High Art on Low Culture

When does art judge the critic?  For a pair of award-winning artists, it happens when the least privileged are empowered to judge the most.  Eric Johnstone and Karen Landmann, two Canadian born friends who met in the U. S., combined art and social work in their photography of  homeless people on the streets of New York City.  Their exhibit, “2 x 6,” is the winner of the Award for Conceptual Art at ArtSplash 2007, a show at Fort Tilden in the Rockaways organized by the Rockaway Artists Alliance, a not-for-profit arts organization.  The work is a collection of the photo portraits presented in the form of a jury, 12 subjects contemplating those who would otherwise judge them.

“I wanted to somehow empower the individual, the person, having the portrait,” said Johnstone, a Columbia graduate with a background in asset management.  “When people see street people they say, oh, that’s just a street person. “  Passers-by view and judge them in the same breath, he says.  But, “if they were to come together as a group and judge…society, what kind of things would they have to say?”

“I wanted to somehow empower the individual, the person, having the portrait”, said Johnstone, who spoke with a quiet thoughtfulness.  His measured words grabbed at myriad ideas as he described his inspiration.  The exhibit is “kind of a warning,” he said.  In a city like New York, if you happen to find yourself without a job and savings, anyone could end up on the street.   “Do we owe these people anything?” 

To help him explore that haunting question, Karen Landmann, a social worker and graduate student at Columbia University, worked with Johnstone on “2 x 6.”  Upon learning of the idea, Ms. Landmann asked if she help using her prior experience working with the homeless.  Landmann is also an accomplished photographer with several public displays in her repertoire.

Ms. Landmann’s experience was essential to producing the exhibit, which included the cups used by the subjects to collect change from those generous enough to give.  The cups were used to viscerally connect a viewer, strolling leisurely through a gallery, with the gritty reality of the portrait.  But why would you want a homeless person to give up something, asked Landmann.  Some of the subjects were attached to their cups; others weren’t.  So Landmann came up with the idea of carrying around a sleeve of extra cups.  This small gesture was a big deal to the street folk.  This, and the five dollars Johnstone and Landmann gave to each subject.  It’s not nothing, and it’s not exactly expensive, said Landmann.  “For a homeless person, that’s huge.  These are people sitting on the street and getting a dollar twenty five all day long.”

The artists developed relationships with the subjects of their portraits.  We sat around the table with them and really got to know them, said Landmann.  We became, if not friends exactly, very friendly with each other.  Landmann also said one of the male subjects even wanted her to be his girlfriend, but it wasn’t threatening.  “I just kind of, you know, politely declined.” 

The empowerment given by the artists to their subjects was expressed by setting up the photographs like a jury.  The name, “2 x 6,” refers to the way a jury sits, and is the format for how the photos are laid out.  And the case they sit in judgment of?  “The case is us,” said Landmann.  “They’re the ones who are judging us.” 

Landmann also shared Johnstone’s sense of warning.  “You know what people say about the homeless…they deserve it,” she said.  “People don’t realize they could become homeless themselves.  Any of us could really become homeless.”

The artists’ concern for their subjects, and the disconcerting possibility they represent, hit home for the judges of ArtSplash 2007, but Johnstone didn’t seem too concerned with the award, or if the piece sells from its showing at the Studio 7 Gallery in Fort Tilden, where it will be on display through Oct. 7.  Rather, he and Ms. Landmann are much more interested in the social problems the piece represents.  “The last pic,” said Johnstone, “there’s a woman and it’s raining, she’s wearing plastic bags. She still has to go out in the street to get money.  Can’t we do better than that?”

The Incredible Edible Piping Plover

It’s impossible to know what they’re thinking. Young lovers, nestled in the shallows of Rockaway Beach, watching the sapphire sea sparkle beneath the sun.  Like many New Yorkers, they are supremely opportunistic, moving onto real estate vacated by a struggling municipality.  Their grasp on this prime beach property, is tenuous, but thanks to Sarah Aucoin and local developers, they need not fear eviction when, at the end of every summer, they spread their wings and fly south.

The piping plover is a squat little bird with knobby knees.  With sand-colored feathers stretching across its back and a fluffy white chest, the bird resembles a corpulent customer trying on a small raincoat.   But it runs in quick, short spurts, dispelling any doubts about its fitness. 

The birds began using Rockaway Beach as a mating ground in the 1990s when, for a variety of reasons, a section of the beach had been closed to the public.  Infrequent rakings and a lack of traffic allowed the area to develop into a massive undulation of sand with sparse grass and small depressions: the perfect mating habitat for the six inch, two ounce bird.

