Response to Public Art

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Eccles:

• Mayor Dinkins was a supporter of art, but Mayor Giuliani’s not. Having an administration that was unsupportive(uninterested) was in hindsight a major source of success in freeing artists from the political process 
• traditional public spaces, and parks are managed by private spaces - run and maintained by private organization, ie. Central Park Conservancy, the Madison Square Park Conservancy and the Bryant Park Restoration and Development Corporation (primary partners)
• rejects the idea that a park has a “message” or “brand”

• debunks the notion that art stood for something other than itself
  it’s about individual not communal

Pasternak:

• Creative Time: to develop projects with artists that would free them from city constraints and avoid bureaucratic obstacles. (work extra hard to have access to the public spaces that they want to use)
• Percent for Art: officially mandated to work within the public spaces

Finklepearl:

• John Ahearn’s Bronx Bronze

• He’s a white resident of the South Bronx, was known both in the his neighborhood and in the art world for his painted bronze sculptures depicting local residents in a vibrant and positive fashion--using a medium traditionally reserved for heroes and allegorical figures to depict everyday people. 
• Ahearn created casts of local residents--a young girl on roller skates and two boys, one alone, another with his dog--for the commission. Some community members said sculptures represented a side of their neighborhood that they did not want presented--especially in their highly prominent location along the Grand Concourse, a main Bronx thoroughfare for residents, tourists and outsiders visiting Yankee Stadium.
• The youth depicted in the sculptures were idle--hanging out on the street--and, some felt, intimidating, even reminiscent of drug dealers and hustlers from the neighborhood. Essentially, people think he is racist. 

• Bob Rivera’s sculpture Open Voyage
• Bob Rivera's Open Voyage is a colorful, abstract work located on the roof of the gymnasium at P.S. 279. The sculpture is framed out of pieces of aluminum bolted together. 
• An aluminum skeletal structure provides support at the back, as do brightly-colored diagonal aluminum poles which help distribute weight.

• Percent for Art (publicly funded, governmental public art entity, is a good place to seek a more collective voice.