“Come One, Come All” to join forces and make a difference! Join our Member of the Month, Cooper Square Committee and the Urban Justice Center March 27th @ 9AM, 1 Centre Street (The Municipal Building), and let our voices be heard, not silenced, and our words spoken, not ignored!

Photo by Jefferson Siegel

Join a coalition of city-wide tenants, advocates, and elected officials get together and reform the rent guidelines and policies of NYC. As The Rent Guidelines Board meet, CSC hopes to demand the Mayor’s new Board to vote for what all New Yorkers need –  A RENT FREEZE!

If you’d like to join the fight: Meet 9 AM SHARP at 1 Centre Street (The Municipal Building) March 27th. You can find more information HERE or call Jaron Benjamin from Met Council on Housing at 718-864-3932

Tenants called for no rent hike before Thursday’s R.G.B. vote at The Cooper Union

Cooper Square Committee’s Transitional Homeless Housing Plan for LGBT Youth Moving Forward:

The NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) is expected to file the Urban Development Action Area Plan for the Bea Arthur Residence at 222 E. 13th St. with the City Council in the coming weeks.  The City Council must pass a resolution designating the project a UDAAP, and authorizing a long term tax exemption, which is a formality since local Councilmember Rosie Mendez is a strong supporter of the project and helped secure $3.3 million for its development.  The Cooper Square Committee (CSC) is partnering with the Ali Forney Center (AFC) to renovate a vacant building at 222 E. 13^th St. to house 18 homeless LGBT youth ages 18-24.  CSC has done the bulk of the pre-development work, and will oversee the renovation, and AFC will rent up and manage the building when it’s completed.  Project architects, Magnusson Architecture and Planning are expected to file the approved building plans with the NYC Dept. of Buildings within the next week.  “We are hoping to acquire the building by the end of May, and start renovation immediately after that” says CSC Executive Director, Steve Herrick.

Architect’s rendering of the Bea Arthur Residence upon completion in 2015.

Greening low income housing: 

 CSC is reaching out to many low income cooperatives to enroll them in the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) which can provide tens of thousands of dollars per building towards new boilers, windows and other energy efficiency upgrades for income-eligible co-ops.  Renovated buildings often reduce their fuel costs more than 30%. 614-620 E. 9^th St. and 336 E. 4^th St. were weatherized during the last few months, and more buildings are in the pipeline, including 128 Rivington St., 131 Norfolk St., 745-747 E 6^th Street and 528 East 11^th Street.  “I’m happy to meet with other low income co-op boards to tell them about WAP and other energy efficiency programs” said Greening Program Coordinator, Angee Cortorreal.

A Cooper Square tenant embraces the new fridge she got through the program.

New windows lining up to get installed at 336 East 4th Street.

photo courtesy of IATI Theater

Fresh off a successful international tour spanning Russia, Spain, and Cuba, Loren Escandon brings Montera back to New York City for a two week run at IATI Theater.

Written and performed by Escandon, Montera is a fierce, fearless one-women show that brings a complex human face to one of the oldest and most dehumanized professions throughout history and in contemporary culture.

Escandon embodies La Guiri, a sex worker confronting the harsh duality between her own experiences and society’s perception of her. With equal parts comedy and vulnerability, La Guiri travels through her own beliefs and dreams about the world of prostitution and her place in it, but also about the larger world around it.

Escandon’s performance goes deeper than the slinky physicality of tight corsets and red-hot shoes. Carrying the audience through a story oftentimes about everything other than sex work, the show’s stream of consciousness script takes the audience though stories centered on themes of love and loss, money, and home – all dimensions that empower La Guiri’s character, connecting her complexities to the broader human condition. Just as she has exposed her body, she has also exposed her soul.

Earning multiple awards and rave reviews since its premier in 2012, the show’s message is central to its acclaim. The show has a powerfully ability to challenge ideas around blame and victimization of women in the sex work profession, and to open up a taboo subject to public discourse, when society more often prefers it in the shadows.

