Whose Park Is It? Artist Lederman Arrested Protesting at Panel Discussion

Robert Lederman Protesting at Panel Discussion held at the Museum of the City of New York. Photo courtesy of "A Walk in the Park".

Carrying a hand-painted sign that said “PARK PRIVATIZATION IS A REAL ESTATE SCAM - IT IS ALL ABOUT RAISING PROPERTY VALUES FOR THE MAYOR’S WEALTIEST FRIENDS,” artist Robert Lederman was arrested recently while protesting at a Parks panel discussion that featured New York City Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe and other supporters of the unelected “public/private partnerships” that increasingly control the administration of New York City’s parks.

Lederman is the president of the street artists organization A.R.T.I.S.T and is currently suing the Parks Department in Federal Court over new rules that restrict artists’ right to work in city parks.

Here’s the news coverage, including video of Lederman’s arrest.

Videos of the protest and arrest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAWooZKyDy0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNFWHAc_-XQ

“Night Of Protests At Museum Park Funding Forum”
A Walk in the Park, by Geoffrey Croft, August 13, 2011

“Which Park Is It, Anyway?”
ParkSlopePatch, by Johanna Clearfield, August 12, 2011

“Is the revenue-generating park a good thing? Commissioner Benepe says it ‘depends on who’s in charge’”
Capital New York, by Dan Rosenblum, August 11, 2011

“Activist is arrested at a panel about private funding for parks”
The Villager, by Albert Amateau, August 11, 2011

Session Eight: Amon Azizov and Peter Walsh

Amon Azizov on Wien Walk in Central Park. Photo Peter Walsh

As he waits patiently for his customers in Central Park under Wien Walk's majestic oaks and plane trees - the mothers from New Jersey and Upstate New York bringing their tween children, the middle-aged tourists from Ohio, the young lovers from the Bronx - artist Amon Azizov feeds the squirrels peanuts from a bag.

Dressed in a denim jacket with the collar turned up against the sun and a cap riding low on his head, Mr. Azizov is prepared for a long day drawing in the open air. Every item in his kit, from the lightweight painting easel, to his worn brushes which sport just the right spring in the bristles, to the Velcro he uses to quickly transform his sample portraits of figures like Nelson Mandela into a workstation, suggests a man committed to using the fewest materials to achieve the highest ends. He has the aura of a sea captain or a mountain climber.

Originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he trained as an artist and was a member of the Soviet Union Artists Union, Mr. Azizov uses the “brush technique” like his fellow former soviet Artashes Karslian working just a few yards down the path on Wien Walk. “I’ve been working here in Central Park for about seven year now,” he says. Mr. Azizov and Peter Walsh exchanged portraits on Saturday morning, August 8th, 2011.

Amon Azizov and Peter Walsh exchange portraits.

Some comments from Peter Walsh:

“Amon and I were introduced by Artashes, who explained the portrait exchange to him in Russian. But I found his English to be quite good. He asked that I draw first and he second. My own drawing went quickly and I was able to catch a good likeness but make a rather bad drawing. I fell to some of the most basic errors of portraiture: I had trouble setting the eyes and I cropped the back of Amon’s head where I should have given it room. Being an amateur, I was rusty.

Amon took a bit longer to do his portrait of me, which is quite good and has the clean, airbrushed finish that the brush technique produces. First he laid in the over-all structure of my head and then he methodically dropped in each of the parts: my mouth and nose, then my right eye, then my left, then my left ear, then my shirt.

When he’s not doing portraits, Amon is a sculptor. “I’ve developed my own technique that relies on sheet metal. No clay or other sculpting materials,” he says. “For example, about two years ago a completed a 16-foot tall giraffe.”

I was pleased to learn that we live fairly close to each other in Brooklyn, Amon at the Newkirk stop on the Q train and me at the Church Avenue stop on the F. Not so surprising I suppose as the neighborhoods have many Russian speakers and communities from across the former Soviet territories. Between us lie several great Central Asian restaurants on Ditmas Avenue such as Restaurant Afsona (Uzbeki) and Café Sim-Sim (Azerbaijani).

The drawings will be posted soon.

