Mural Completed

The three European artists who conceived and executed a mural depicting "the Renaissance story" for One Gateway Center (see the last two entries to this blog) have finished their work:

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I thought to ask only after I'd put the bulk of the information about the thinking behind the mural into the earlier blog entry, if they also borrowed the colonnade that appears in the foreground of the mural, and was told that it is from a painting by Pinturicchio, another artist of the Italian Renaissance.
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So the mural in Gateway One is a composite of elements from five Renaissance works, all combined to give visitors to this Downtown Newark complex a sense of the refinement and vitality of New Jersey's greatest and most cultured city.

Mural in Progress (Part 2)

HERE are two more views of the mural going up on the ground floor of One Gateway Center.

This first shows the artists in front of the mural. They kindly moved the scaffold out of the way. (Left to right: Francesco Farolfi, Lisiane Cagnin, Andrea Heinisch)
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Below is a closeup, showing the drawing on the wall that is then filled in with paint, along with a print of the work from which this portion is borrowed.

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I asked whether the painting was in oils or acrylics, and was advised it is neither. Rather, the artists are using a historic mural technique in which they mix their own paint. Ms. Heinisch showed me sturdy plastic bags of powdered pigments on a table, to which they add casein ("A white, tasteless, odorless protein precipitated from milk by rennin. It is the basis of cheese and is used to make plastics, adhesives, paints, and foods." -- Dictionary.com), as a bonding agent, "glue". This is, she says, "a medium they always used in times before", and use of this technique is "very similar to fresco painting." (Ms. Heinisch occasionally struggles for a word. She is from Bavaria, but lives in Florence, Italy, so on this trip must cope with three languages: German; Italian, the language of one of her fellow artists; and English.)
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When I said that the scene depicted looked very familiar, like something from the Renaissance that I had seen, she told me, "We put together the Renaissance story." Pointing to a print on the wall over the table that holds the pigments, she added, "This is The Ideal City by Piero della Francesca, but in the original this is an oil painting. And then this [the group of three men on the left of the mural] is coming from Florence. It's painted by Vannini" and hangs in the Palazzo Pitti. Mr. Farolfi adds that it was painted in the 17th Century, perhaps 1620 or 1630. Ms. Heinisch continued, this "represents Michelangelo when he was fourteen years old." He's by the bust of a faun (which is yet to be painted into the mural). "And there's a story about it, because he was making this sculpture and then Lorenzo de Medici came over and he said 'Well, this does not look like an old man', so he [Michelangelo] knocked out some teeth and then when Lorenzo came back and said, 'Now, it really looks like an old man', and he became his favorite artist."
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I then asked about another group of figures, on the right of the mural. It comes from the hugely famous Raphael painting, The School of Athens where it also appears on the right. "Because we wanted to represent the arts [indicating the group including Michelangelo], science [the group on the right], and the humanities and beauty [the figure on the extreme right carrying fruit on a tray on her head]. This was painted by Ghirlandaio in Florence. Ghirlandaio was the maestro, the teacher of Michelangelo. He went to his workshop."
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The mural, thus, is a composite from various artists, all behind a colonnade they added in front of structures portrayed in La Città Ideale by della Francesca.
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Newark is not yet The Ideal City. I have observed on my (Resurgence City website) that "renaissance" is not exactly right for what's happening in Newark, so I prefer the word "resurgence". However, a city in its renaissance striving for the ideal would appear to be the impression the owners of Gateway One want viewers to take away from the mural they have commissioned. That's a little ambitious, but there's nothing wrong with a little ambition.

A Mural Grows in Newark

I took a different route into my office building from lunch today and chanced across a mural being painted fresh and freehand by three European artists brought in from Florence, Italy as part of the renovation of the public spaces of Gateway One, the first building of the Gateway Center complex opposite Newark Penn Station.
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This is what the mural looked like Monday:
The woman in the foto is Andrea Heinisch, a German. She is working with another woman, Lisiane Cagnin, from France, and a man, Francesco Farolfi, from Italy, to create this wonderful anachronism on the ground floor, beyond the escalators, of a modern American office building.
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I will add at least one other foto of this project to this blog: the completed mural. Maybe I will as well interview the artists into my handheld dictation machine (an excellent thing to use for personal notes when you can't write — for instance, you have no paper nor pen, or you're driving and can't stop to fumble around for writing materials: c. 40 bucks at Radio Shack), then let you in on what they're doing and how they like our fair city.
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Newark is full of surprises.

Newark Abuilding

I went for a post-op checkup with my orthopedist this past Wednesday at UMDNJ and looked out from the parking structure at the surrounding view. I saw a construction crane north of the Essex County Civic Center that I hadn't noticed before. I've got to track that down and see what is being built there.
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I also got stuck in traffic on McCarter Highway later that week trying to get to Kmart in Kearny, but saw up close the progress they're making on the light-rail system along the highway from Newark Penn Station to the Broad Street Station. I got this picture of a guy cutting a steel support to size for the NJPAC station.

