ART REVIEW; Way Up in the Bronx A Hardy Spirit Blooms (original) (raw)
Arts|ART REVIEW; Way Up in the Bronx A Hardy Spirit Blooms
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/07/arts/art-review-way-up-in-the-bronx-a-hardy-spirit-blooms.html
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ART REVIEW
- May 7, 1999
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May 7, 1999
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Section E, Page
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Art in the Bronx, like the sprawling borough itself, is a resilient, clamorous, multifaceted thing, cosmopolitan in outlook but imbued with a spirit of place.
It embraces forms from video installations to virtuosic aerosol-spray murals. And it turns up in unexpected places: in school hallways, hospital lobbies, courtrooms, subway stations, living rooms and -- officially, unofficially and often heart-liftingly -- on building facades.
Exhibition spaces designed on the white-cube Manhattan model are relatively few and far between. But they are determinedly there, and so are artists, lots of them, some well known, others up and coming, living and working throughout the borough.
Their creative presence is tonic to a part of the city that has suffered more than its share of political and economic sabotage over the years and still battles stereotypes promoted by Hollywood films like the 1981 ''Fort Apache, the Bronx'' and books like Tom Wolfe's 1987 ''Bonfire of the Vanities.''
There is no question that the borough remains a vulnerable organism, but amazing things are in progress. The South Bronx is being resurrected. (And the Grand Concourse remains pretty grand.) Grass-roots community ventures of all kinds are flourishing. And so is art, particularly in a handful of tenacious institutions, large and small, that have settled in to stay. A few of them are considered below.
The social and cultural histories of the borough come across with stirring immediacy in the show ''Urban Mythologies: The Bronx Represented Since the 1960's,'' at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Organized by Lydia Yee, a curator at the museum, and a guest curator, Betti-Sue Hertz, the show, which comes with an excellent catalogue, is arranged chronologically and opens with pictures from the early 1960's by Max Levine, a local photographer.
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