We can all benefit from the humanity the show displays by taking it outside of theater walls and applying it to the world we interact with every day.

Montera runs April 3 through April 13, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8pm and Sundays at 3pm. Tickets can be found here.

While celebrating Lower East Side History Month, Lead Organizer of The Cooper Square Committee, Brandon Kielbasa shares this post on their first ever Tenant Rights Walking Tour:

The Cooper Square Committee’s Tenant Rights Walking Tour was designed to deliver basic “know your rights” type information for tenants along with nuanced tips on how to organize their buildings and engage the larger tenants’ rights movement.

The tour  concentrates on the problems tenants face in the LES, and highlights how tenants have come together to organize their buildings, creating a successful means for pushing aggressive, speculative landlords. The tour will speak to everything from the very first steps tenants need to take (talking to their neighbors and calling 311) to some best practices in organizing (coming together quickly at the first sign of trouble).

The tour is approximately 90 minutes long and this first version of the tour looks at organizing efforts in five different buildings throughout the LES. Some  buildings have direct connections to one another, while others are connected by shared issues, or by the approach tenants took to organize against their landlords. Though many of the buildings featured are/were rent regulated, the tour will also delve into the larger considerations tenants should be knowledgeable about when organizing in any building.

The Cooper Square Committee intends to continue doing these tours and produce one annually. We hope to make this an ongoing cycle, and for the tours to become a part of our regular educational programming. We expect to add stops on future tours based on the issues that are currently trending in the community, in addition to looking at outstanding organizing practices, and patterns of real estate speculation.

We feel that by offering tenants’ rights educational programming in different formats that we might attract LESers and other NYers who might be less likely to attend general tenants’ rights workshops. In the end, we hope the tours will be a new and interesting way for us to continue to get tenants the knowledge they need to defend their homes and their communities.

Written by Brandon Kielbasa

Ever wondered what it’s like to be a choreographer making new work, rehearsing with dancers, and preparing for performances? Well, you’re in luck because this month we are highlighting a few members of our Dance Block program!

Dancer, choreographer, and artist Alex M Schell has been in the Dance Block program since October of 2012, originally drawn to the program’s affordable rental rates and central location. Currently, she has been using Dance Block studio space to go over material, remold existing work, and experiment new ways to generate dance. Alex has utilized almost all of our various studio spaces.

“What’s particularly helpful for me, is having a lot of different space options. [Each space] really helps me generate new material, to have new ideas, and to refocus my energy on how the audience is going to watch [the piece]. ”

Alex M Schell shared a few of her upcoming projects with us in the FAB Minute below, along with a peek into her rehearsals. She is the founder of A Motion Scape Project and has several exciting events going on the next few months!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out Alex M Schell and her company here:

http://alexmschell.wix.com/create
https://www.facebook.com/amsproject

Learn more about the Dance Block Program here:
http://fabnyc.org/spaces

Beginning in June, the fine folks over at hyper-local Lower East Side blog The Lo-Down began spotlighting the terrific work of multimedia artists Theresa Loong and Laura Nova, the two women behind FABLES project Feed Me a Story. A multi-year project, Feed Me a Story is a collection of stories, videos, drawings and photographs documenting the many aspects of a “family recipe.” The project initially began through SPARC (Seniors Partnering with Artists Citywide), a New York City-funded program that connects artists with senior centers around the five boroughs to foster inspiration and meaningful relationships between both parties. During SPARC, Theresa and Laura interviewed residents about their most memorable dishes, then asking them to create the dish as they documented the process on film. Completed dishes were plated and photographed, and eventually constructed into what is now on view over at First Street Green. We encourage you to pop by, take a look at the eclectic selection of ethnic cuisine, and to explore their website www.feedmeastory.com for the histories behind each recipe.