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This work is being done between directional lanes of McCarter Highway, but I don't see where the line goes after the PAC station, since the highway rejoins.
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There is also construction along the riverfront, hopefully of a Riverwalk pedestrian esplanade, tho I have not been able to confirm that. There is also supposed to be a marina condo development going up in that area. I look forward to that.
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All over the Central Ward there are townhouses going up by the hundreds. There is a huge development at Morris Avenue and Springfield Avenue, behind the new Duane Reade and Auto Zone. I have pix of that in various stages of construction, along with various other developments, like the new Social Security Administration building at Springfield Avenue and Livingston Street, that I want to draw together as a new page, "Newark Abuilding", on the Resurgence City website. But there's a lot of work in doing this. Perhaps I'll put a few up from time to time here until that webpage is ready. Stay tuned.

Open Letter to the Newark Museum

Executive Director/President
The Newark Museum
49 Washington Street
Newark, New Jersey 07102-3176

Re: Building Audiences -- in Various Buildings

Dear Sir/Madam:

In sorting thru papers the other day, among which was a renewal form for my Newark Museum membership (which I took care of by phone), it occurred to me that the Museum suffers from the truth of the expression "Out of sight, out of mind." It also suffers from the perception that it is an elite and somewhat alien enclave in this particular city. It is too white for many of the residents of the city that surrounds it, and its neighborhood is perceived as too black for many suburbanites to feel comfortable visiting.

Maybe we can solve both these problems, and two others -- the Museum is physically too small and out of the way for most people -- without a huge building program.

I work in Gateway Center, in which the Museum had a gift shop I passed by regularly and from which I bought various things. That retail space is still unoccupied. So are other retail spaces in the Gateway complex.

The skyways that link six buildings to Newark Penn Station and each other are busy highways for pedestrians who could be reminded daily of the Museum's existence, hours, collections, and relevance but are not now so reminded.

(a) Perhaps a deal could be worked out in which the management of Gateway Center, the Legal Center, the Hilton Hotel, and Penn Station would permit the Museum to use as little galleries, on a temporary basis, various vacant retail spaces for free or for a nominal payment, to (i) give the complex a fully-occupied look and (ii) showcase retail space that is now ignored by passersby.

The Museum could establish mini-museums in each vacant retail space, taking a page from the Whitney Museum's book. You may recall that for several years the Whitney had outposts in Downtown Manhattan and the Equitable Building in Midtown. If the Newark Museum is like most museums, it has a great many more pieces in its collections than space in which to display them. (The Whitney's website says that only 1% of its collection is on display at any given time!) With additional space, more items could come out of storage areas into public view, either as mini-exhibitions complete in each vacant retail space or as a multi-site exhibition in several vacant retail spaces that people could move between.

Each retail space would contain selected original works and/or reproduction posters, plus desktop computers or electronic kiosks by which photos and commentary on many of the Museum's other works (currently displayed and in storage) could be shown.

Each retail space would display a sign in the window to say that this is a temporary installation and the space is available for lease (with contact information), but until it is leased, the management company is offering a little culture to pedestrians as a public service. A display just inside the door could hold management-company brochures under a sign like "You came into this space. Others do too. Maybe this would be a good place for your business."

Vacant retail spaces are not the only venues in which the Museum could set up mini-exhibitions, of either original works or reproductions. Arts High is an obvious venue, as are other schools, public and private, at all levels, from primary grades thru graduate school. Almost all of them have exhibition space and security guards. The less-secure spaces could be lent reproductions. There are also community centers (the NCC center, for instance), nursing homes, and of course the branch libraries of the Newark Public Library.

The Museum could cover Newark with art like an octopus camouflaging itself against a coral reef, selecting objects that appeal to the specific location and are thus most likely to strike an evocative chord with the people who see them. Naturally, in this computer age, a kiosk tied to photos of the Museum's ENTIRE COLLECTION could be placed in a very small space in a school or public library, as part of an intranet, if the Museum's Internet website could not handle such mass. The Newark Museum could have a hundred sites, 200, covering Newark like dandelions in a lawn. Why own things you can't show? Indeed, if the Museum wants to sell its lesser works, they could go to these extramural mini-museums with dignified signs that say "The Museum will entertain any reasonable offer to purchase anything displayed here."

Plainly one major concern must be insurance for any original works loaned. Naturally, if posters instead of originals are placed, insurance becomes less a concern, and the insurance that each building's management or owner (e.g., the Newark Public Schools or Public Library or New Community Corporation) already carries might in many cases suffice. If not, we happen to have a very large insurance company here that is very public-spirited. I suspect Prudential (and any other insurance company based in Newark) might find a lot of insurance coverage in its public-relations budget for exhibitions that carry prominent mention of its role (e.g., "This exhibition is protected by The Prudential. Shouldn't you be?") -- and contact information. It costs an insurance company very little to set up an insurance arrangement if it doesn't have to pay out because the items covered are protected by security guards.

