Park Artists Take Case to the U.S. Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court. 

Image from Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Following on the heels of an appeals court loss in September, the artist-plaintiffs suing the City of New York over rules regulating art vendors in city parks are petitioning the United States Supreme Court to hear the their appeal. Robert Lederman, the lead plaintiff in the case and president of the street art vendors’ organization A.R.T.I.S.T., released a statement vowing “We intend to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court at the earliest possible date, and feel confident that the many errors in both the appeals court ruling and the lower court ruling will be overturned.”

As they move to  petition the Supreme Court, it appears that Lederman and his attorney Julie Milner may be approaching this latest appeal from a new direction based on the court’s ruling that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Deputy Mayor Edward Skylar could avoid being deposed in the case. According to Lederman, the decision makes it “virtually impossible to obtain a deposition from any government official.” In addition, Lederman has stated that “If allowed to stand, this ruling would protect police officials, mayors, agency commissioners, governors, senators or even the US President from ever having to face a sworn deposition. Even the lowest level government officials would be able to cite this ruling in order to avoid giving a sworn deposition.”

Federal Court Upholds City Rule Regulating Art Vendors in Parks
Victoria Bekiempis, DNAinfo New York, September 26, 2013

Appeal Is a Washout for NYC Street Art Activist
Adam Klasfeld, Courthouse News Service, Wednesday, September 25, 2013

In artist case, Court Limits Right to Depose Government Officials
Robert Lederman, President of ARTIST, Friday, September 27, 2013

Appeals Court Decision
Judges Cabranes, Hall and Chin, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Session Nine: Gao Min and Peter Walsh

Gao Min and Peter Walsh on Wien Walk in Central Park, September 3, 2011. Photo by Wei Chen

Shaded by the cool oak canopy of Central Park’s Wein Walk, artists Gao Min and Peter Walsh finished their exchange of drawings this morning – number fifteen in the ongoing series of portrait exchanges in the Central Park Portrait Exchange. The session had been interrupted three weeks earlier when a brisk trade of art patrons prevented Walsh from beginning his drawing. Gao had a line of customers!

Sitting for his portrait this morning Gao laughed, “It’s been a long time since I’ve sat for someone else. It’s hard! When I was a student at art school in China we would sit for each other, but it’s been years.” Gao is a former art professor and former director of the Division of Western Arts in the Department of Fine Arts at Southwest-China University, a large school located in Chongqing, China. Among his many achievements is his college level instructional art book “Color,” which has gone through 13 editions in China.

“I’ve been drawing in Central Park for sixteen years,” he says, “though mainly now I come on weekends. Aside from the extra money, I come because of the faces. So many faces to draw!” During the week Gao works in a commercial art studio. Trained in the realist drawing tradition (both Chinese and Western), Gao also paints at home and is experimenting with new works that he has yet to release to the public. To see older works, go to his website here.

Some thoughts from Peter Walsh:

“Ouch. I try not to see the Central Park Portrait Exchange as a competitive form, but when my work is placed next to someone as talented as Gao Min, it’s hard not to feel the pain!

I was excited to complete this exchange because I had first met Min in New York State court in September of 2010 when we both testified against the New York City Parks Department by authenticating our videos of artists being abused by new park rules that forced them to sprint into Central Park at 6am every morning. Click here and here for details. Min’s disturbing video was appropriately called “Artist or Race Cow?”; mine was “NYC Mayor Bloomberg Forces Artists to Run for their Livelihoods.”

That said, although my rough drawing of Min pales next to his elegant one of me, I did capture some part of a likeness of him. “It’s fine,” says Min, “you’re good enough to work here in the park if you wanted to. People will pay.”

I’ll take that as a thumbs up! Thanks, Min.

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

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

How does an art project like the Central Park Portrait Exchange come into being?

    
Mostly through non-monetary exchange.

What’s that?

Trades, favors, apples for oranges, my labor given for your labor.

For example, each artist – professionals like Wei Chen, Dario Zapata or Artashes Karslian who regularly work in Central Park – has contributed a drawing and sat for another, but no money has changed hands (at least not yet). What do they get out of the deal and what do I, Peter Walsh, as organizer of the Portrait Exchange get out of this “non-monetary exchange”?

Well first, as the project organizer I have temporary physical possession of the drawings, which I hope to be able to exhibit down the road as a group exhibition. Maybe the work will be sold. Or not. At some point, if the drawings are not sold, the physical portrait exchange will be completed. I will receive all the drawings of myself and each artist will receive the portrait that I drew of them.

As the exchange organizer I get the added value of helping to create a group artwork which, outside of its considerable value as a meaningful artwork, has the potential to provide me with other opportunities in the art world and theoretically helps to build my career.

For the artists working in Central Park who have chosen to participate in the exchange, there’s been a savvy calculation that doing so will result in publicity and other intangibles that may help in their fight against New York City’s new rules restricting their ability to work in the park. That gambit has already paid off in articles such as journalist Leslie Koch's article "Artists sue Mayor Bloomberg, NYC Parks Department over new regulations", ongoing blog posts on this site and even in courtroom testimony on their behalf.

On September 13, 2010 I testified in New York State court to the veracity of video footage that I had shot because I’ve been working regularly on the exchange in Central Park. That video, which showed artists being forced by the city to run a footrace every morning in order to work, is part of a body of evidence that has kept in place a Temporary Restraining Order against the city’s new rules – and has given several months’ relief for the artists from the new regulations. How much of that is connected to the portrait exchange is one of those difficult to measure “intangibles,” but the gain is real and has kept work and money coming the artists’ way.

So far, the gamble of participating in the Central Park Portrait Exchange appears to be paying off for everyone.

Artists United files in New York State Court for an injunction against the new NYC park rules arguing the rules discriminate against women, the elderly and the disabled.

Following on the heels of multiple videotape examples of artists being forced to race each other for city-approved vending locations in four New York City parks (Central Park, Union Square Park, Battery Park and the High Line), the artists group Artists United has filed for an injunction against the new rules in New York State Supreme Court.

For details on the new court case see the article by Albert Amateau in Downtown Express, Volume 20, Number 36 / August 25 - September 1, 2010: “Second lawsuit challenges new vendor rules for parks.”

To see video shot by Peter Walsh in Central Park see the July 31, 2010 post on this blog: NYC Mayor Bloomberg Forces Artists to Run for Their Livelihoods.

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Forces Artists to Run for Their Livelihoods

“Oh my lord! It is ridiculous!” say NYC Park police officers.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has created new Park Rules that drastically reduce the number of artists that can work in city parks, effective Monday, July 19, 2010. The new Park Rules force artists to literally run for their livelihoods. Every morning at 6am, artists must now race into each park to secure an authorized location. Artists who don’t get a spot either don’t work that day or they must relocate to a spot that dramatically reduces their access to the public. Hundreds of artists’ jobs are at stake.

This video was shot Saturday, July 31, 2010 at 6am by Peter Walsh.

Click here for the HD version.

For other disturbing video on the situation in Central Park, see Gao Min's videos here.