Monday, April 7, 2014

'Moving Murals' marks the first exhibit for City Lore on East 1st Street



City Lore is now up and running at 54 E. First St. with its new gallery space at the former home of the Lower Eastside Girls Club.

For starters, a little about City Lore. Per the organization's website:

Founded in 1986, City Lore’s mission is to foster New York City – and America’s – living cultural heritage through education and public programs. We document, present, and advocate for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. We work in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history; preservation; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each of these realms, we see ourselves as furthering cultural equity and modeling a better world with projects as dynamic and diverse as New York City itself.

"Moving Murals," City Lore's inaugural exhibition, opened this past Thursday … it features the photography of Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper…



Here's a description:

Photographed during the "Golden Age of Graffiti" in the '70s and early '80s, Chalfant and Cooper's images of graffitied subway cars are among the major documents of American popular culture in the late twentieth century. Moving Murals presents the images in a wall to wall mosaic of over 850 muraled trains, creating an ultimate All City graffiti trainyard environment. Complimenting the murals: photographs of the writers in their element.

And for the first time, the exhibit provides an interactive audience experience through the addition of Chalfant's recently published iBook viewed on a large screen, complete with the train image archive, artist interviews, and videos.

We stopped by to check it out…












The exhibit is up through July 10. And there are a few special events associated with it, including a screening of the hip-hop documentaries "Style Wars" I and II on April 17.

The Gallery is open every Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.

For more about City Lore and their new space, you can read this article by Serena Solomon at DNAinfo from February.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wait a sec...where did the Girls' Club go?

Anonymous said...

So now we're supposed to celebrate the "golden age of graffiti"?

I'm seeing a lot of new graffiti,
including "tagging" multiple trees on my block, 5 huge tags at street level on 2 buildings down the street, plus tags on restaurant signage, etc. Excuse me if I don't think it's anything to celebrate. It was vandalism then, and it's vandalism now.

Anonymous said...

tagging is good, it works against the real estate market.
nostalgic gallery art and sanctioned public art helps the real estate market.

Anonymous said...

@April 4 at 1:24pm: "It works against the real estate market"??

Graffiti can be removed from buildings, but not from trees. So tagging TREES (live, beautiful trees) is, to you, a good thing to do, because it makes the trees more ugly and therefore the neighborhood less desirable? What a sick mind-set you express!

Anonymous said...

I hope some "artists" tag and acid-etch the windows of the "gallery".

Poverty tourists.

- East Villager

Anonymous said...

Moving murals? Fuck that shit. Fucking hipsters.

Fuck all these so-called "street artists" who are nothing more than Johnny Come Lately rebels on a leash who never tagged. I mean at least hire real deal taggers not these nerds from wherever. Oh wait, this is NYC 2014 where everyone who ISN'T from NYC gets props.

D

Anonymous said...

Hate to say it, but it's crappy graffiti. These are kids from Ohio that don't know the cultural relevance and don't do cool stuff with it (and yeah, I've actually met a lot of them). It's just an ugly eyesore. They're not good at it.