclaiming the Lost Era,” by Leah Good
We met in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Once, this had been the quintessential New York neighborhood, with a hodgepodge of art galleries and high-end designer stores rubbing elbows with grimy bodegas and Asian fruit stands. Remnants of the lost years still abound. As I nurse my warm cup of coffee, I watch people weave in and out of stores that were burned out husks less than a decade ago. I can see the fender of a torched car in the dark elbow of an alleyway. A dusty storefront, the glass threaded with cracks, proclaims a sale that ended more than four decades ago.
Alice Q, on the other hand, is fresh-faced, with her dark blonde hair pulled back from her forehead and spilling over one shoulder. She catches me people watching and says, with a self-assured smile, “We are going to reclaim this neighborhood, one block at a time.”
Her new art exhibit, a retrospective on the years following the Fall, is opening next week, in a gallery just around the corner. “It’s the perfect location,” she says, “right on the borderland between the past and the future. I wanted my art to capture the aesthetic of this neighborhood, the remnant from a lost time.”
She speaks more frankly about her art, and art in general than most other artists I have met over the course of my work. She dismisses the recent return to traditional realism as “reactionary nonsense.” She declares that only experimentation leads to progress, in art and in life. She expresses admiration for Nicolai Bernstein and the work he is doing in the bombed out sections of Cairo. She spends a long time fretting about rumors of an upcoming coffee crisis, declaring it an unmitigated disaster if the people of New York cannot buy their coffee.
“I think, at their core, people want to communicate,” as she stares into the dregs of her coffee cup. “That’s what the Fall stole form us, and I want to take it back. I want to open up a space for dialogue, for the development of a new discourse and a rhetoric of understanding, not enmity.”
sounds pretty cool. nayidea when its being held? you were a little light on the details…
Ah sorry, you should go read the entire article in the manhattan weekly. I think it mentions where its being held and information about the dates/prices etc
I haven’t ventured as far south as the LES in quite a long time. I just thought the article was interesting!