PRESENTATION: Life Between Buildings

The exhibition “Life Between Buildings” explores how artists have unlocked the communal potential of New York City’s interstitial spaces: “vacant” lots, sidewalk cracks, traffic islands, and parks, among others. Inspired by the vibrant history of community gardens the exhibition brings together work by 14 artists and collectives, and features drawings, photographs, sculptures, multimedia works, and performances created from the 1970s through the present day.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

During the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s, grassroots groups began converting lots that had been left abandoned by landlords and the city into gardens and communal spaces—especially in the Lower East Side (Loisaida), where overlapping communities of activists, artists, squatters, and Puerto Rican and Nuyorican residents led these efforts. Compelled to step in due to the absence of public services, guerrilla gardeners unleashed new possibilities for reenvisioning the city as a commons. Similarly catalyzed by the changing built environment, artists were also moving beyond the studio and gallery out into the city, taking up the politics of urban space itself as their medium. At times, these approaches intertwined: artists made work in conversation—and sometimes in collaboration—with gardeners and community efforts. Life Between Buildings highlights select moments from the 1970s through the present day that distill the entanglements of these histories.

In the early 1970s, Gordon Matta-Clark began exploring how trees impact urban ecosystems. These drawings sketch ideas for what he termed “hit-and-run gardens,” compositions of fantastical topiary he dreamed of planting overnight in vacant lots. Matta-Clark’s ideas developed in tandem with the rise of the community gardening movement, and as the 1970s progressed he began collaborating with existing community groups to transform underused spaces. In 1976, he proposed A Resource Center and Environmental Youth Program for Loisaida, which would teach Lower East Side youth the skills needed for homesteading abandoned buildings and turning lots into gardens—activities already prevalent in the neighborhood. This work, he wrote, “would no longer be concerned with just personal or metaphoric treatment of the site, but finally responsive to the express will of its occupants.” An early facet of the project involved working with the activist group CHARAS to construct an amphitheater in a lot at East 9th Street and Avenue C that was being turned into a community space. The lot later became La Plaza Cultural de Armando Perez, a community garden that still exists today.

Cecilia Vicuna moved to New York City in 1980, having been exiled from Chile following the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973. She settled in Tribeca and began wandering the nearby riverside, streets, and vacant lots, where she created small, site-specific performance installations she called “Sidewalk Forests” (1981). Vicuña has brought awareness to the intertwining of humanity and the earth since the mid-1960s; in her “Sidewalk Forests”, she brought this ecological perspective to bear on a neglected urban environment. She saw these works, in which bits of thread and dashes of chalk highlight weeds bursting through the pavement, as “small altars on the streets of New York, air vents for the earth, pasture born in the gutters.” These ephemeral actions exist today in photographs and an accompanying poem that Vicuña wrote on the back of one, which translates to, “the earth breathes through the pavement’s cracks.” Drawing on Indigenous knowledge and her ecofeminist work from the ’60s, Sidewalk Forests distill an awareness of the fragility and persistence of nature in the face of human intervention. Around the time of this series, Vicuña became a member of a community garden founded in an undeveloped lot in Tribeca.

POOL (Performance On One Leg) was a collective convened in New York City by dancers Peter Cramer and Jack Waters and core members Christa Gamper and Brian Taylor from 1981–85. Fixtures in the downtown performance and queer club scenes, Cramer and Waters brought together the shifting members of POOL as an early facet of their ongoing exploration of how sexuality, race, class, and urban ecology intersect. POOL frequently performed in public and semi-public spaces such as parks, pools, streets, construction sites, and nightclubs. These archival materials relate to performances staged at Hamilton Fish Pool, a public pool near where they lived in the Lower East Side; the empty landfill that would become Battery Park City (as part of Creative Time’s Art on the Beach series); Federal Plaza, a public square then home to Richard Serra’s controversial sculpture Tilted Arc (1981); and the backyard of ABC No Rio. POOL used the city as a stage out of economic necessity, but also to challenge ideas of propriety and explore ancient rituals tied to communion with the seasons and environment. At this moment, the city was recovering from a recession: buildings were being constructed, class divides sharpening, and space becoming increasingly monitored. In 1983, Cramer and Waters became the directors of ABC No Rio, a venue that had opened in a foreclosed building on Rivington Street in 1980 and became a legendary space in the art, punk, and hardcore music scenes. In 1996, they turned a lot on East 2nd Street into a community garden called Le Petit Versailles—yet another instance of the duo finding pockets of wildness in the city. The garden remains an active space for experimental art, performance, and gathering.

Matthew Schrader has photographed Ailanthus Altissima trees growing throughout New York City since 2018, accumulating a growing archive of images, some of which are presented in this installation. The Ailanthus species first came to the Americas in 1784, imported from China as sought-after decorative foliage for private gardens. Its reputation shifted over the ensuing centuries as the trees took root in new habitats, following the pathways of colonization and industrialization. Flourishing in disturbed and depleted soil—such as rubble-strewn lots and sidewalk cracks—able to clone themselves indefinitely, and almost impossible to kill, they are now regarded as weeds endemic to urban environments. The same shallow root structures that allow Ailanthus trees to thrive in neglected areas also make them well-suited to the active construction sites of those targeted by development. Schrader tracks these dual forces in his photographs, which form a constellated record of his encounters with the tree. The ongoing project records how the trees archive both disinvestment and areas of rapid expansion and gentrification—such as Long Island City, among the fastest growing residential neighborhoods in the US, and the nearby Greenpoint waterfront.

David L. Johnson makes work inspired by frequent walks throughout New York City, observing and documenting moments in which typically invisible structures of power gain legibility. In “One-Liner” (2013), shot on Johnson’s iPhone, an NYPD officer paints a yellow line on the street, sequestering a portion of pavement for NYPD use, while an off-duty officer stops to question him about the origin of his painting job. In “Snow” (2014), a maintenance worker sweeps snow in front of a commercial building during a blizzard. Inside the building’s lobby, real estate developer Edward Minskoff and the artist Jeff Koons inaugurate the installation of Koons’s sculpture of a red balloon rabbit. The focus of the video moves between these two scenes until Minskoff and Koons exit the building, walking to a car parked directly in front. In both videos, the lines and barriers that choreograph access come into relief.

Works by:  Tom Burr, Mel Chin, Danielle De Jesus, Niloufar Emamifar, Becky Howland, David L. Johnson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Margaret Morton, Aki Onda, Poncili Creación, POOL (Performance On One Leg), Matthew Schrader, jackie sumell & The Lower Eastside Girls Club, and Cecilia Vicuña.

Photo: Installation view of exhibition Life Between Buildings on view at MoMA PS1 from June 2, 2022 to January 16, 2023. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Steven Paneccasio

Info: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue Long Island City Queens, NY, USA, Duration: 2/6/2022-16/1/2023, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri, Sun-Mon 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-20:00, www.moma.org/