For a quick preview of each, take a look at The Lo-Down’s coverage.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This month we have been meeting with Dance Blockers to see what they’ve been up to, any events they want more people to know about, and their thoughts on the Dance Block program as a whole.  Choreographer and Artistic Director of Dante Brown | Warehouse Dance joined the Dance Block program back in March 2014, and graciously agreed to sit down to talk with us.

Why are the studios that we offer so appealing for you?

“I have dancers coming from Astoria, dancers coming from 34^th street, and several dancers coming from Brooklyn. So we definitely use Dance Block as a hub, it’s a good central site for all of us to come together”

How does the space influence your creative process?

“In terms of rehearsals, the studios seemed removed from everything.  We can investigate ideas; it feels like we are creating a world outside of our everyday lives. [The program] allows up and coming choreographers to incubate the space to find their voice as artist, which is important for any dancer, performer, or artist trying to anything in this city.”

What is something you find successful about the Dance Block Program?

“I feel very supported.  I think the staff does a beautiful job of supporting the chaos (all of the needs of choreographers) and really providing order and structure for me to make work.  I think it is rare to have a staff that is so caring, especially for artists who can be a little disorganized sometimes. The staff is definitely top tier!”

What if the Dance Block Program wasn’t around?

“If this program wasn’t around, it would be really expensive for me to keep rehearsing at the level that I am rehearsing at now.  $10 for these resources is very rare. I have come across some studios with the same price, but don’t provide the same services that Fourth Arts Block provides.  I have used other spaces, but it just feels comfortable here.”

Hear about Dante’s upcoming projects, and get a preview of the incredible work he’s been creating through Dance Block in our latest FAB Minute:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out more of Dante’s work and his upcoming shows here:

www.dantebrownwarehousedance.com

www.facebook.com/dantebrownwarehousedance

www.instagram.com/dbwarehousedance

If you would like more information on our Dance Block program, please visit us at www.fabnyc.org/spaces

We continue this month’s Dance Block spotlights with dancer and choreographer, Fatima Logan.  Fatima has been using the Dance Block program for over a year now, and has become a welcomed regular here at Fourth Arts Block.  Fatima is the Artistic Director of Vashitidance Theater, a company that strives to combine live music and dance to uplift the community.  We were able to speak with Fatima briefly to get her perspective on Dance Block.

What initially attracted you to the Dance Block Program?

“We practice and perform with live music, and where we were rehearsing before some of the teachers were complaining about the our drumming.  I needed to find a space that wasn’t inside a dance school so that there wouldn’t be any conflicts with sound.”

How does the space influence your creative process?

“We use the space to set new work, but also to rehearse existing work.  Sometimes we get invitations to be in festivals or performances that may have a time limit that is outside the length of our current repertoire. I’ll use space to re-stage pieces so they fit the requirements for a particular performance.”

What aspects of the program do you find most beneficial?

“I like that scheduling is really easy. I don’t have many complaints about the program.  I can come in to the office, take care of what I need to take care of, and then be on my way.  When I do come into the office, everyone is friendly. The Dance Block program is very friendly, approachable, and is low hassle for artists.”

Our latest FAB Minute video includes some of Fatima’s upcoming projects, as well as some clips of how Fatima and her dancers use the Dance Block program.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Below are sites you can visit if you would like to know more about Fatima, Vashitidance Theater, or any of Fatima’s upcoming events!

www.vashtidancetheater.com

https://www.facebook.com/VashtiDanceTheater

For more information on our Dance Block program, visit http://fabnyc.org/spaces

If you’ve walked around the East Village recently, you may have noticed some of its walls covered in abstract layouts of Yiddish theaters, faces of famous women, posters designed by Puerto Rican artists, plates full of food, and the architecture of old New York. You may not have known that each of these pieces celebrates the Lower East Side (LES) through a project titled FABLES, a public art series presented by Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) that explores different elements of LES history.