NOTE: I also began an exchange with Min Gao, a very talented Chinese artist who also shot some important video footage that has been used in court to defend artists working in New York City’s parks. But business picked up quickly and customers were waiting so I wasn’t able to do my portrait of Gao. We’ll complete the exchange soon.

Finally! A Video Post for the Central Park Portrait Exchange

Finally! Over a year into the portrait exchange and I've finally produced a video post for the blog.

What took so long? Too many stories to tell!

I've been struggling to sort out what needed to be said and to figure out how to keep a clean narrative that can convey the rich complexity of all that has been going on. There's the story of the portrait exchange itself. There's the story of the ongoing legal battle of artists versus the city and the Parks Department. There are the stories of each artist working in the park and my story as the organizer too. There are stories about drawing and the different portrait techniques being used. There's the story about where each artist came from and how they trained. And more.

In the end, I decided to start with the story I began with when I originally imagined the portrait exchange. What makes art valuable? What happens when two artists meet and engage each other in a reciprocal artistic exchange using the same materials at the same time and place under the same conditions? It's both a competitive and a collaborative situation. What will these portraits look like together as more and more exchanges are completed?

Here is the first of what I hope will be several videos.



My thanks go out to all the artists who have participated so far (and to those who will participate in the future too!). Also special thanks to Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra for their impressive video footage, to Louise Ma for her cheerful willingness to lend a hand and to help with Mandarin translation on the spot in the park, to all the photographers who have helped so far including Alex Ramirez-Mallis and to all my friends and allies who helped vet the video before I set it loose in the world, including Christopher Quirk, Hope Ginsburg, Deidre Hoguet and Emily Walsh.

Peter Walsh

Ai Wei Wei Confirmed as Central Park Portrait Artist

Chinese artist and dissident Ai Wei Wei was confirmed today by the New York Times as having been a portrait artist in Central Park during his sojourn in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same moment, New York City officials continue to crackdown on artists working in Central Park, directly across the street from where New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself unveiled Ai Wei Wei’s "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads".

In an article from 1991 about the death of portrait artist Lin Lin in Times Square, Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who identifies Ai Wei Wei as "a painter and sculptor who was one of the first young Chinese artists to come to this country" says "A typical day might include several hours in the afternoon drawing portraits in Central Park, Mr. Ai said. Then, a portrait artist might travel down to 34th Street to work for a few hours in the early evening outside Macy's. Later at night, he might venture over to Times Square, where, despite the dangers of the neighborhood, there are often many prospective customers late into the night."

Today's article on Ai's New York City photos at the Asia Society states "Mr. Ai worked as a street artist while he lived in New York, charging $15 to $25 for a portrait in Times Square." As usual, the Times, which has consistently taken the city's side in the current dispute between artists and the Parks Department, avoids stating that Ai worked in the parks, even though their own archive confirms it.

Brian Haw and the Fight for Public Space

Brian Haw (middle) with Peter Walsh (left) and Zuky Serper (right) at Parliament Square, London, November 2, 2004. Photo: Susan Kelly.

Peace to Brian Haw (1949-2011).

Coming up out of the tube into London’s bright mid-day sun, I wheeled my election cart up into Parliament Square, Big Ben’s Clock Tower looming over me as I struggled to get my bearings. Immediately I was welcomed politely to a patch of park sidewalk across the street from Parliament by a scruffy, sharp-minded man in a winter coat and a cap covered with political buttons like the hull of a ship is encrusted by barnacles. It was November 2, 2004, Election Day in the U.S. presidential election, and Brian Haw had already been on site for three years. Brian, armed with a cheap bullhorn and a forest of hand-lettered signs, was a one-person campaign against the Iraq War. He kindly gave me tips on the lay of the land as I set up a voting booth for Plebiscite2004, ostensibly an art project, that I had been running for about a month in the run-up to the election.

This post is not about that project or U.S. elections or the War in Iraq. Instead, I’d like to honor Brian as a defender of the right of ordinary people to make use of public spaces in vigorous, difficult and honorable ways, as opposed to notions of public spaces as being white-washed “neutral spaces” or “quiet zones” or even worse, public-private real estate to be sold off to the highest bidder.

