New York Times

April 30, 1998

Port Authority Opens Trade Center to Select Painters

By Jan Hoffman

 

Tucked among the thousands dressed in business suits and intently rushing

the turnstiles to get to work, the 19 did not immediately stick out. But

during those long, long elevator rides to the upper reaches of New York

City's tallest buildings, the regular tenants would get a good look at the

newcomers. And gawk.

 

After all, how often does a leather briefcase bump up against a

paint-splotched French portable easel?

 

Along with investment bankers, corporate lawyers and shipping magnates, 19

handpicked artists have been trundling to work at the World Trade Center.

 

Oil-on-canvas painters all, they participated in an unusual pilot project

sponsored by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the

Trade Center, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a nonprofit arts

organization. For nearly a year, they made art in raw, glorious space,

rent-free, on vast swathes of five floors in the twin towers, the most

astonishing being 35,000 square feet -- nearly an acre -- of the 85th floor

of One World Trade Center.

 

"I could look up from everywhere in the city, point to the towers and say,

'That's my studio!' " said Susanna Heller, a painter.

 

A studio tour Tuesday night for the benefactors of the World Views project

revealed artists made giddy by breathtaking vistas from what amounts to

Manhattan's loftiest loft. Encouraged only to look out the window and paint

what they saw, they produced wildly diverse canvases -- sunlight splashing

on harbor waters and steel skyscraper walls, the Verrazano Bridge emerging

from morning fog, the sinuous lines of, yes, the West Side Highway.

 

Some painters, looking north, made cityscapes remarkable for their unique

perspective, inferred by what was missing from otherwise comprehensive

scenes: the World Trade Center towers.

 

"They had never tackled something so drastic, so ambitious and so

searching," said Graham Nickson, dean of the New York Studio School of

Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. He selected the first group of painters,

who all work in the perceptual, or representational, style.

 

For the painters, the experience was as much about process as the prolific

outcome produced by it. Accustomed to creating in solitude, they now had

companions, some less than welcome and certainly not equal in stature, for

Nickson deliberately chose from the ranks of emerging and mid-career, as

well as seasoned painters. One artist, John Dubrow, was startled by the

World Trade Center's hordes of corporate titans -- the lone neighbor on the

85th floor is the Hyakugo Bank Ltd. -- but learned to joke about going to

work in an office for the first time in his 20 years as a painter.

 

Torild Stray, a Norwegian painter, said the tall tower, which sways in a

hard wind, took some getting used to. "I'd say, 'I only had two glasses of

wine at dinner, so why am I rolling over?' " said Stray, who wore a smock

and pants flecked with paint, and, like the other artists and visitors on

the 85th-floor tour, was bathed in the honey-colored late-afternoon light

that gushed through the windows, splashing across the bare, spattered

floors and naked, unfinished ceilings.

 

The painters can remain until mid-July, when paying customers, including a

midsize law firm, will be moving in, spending as much as $37 a square foot

in rent. Cherrie Nanninga, the Port Authority's director of real estate,

who also happens to sit on the board of the Lower Manhattan Cultural

Council, said the World Views project would likely continue in other raw

space in the towers, for new groups of artists in other styles, selected by

museums and art schools around the city.

 

For arts devotees like Barbara Ball Buff, the collections associate at the

Museum of the City of New York, who visited the studio in the sky on

Tuesday night, this latest marriage of art and commerce is ripe with

promise. "Some of the work was obviously better than others, but even so,

it's such a wonderful idea that a big real estate enterprise takes

cognizance of our artists and the artistic legacy of the city," she said.

"I'd love to see more buildings doing it."

 

The Port Authority did not get a tax deduction for the project because it

is tax exempt, but Nanninga said that the Cultural Council was looking into

that possibility as an inducement for other developers.

 

In fact, the project has solved residual problems for all parties involved.

Because of the boom in real estate, New York City studios for artists are

more scarce and expensive than ever. And though office space in the twin

towers of the World Trade Center is at a premium these days, the complex,

which has more than 10 million square feet for rent, is usually about 10

percent empty -- particularly on the higher floors, avoided by some tenants

who recall how workers stranded by the 1993 bombing had to hike down

hundreds of stairs. By temporarily filling the space with artists, hardly a

costly effort, the agency has found a way to give the property a whimsical

appeal for prospective tenants and, not least, burnish its own reputation.

 

To hear some of the painters talk, the project has been pure, esthetic

hell. With so much open space available to them (about 60,000 square feet

total across five floors), plus urban master-of-the-universe vistas in all

directions from floors so high they look down on helicopters whizzing

below, natural daylight molting and moving across harbors and skyscrapers

and bridges in all kinds of weather, in four seasons, only to be swept

aside at night by the city's imperious, neon palette, just how is an

overstimulated painter supposed to select a site and settle down?

 

"We were all so seduced by the views and the space that in the first three

months it was like a beehive," said Carl Scorza, a painter who brought the

idea to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

 

But finally, after the agony of the ecstasy, after the more prosaic

squabbles over turf, many artists began what became a very productive

period: 10 painters showed about 100 works Tuesday night.

 

The paintings do not have a home yet, and the collection will likely be

broken up as the artists scramble to place individual works in galleries.

But that does not preclude a show someday, assembled by the Lower Manhattan

Cultural Council, perhaps somewhere in the Trade Center itself.

 

With that end in mind, the council intentionally started the project by

inviting largely realistic, representational painters, like Rackstraw

Downes. "Representational painting is not the most popular thing," Jenni

Kim, the program director at the council, said. "What gets a lot of

attention in SoHo and Chelsea is not paintings of Manhattan. But people who

work in the Financial District may not feel the more avant garde art is

accessible to them. This is."

 

In the lush early evening light on Tuesday, at least one young painter

stared out wistfully, saying that she still found the extravagant space and

views provocative and maddening. "Sometimes I wish I was outside the

building, on the ledge," said Elisa Jensen. Pointing to the columns that

interrupted the windows, she explained, "That little piece that stops the

view is torture: I want to see more of the curve of New Jersey!"

 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

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