On a Tuesday evening in July, FABnyc’s Director of Public Art, Keith Schweitzer, led a walking tour of the FABLES projects, which were created by five artists and artist teams. Keith explained that each of the artists has a personal connection to the LES, whether it’s their birthplace, their place of work, or they have family roots here. The artists were selected in late 2013 from about 200 submissions by a four-person jury and were judged based on their concepts, connections to the neighborhood, and on samples of their previous work. “Feasibility was another criterion,” Keith admitted. “Some of the ten semifinalists didn’t make the cut because their projects weren’t practical given what we were capable of providing.”

The tour began at City Lore, where Tamara Gayer’s hand-cut vinyl depictions of Yiddish theater marquees grace the glass front of the gallery. Her project, which also includes a similar design outside Italian eatery and bar, L’Apicio, is titled Who Needs Honey When Sugar is Sweet (a name taken from a 1930s Yiddish play). Gayer, whose family lived on the LES, worked with commercial-grade vinyl and based her images on her own abstract illustrations of the marquees.

Gayer’s mural outside City Lore.

Next, the group visited the Centre-Fuge site, which displayed a mural by Lexi Bella called Lower East Side Heroines. The mural features portraits of important, beloved female figures from the LES, like Rosario Dawson, Ellen Stewart (Founder and Director of La Mama), and even Bella’s own daughter, Roxy. For Bella, who has lived and worked on the LES, this project became very historically investigative during the months between being chosen to participate, and late April, when the mural went up. “This project,” explained Keith, “gave her the opportunity to delve deep” into the lives of these women through her paintings of them. Along the way, she learned about some of the figures she hadn’t known about before; most significantly, Stewart, who helped establish the neighborhood as a theatrical arts district and whose portrait became one of the most talked about images. The mural was also praised highly by Dawson, who visited it and was honored by Bella’s work. Those of us on the tour were lucky to see the mural then, because it was painted over the next day. However, Bella has created her own website to prolong the life of the piece, which can be found at http://www.lowereastsideheroines.com/.

Keith Schweitzer teaching the group about some of Bella’s LES heroines, including Debbie Harry and the Russ daughters (Hattie, Ida, and Anne).

The tour then made its way to First Street Green, which hosts two of the FABLES projects, Posters on the Wall: Our Nuyorican Story and Feed Me a Story. Posters, a project curated by Miguel Trelles and Juan Fernando, is a collection of posters created by Puerto Rican artists in New York during the 60’s through the 80’s. This is the first time these posters, which have until now been housed in an archive at Hunter College, are being displayed publicly. During the decision process, there was a discussion about whether this project, as a curated work, was acceptable within the FABLES guidelines. Keith is certainly glad the jury decided to include it, and considers this project one of FABLES’s greatest success stories. “Here was an archive, a collection [of posters] that people have been accumulating,” said Keith, “and it was basically just sitting in a basement and the [artworks] weren’t on display.” The decision to breathe life into this project, Keith believes, is very much in the spirit of the way FABnyc serves as an incubator for the arts on the LES. This is certainly what happened with Posters, a project which will likely evolve into a book or public online archive. “We like to inspire a project to develop,” says Keith, “to be a launching pad, a testing ground.”

Some of the Nuyorican posters in First Street Green.

FABLES served as a launching pad for the next two stops on our tour, too. Feed Me a Story, a project by Theresa Loong and Laura Nova, is made up of eight photographs of different food dishes set on a red-and-white-checkered picnic tablecloth. The large images are bright and mouth-wateringly colorful, and each one is captioned with a person’s name and the name of the dish (e.g. “Mendy’s Cauliflower Latkes”). The foods are clearly ethnically distinct, and the whole display paints a striking portrait of the Lower East Side. Also on the mural is the title of the piece, along with the project’s website (www.feedmeastory.com). Going to the website one can find the recipes for each dish displayed, as well as a video of it being prepared by its cook. The cooks, who the artists worked with at the LES’s LaGuardia Senior Center, share stories of their families and heritages as they make their dishes.  It was exciting for everyone that “something talked about in a room in the senior center got shown to the public,” said Keith. The seniors who participated in the Feed Me project all came out to see it and had a potluck dinner on the site. “This is the first public iteration [of Feed Me a Story],” said Keith, but the project will continue to travel and grow from here.

