The name Robert Moses has become synonymous with the type of city planning most sentient New Yorkers hate. If he’d had his way, the legendary architect of mid-20th-century New York would have replaced Greenwich Village with a 10-lane highway, much like he razed neighborhoods in the South Bronx to build the Cross Bronx Expressway — an act many believe contributed to its decay. But to his credit, when Moses became Long Island State Park Commissioner in 1934, there were only 119 city playgrounds. When he retired in 1960, there were 777, which he hoped would deter juvenile delinquency by offering “clean, wholesome play” to children.
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When I was a kid, my father kept a dog-eared street map of the Dallas metroplex in his truck’s glove compartment. As a contractor who spent hours driving each day, this atlas was his North Star — a point of reference for navigating the city’s chaotic, concrete sprawl. Today, the cartographic tradition that his homely map belonged to — spanning millenniums from the early Phoenicians to Amerigo Vespucci and Lewis and Clark — is rapidly changing. I now find my way through New York by following a tiny, triangular point on an iPhone screen. In an age of new technology, information, and globalization, maps are no longer mere objects, and they increasingly represent immaterial worlds. This shifting understanding of time and space is reflected in Contemporary Cartographies, a group show at CUNY’s Lehman College Art Gallery in the Bronx.
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When the little-known artist Richard Pagán died in 1989, he was at the precipice of a promising artistic career. Pagán had just recently become the first Puerto Rican to win the Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Jackson Pollock Award for his large expressionist canvases, and his circle of friends included the likes of Willem de Kooning. A new body of work was slated for exhibition at the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, but the show was derailed when the 35-year-old tragically died after inhaling gas leaked by his apartment’s defective heating system. Over time, his work was forgotten.
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No holiday season is complete without a viewing of Home Alone, the classic film in which a young Macaulay Culkin is left to watch mob flicks by himself while his family heads to Paris for Christmas. Though few of us can boast of having fended off a couple of crooks from the family mansion, we all cherish our own childhood memories of times when distracted parents or inattentive babysitters allowed us to act on our imaginative impulses. Day Tripping, photographer Julie Blackmon’s stunning new show at the Robert Mann Gallery, captures the mischief and magic that brew when adult backs are momentarily turned.
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