Like the current and on-going court battle over artists’ rights to work and sell in New York City’s parks, Brian’s extended legal fight over his right to use a park sidewalk in London and to speak his views publicly gets at the heart of what we want democracy to be. For example, what does it mean that across the street from where Ai Wei Wei’s "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads" is now installed in front of Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has instituted a crack-down on artists’ ability to interact with the public. This is not meant to conflate the seriousness of Ai’s detention with the ability of a small group of artists to make a living, but rather to point out that the fight for public space and freedom of action is being played out across the world – in London as well as Beijing, in New York as well as Cairo.

It takes people like Brian Haw and Robert Lederman, the repeatedly arrested president of the New York City based street artists’ group A.R.T.I.S.T., being willing to fight on the street and in the courts to be able to keep the “public” in public space.

Every art action on the street entails a negotiation over the right to be there. On that day in London in 2004, Brain Haw used his experience to help me defend my own right to be there as City of London police officers pressured me to move. Literally I was given a choice: be arrested if I stayed on one side of a crack in the sidewalk, or be fine if I moved to the other side (in this case, into the jurisdiction of the City of Westminster). Here in New York for the same political art project, I had to get the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) to intercede on my behalf in order to set up in front of the Unisphere in Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The street is the front line of the push between regular people and the authorities – no matter where you are.

For more on Brian’s life and times and his court battles, see these links:

Brian Haw, New York Times Obituary

Brian Haw, Wikipedia

Brian Haw, Al Jazeera Obituary

Public Space Battle in NYC Grows: City Actions Now Extend Beyond Artists to Include Musicians and Newspapers

As scorching summer temperatures hit Manhattan, sparring over what a person can do in New York City’s public parks has heated up too.

In May a panel of New York State Appeals Court judges allowed new park rules to go into effect, dramatically restricting where artists can work and sell in four busy city parks, pending the outcome of an artists’ lawsuit against the city’s Parks Department.

See:
“Panel Finds Vendor Restrictions Do Not Violate Free Speech Rights” New York Law Journal, May 18, 2011.
"Appeals Court Rules Against Artists in Dua v. City of New York Department of Parks Suit," Cental Park Portrait Exchange, May 18, 2011.


Meanwhile the Parks Department ordered it’s Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) officers to expand enforcement of restrictions beyond artist vendors to include musicians in newly created “Quiet Zones,” including near the crowded and popular Bethesda Fountain in the heart of Central Park.

See:
“Musicians chased from Central Park,” New York Post, May 28, 2011.
“Musician Crackdown At Central Park's Bethesda Fountain,” A Walk in the Park, May 29, 2011.
“No Radios by the Fountain, Please! Or Cellos!,” New York Times, June 5, 2011.


Concurrently, Robert Lederman, president of the street artists organization A.R.T.I.S.T and an artist/plaintiff in a second suit against the city, in federal court, reports that new depositions of PEP officials confirm that sellers of newspapers such as the New York Times, New York Post and the Daily News are now officially banned from selling from temporary stands in parks such as Union Square. Those news-sellers would be forced to compete for the same restricted locations used by artists.

See:
“Why Bloomberg is Evicting Newspaper Vendors From 4 NYC Parks,” Robert Lederman, June 8, 2011.
“Art vendors spots restricted at Union Square, High Line,” The Villager, Volume 81, Number 2: June 9 to 15, 2011.

NYC Begins Crackdown on Musicians in Central Park

The New York City Parks Department has begun a crack down against musicians performing at Central Park’s famed Bethesda Fountain, targeting a classical harpist, a father of nine singing spirituals and a double-bass player who loves Bach, according to the New York Post.

“Is this in preparation for a new 30 table bar/food concession the City is quietly planning to install five feet away?” asks the blog A Walk in the Park.

The news comes on the heels of a recent New York State appeals court decision that removed a temporary injunction protecting artists and other expressive matter vendors working in four Manhattan parks from new park rules limiting their right to work and sell in public parks.

According to the Post, “When asked about the music crackdown, a spokesman for the Central Park Conservancy, the cash-flush nonprofit that runs the park for the city, said: ‘The fountain is a place for quiet reflection.’”

The battle over public space in New York City will continue soon in federal court as artists take their case back to a courtroom in the United States District Court’s Southern District of New York.