The dishes of Feed Me a Story.

The tour then made its way to Ideal Glass, an art collective on 2^nd Street, where Levan Mindiashvili’s mural Ghost is on display. Painted on the wall are buildings with architectural elements no longer present on the LES, creating a window-like reflection of a much older New York. “[Because] this is the first time he’s done anything of this scale in public,” Keith said, Mindiashvili used smaller strips of paper that he painted in his studio and then pieced them together on the wall. As with Bella’s mural, Mindiashvili’s project “inspired an investigation,” with Mindiashvili working with the New York Public Library to research the old architecture of the LES. Though Mindiashvili’s work normally speaks about architecture, this was the first time he investigated the architecture of a specific neighborhood. Mindiashvili’s work in turn inspired another Ideal Glass artist, John Sully, to create a video response to his work. The video is shown starting at sundown on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, playing until about 11PM.

Mindiashvili’s window-like mural outside Ideal Glass.

We ended off our tour with drinks at L’Apicio, whose outer wall is housing the other part of Gayer’s project.  Reflecting on FABLES 2014, Keith is very pleased with the project, and proud of its results and of the opportunities it provided for the contributing artists. “We’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time,” said Keith, “but needed the proper funding and host locations.” Even once the project was planned, though, “there were a lot of unknowns, and a good amount of faith went into it.” The projects greatly evolved from the time the artists were selected to seeing the sketches, “… and the fruits of their work and watching it develop was thrilling.” Keith said the outcomes surprised everybody on the upside, but that “given the caliber of the artists that were selected, we had pretty strong confidence that they would do a great job.” The success of the project only makes it more likely that FABLES will continue in future years. “We would like to keep going,” said Keith, “and provide opportunities of this nature for other [artists] in our neighborhood.”

After four months of exhibitions and public programs for Fourth Arts Block‘s latest public art series FABLES, the project will come to a close this month. Fourth Arts Block opened FABLES: a public art project to coincide with the first annual Lower East Side History Month in May 2014, to celebrate the beauty of our neighborhood, its community, and all the stories that pulse through its streets.

Though we are saying goodbye to the physical manifestations of these projects, we are very excited to share in-depth interviews from each of the artists involved in FABLES, and explore their cultural heritage and relationship to the ever-evolving Lower East Side.

To start things off, we have Miguel Trelles of “Posters on the Wall: Our Nuyorican Story,” a carefully curated presentation of Nuyorican Posters from the Center for Puerto Rican Studies‘ extensive image archive, with prints dated from the 1960s through the 1990s. In partnership with artist Juan Fernando Morales-Nazario, Trelles and Morales-Nazario toyed with the notion of a show within a show for this First Street Green Park exhibit.

—
Can you give some background into your work with Centro (Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College) and how the Posters on the Wall project came to be?

Back 1993 or so, as I was working towards an M.F.A. @ Hunter College, I became involved with the Wexler Collection of Puerto Rican prints at the Wexler Library. I volunteered and subsequently was paid to create a catalog for the collection, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican printmakers from the Island. It was on again, off again and then I graduated in 1995. It was a long and winding road until 2007, when as an adjunct for the Art Department at Hunter I was given the opportunity to curate an exhibiton of the Wexler Library Collection of prints for the Leubsdorf Gallery. The project came full circle and a modest but handsome catalog was produced. Centro, who has a library that has been my go to for many personal art projects (especially prints), and whose Journal I have followed throughout the years commended me on this Wexler effort and subsequently asked invited me to study their collection of Puerto Rican prints, with an emphasis on Puerto Rican printmakers from New York and the diaspora. The aim is to produce another catalog where I can delve into this fascinating subject.