(b) Moreover, the Museum could, perhaps in conjunction with other arts organizations (Aljira comes to mind), display posters of its best pieces in the Gateway/Legal Center skyways, along with information on Museum hours and collections, plus order forms for posters, reproductions, etc. This might take the form of a time-limited exhibition, akin to the art shows in Greenwich Village in which sidewalks and fences are lined with paintings for a few days annually, or the form of a permanent display in which many individual posters are changed periodically to keep the exhibition fresh.

Such displays would enable the Museum to reach the thousands of pedestrians who walk thru the skyways and past unoccupied retail spaces, at once to remind them of the existence and mission of the Museum and to show them the joy that a little art in their lives each day can bring.

Expanding the Museum's home structures would be enormously expensive, and still wouldn't solve the problem of "out of sight, out of mind" nor the (mistaken) perception of the Museum as dangerous to go to -- unless the Museum completely relocated to, say, a capacious new building in the area between Newark Penn Station/Gateway Center and the planned hockey arena, which I imagine would be fiscally impossible at this time.

With dispersed exhibitions such as I propose, Gateway, Legal Center, Hilton security people, and Amtrak and Newark police, Museum volunteers, and the simple presence of large numbers of ordinary working people passing by the existing retail spaces and past skyway exhibitions would make visitors feel safe. If they then see subtle promotional materials designed to counter the impression that visitors to the Museum's home base are at high risk of being robbed or murdered, the comfort they feel in the Gateway context may carry over to their feelings about the Museum's home base.

Realize that thousands of commuters who work in Newark but live in the suburbs are literally afraid to leave the confines of the Gateway complex to go anywhere else in Newark. So are some of the guests of the Hilton, though others may not have such preconceptions.

The Hilton Hotel affords the Museum a real prospect of new visitors, because businesspeople with 'time to kill' may have no idea of what to do in Newark, nor how close the Museum is to where they find themselves. Visitors from places like Paris, London, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Beijing may have no idea that the Newark Museum is worth visiting, but might instead assume that a city of Newark's modest size could not have a world-class museum, so the Newark Museum might be thought as little worth visiting as would be a "Podunk Museum". Bringing vivid examples of the excellence of the Museum's collections, and filling the skyways and retail areas near the Hilton with art would make quite an impression -- of the Museum, of Newark -- on visitors who represent diverse audiences, nationalities -- and wealthy transnational corporations.

Moreover, it seems to me that the Museum should focus its acquisition strategy on building collections that appeal to present and future audiences. That is, the Newark Museum may have one of the Nation's best Tibetan collections, but how many Tibetans are there in this community, eager to contribute to the Museum's sustenance? If instead the Museum concentrated on building the Nation's very finest collection of contemporary African, Caribbean, Hispanic, and Portuguese-Brazilian art, it would tie in much better to existing communities that might actually visit the Museum. The key term here is contemporary. Today's young audiences are interested in today's culture, and it is contemporary art that can draw them into the overall artistic heritage first of the geographic or cultural area that most interests them, then of all the world.

The Museum might indeed, with other Newark arts organizations, create an annual "Newark Newart Exposition", that offers exhibition space for today's artists to compete for modest prizes in a mile of artworks strung along skyways, park walkways, and sidewalks (say, from Penn Station thru all the interconnected skyways and building lobbies, thru the Seton Hall Law School, on thru Military Park, up Broad Street to the Museum, along Washington Park, across to NJPAC's plaza, and ending in a great open-air exhibition at Bears/Eagles Riverfront Stadium, staged in daytime, in good weather (e.g., mid- to late-September). If a Riverwalk is developed from Penn Station to NJPAC, the path of the Exposition could contain a return route. Moreover, the Loop bus could, for the duration of the Newart Expo, stop at key points to rescue weary artlovers.

If the Museum hooks a young audience, it doesn't have to wait decades for them to become benefactors. They will make Museum functions a part of their recreational routine. And if they find themselves even thinking of attending more than two or three events per year, they might decide that taking a membership makes good sense. Once they have a membership card, they become eager to make the best use of it. They will attend more events because they're free! And they may even drag their friends along to events and "treat" them because they've already saved on their own admission.

I'm almost 60, and have belonged to the Museum for only one of the more than four years I have resided in Newark. What if I had joined when I was 23 and renewed every year since, and brought my friends to numerous Museum activities -- and some fraction of them took memberships and renewed regularly too?

Grab people young to build your future. The way to grab them young is (1) go where they are, rather than expect them to come to you -- they have other things on their minds; and (2) grab their interest by finding the best that is new in the cultures that most interest them.

You have to reach out to reel in the young, because they're spoiled. They expect everything to appear before them wherever they happen to be: TV in their room, a computer that brings all kinds of information into their home or classroom or school library, cellphones and text messaging that ring on their hip. You have to go where they are before they will go where you are.

Please think about this.

Cordially, L. Craig Schoonmaker, Newarker