 But perfection was transient. Dunes are generally unstable, either washing back into the sea, or growing into stabilized ground.  The Rockaway dune shifted towards stability, sprouting thick grasses, which are not preferable for plovers.

Beachgoers rediscovered the Rockaways and a neighborhood development plan meant even more threats towards the little birds.  The plovers, a federally threatened species, were facing eviction from their summer home.

When they were first noticed in Rockaway about ten years ago, the plovers were making good on land left to itself.  Abandoned property on one side and the sea on another had left a stretch of beach undisturbed by pedestrian visitors.

The birds, 20 to 50 pairs of them, began to come every March to mate.  Plovers are serially monogamous, says Sarah Aucoin, deputy director of the Urban Park Rangers.  They settled down with a single mate for the season, made nests, deposited several eggs, and dined on worms, beetles and the occasional clam.  When the chicks hatched, they would wander the dune in search of enough food to prepare them for the autumn move to North Carolina, or, perhaps, the Bahamas

But plover paradise began to crumble as the years wore on.  The city raked the area less, allowing thicker grasses to sprout.  While such a thing is good for dune stabilization, which helps stay beachfront erosion, it is bad for piping plovers. 

Like Goldilocks and her warm oatmeal, the birds need just enough grass, but not too much. In a sense, the birds require a dune that is in a particular phase of its life, somewhere between empty sand and shrubby overgrowth.  The changing conditions on Rockaway Beach were forcing the plovers to seek new breeding ground.

“They’re plovers,” said Aucoin.  “They can do what they want.” Aucoin, however, wanted the birds to stay.  With beach crowds increasing, Aucoin said the parks department didn’t want to fence off more beach, or patrol the area.  Instead, the goal was to optimize the existing plover habitat. 

So Aucoin began a navigation of the Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to secure permits to create, at the dune, the perfect plover site.  Discerning the Plover’s picky preferences, Aucoin and the Rangers thinned the grass in areas permitted by the D.E.C.

 “It was a lot of work,” Aucoin said.  The grass had to be hand -picked and replanted on the back side of the dune, in a compromise between D.E.C.’s desire for dune stabilization and the needs of the birds. 

“Plover nesting success increased dramatically,” said Aucoin, who won an award for her efforts at this year’s graduation ceremony for the Urban Park Service.  “The D.E.C. folks that I worked with from the Erosion Control unit in Albany were fantastic – they were able to balance these competing interests beautifully, protecting the dune AND allowing us to do habitat enhancement for the plovers,” she wrote in an email.

But at the end of 2001, a different kind of doomsday seemed to menace the birds, when a redevelopment plan for Arverne, the neighborhood adjacent to the habitat, threatened the birds with increased human traffic.  The developers, already working closely with the city on other aspects of the project, chose to combine efforts with the parks department as well.  It was all part of the approval process,” said Gerry Romski, attorney for Arverne-by-the-Sea.  

The development informs potential residents of the habitat’s presence up front.  “We have literature here on the piping plover that we hand out,” said Laura Sporny, sales manager for Arverne-the-the-Sea, which abuts the western edge of the plover habitat. 

The 117 acre development has taken other measures to ensure the continued presence of the plover.  “You can’t have loose cats,” said Romski.  Household predators pose a distinct threat to the birds, especially the helpless hatchlings that wobble around the dune looking for food.  There is a piping plover protection fund.  “Every homeowner makes a contribution every year,” said Romski.  “[Residents] recognize they have to live in harmony with the plover and they make adjustments.  No one complains”

With more development planned for the future, Sarah Aucoin of the Rangers anticipates an increase in the pressures in the area, and more potential threats to the birds.  But through outreach to the public and by working with developers, and state and federal departments, Sarah is optimistic about the birds’ future as honored guests of New York City.  “We want to help people see [the plovers] as a resource.  How odd, how unlikely it is.”  Aucoin is applying this year for a larger testing area to secure the plover’s presence for years to come.

Through all this, the birds remain oblivious.  They’re most likely unaware of the massive, coordinated efforts among Aucoin, the federal and state departments, and the Arverne developers.  The birds simply continue to come every March, meeting and mating, then flying off into warmer, more southerly territories.

For all the efforts to save their habitat, the only thing the piping plovers know is their home will be here next year, when they return for another summer in the shallows of the great dune on Rockaway Beach.