“Posters on the Wall: Our Nuyorican Story” at First Street Green Park

What was your intention to allow the public to add their own artistic statements to your installation at First Street Green?

As visual artists we are cognizant of everyone’s artistic potential and we believe certain projects such as this, are enriched by public participation. Besides FABLES has set a very high (but constructive and fun) bar in public art projects that dynamize the Lower East Side and its rich heritage.

Do you have future plans for Posters on the Wall and the conversation it’s been fostering?

I definitely think the FABLES forum has paved the way for me to revise the essay I have been working in for the past year so that the catalog can be designed and printed sooner rather than later. Additionally there has been some interest in turning this into a traveling exhibition that after Centro, The Clemente Soto Velez Center, and FABLES, can visit university galleries especially in the North East.

How have some of the artists behind the posters responded to the project?

They have been supportive and seem amused that these time/place specific “notices” can be reactivated in different contexts thanks to the prescience of the Centro archives in collecting them. 

Have you received any interesting feedback on the installation at First Street Green?

My favorite feedback was an email forwarded by FABLES where a very concerned neighbor expressed dismay at the posters (in this case reproductions) where getting pummeled by the elements! More often the feedback came from Puerto Rican residents who had a “Proust” moment. It was also very pleasant to be warmly encouraged by the broader LES community at large who felt the project provided a fascinating glimpse at the travails, concerns and accomplishments of a community that neighbored their own or that they felt close to in some way or another. In other cases, and this was very gratifying, others expressed their excitement at becoming acquainted, for the first time, with our Nuyorican aesthetic. 

What was the initial draw to applying for this project? How did you hear about it?

After premiering at Centro in 2013, Posters on the Wall was featured as the 2013 Borimix visual arts exhibition at the Clemente Soto Velez Center. The people at FABLES, Tamara and Keith, were then instrumental in inviting Juan Fe and myself to apply for the FABLES 2014 public art venues.

When you came across the application, did you have a pre-existing idea in mind or did the open call inspire a wholly new work?

Both. We were very prepared because Juan Fe Morales had carried out what I consider to be a highly attractive exhibition design. And yet the open call, the potential for outdoor site specificity, the highly contagious and supportive energy of Keith and Tamara (and the whole FABLES crew) and the glorious early summer hanging all contributed to infuse this iteration of Posters on the Wall with a unique appeal. A certain enchanting quality is best transmitted when the public at large, especially our Loisaida folks, decides to pay attention and interact with a project. . .

Was this your first public art project? Did the framework of “public art” change your approach in any way?

I truly think this was a first for me. I have done murals and have been involved in a remarkable NYC Loisaida Cultural Center atmosphere (the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center) since 1995. And yet, this project gave me the unique opportunity to project my scholarship and admiration for the Nuyorican aesthetic into the public arena in a way that made it so much more meaningful to me and, apparently, to other folks as well. And also, the curatorial process shared with Juan Fe, a fellow artist, a curator colleague and a friend, became ever more seamless.

Can you give us a quick glimpse into the inspiration behind this piece?

The remarkable opportunity to experience past “public” art (the poster) in a new context and a new era. We soon discovered that Nuyorican artists crafted prints/offsets that have withstood the test of time and still call a passerby’s attention. Our community and NYC has a collective memory that registered many of these icons so that they endure, and this art with a documentary purpose (the sublime poster), is much more fascinating for its dynamic mix of historical information and artistic means.

What was it like working on your location? Did the history or current use of your specific location have any influence on your project?

Working at the park was a blast. Shade and breeze in the sun thanks to the trees, people hanging out checked out the hanging, passerby’s commented, we had some loved ones get enthused helping us. . . It felt kind of like being Tom Sawyer painting that fence. . . Others wanted to join and whether physically or emotionally they did. Of course the location meant a lot to me. The Lower East Side/Williamsburg frontier has been a destination of the Puerto Rican NY diaspora since before the mid 20th century, when it became a true bulwark, along with El Barrio and The Bronx . Besides, Loisaida became a unique cultural epicenter thanks to Miguel Algarin, Pedro Pietri, Mickey Pinero, Bimbo Rivas, Jorge Brandon, Lucky Cienfuegos, Papoleto Melendez, Sandria Maria Esteves and many other Nuyorican poets that afforded the community a source of pride in good times and through bleak years as well.

Silkscreen print from “Posters on the Wall.” Title translates to “Does this train stop at Delancey?” performed at Teatro de Orilla (214 E 2nd St.) in 1972.

How would you describe your relationship to the Lower East Side? How did it permeate into your work for this project?

It has been a love affair full of bliss. “Storm and stress” and also some form of civic commitment, enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment and more commitment. In short, it has been wonderful. These days, when things are good (and I arrived here late, in the mid 1990′s when things were improving but latinos were finding it increasingly hard to stay, definitely diminishing the neighborhood’s real life vibrancy) it seems difficult to imagine the epic struggle of so many to survive and even improve the neighborhood around them. I feel humbled by their efforts and encouraged to advocate a neighborhood where all kinds of folks from all walks of life can share–and if not to actively help each other, at least respect and celebrate the differences. Allow me to quote Bimbo Rivas “Loisaida” (1974)

. . .una mezcla, la perfecta

una gente bien decente
de to ‘as rasas
que estiman
que te adoran
que no saben explicar
lo que le pasa
cuando ausente de
tus calles peligrosas

si te aman
A ti, mi hermosa Loisaida

O what a town…..

even with your drug-infested
pocket parks, playgrounds
where our young bloods
hang around
waiting, hoping that
one day when they too
get well and smile again
your love is all
they need to come around.
Loisaida, I love you.
Your buildings are
burning up
that we got to stop.

Loisaida, my love,
Te amo.

How has this project inspired or fostered ideas about how to integrate your community and history into future work?

How to integrate the NY, Loisaida and especially the whole Latino/Puerto Rican family into art and culture projects is perhaps the best way to describe the mission of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Education Center, where I have the privilege of working as an artist, programming exhibitions and serving on the board. Thanks to the Puerto Rican/Latino performers and artists in the centers as well as the many other artists that work there we are constantly looking for and finding new ways to bring Latino/Puerto Ricans into contact with all kinds of art and theater (FringeNYC, Cutlog, etc.) and all kinds of people to experience Latino/Puerto Ricans art and theater (Borimix, Open Studios, etc.).

Curators/Artists Miguel Trelles (left) & Juan Fernando Morales

What are your thoughts on the current state of the LES? Hopes, dreams, fears, hesitations? 

As with many historic neighborhoods what has been gained in safety, security and general quality of life improvements has often represented a loss of diversity due to growing unaffordability. Whereas this trend has been both good and bad, it sometimes appears as if Bimbo’s dream will remain unreachable to the children and grandchildren of the people that worked to make it happen. For now, the greatest hope is that new developments consider the plight of former longstanding residents forced to evacuate, but that we don’t shoo away newcomers either, so that young artists and recent arrivals can find a spot and that we develop job opportunities beyond bartending.

Any upcoming projects you’d like to share?

Borimix Puerto Rico Fest 2014 is around the corner. The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center has hosted this festival Manuel Moran and I have worked on for almost a decade. Produced by Sociedad Educativa de las Artes (SEA), the Festival opens in November and includes theater, music, art etc., seeking to mix in Puerto Rican culture and artists with the New York matrix. We showed Posters on the Wall here in 2013 and this year we will hang a group show, Aquous Fervor, of work allusive to water and its imagery in the poetry of Julia de Burgos. Please join us.