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March 16, 2010
A Quiet Alarm Sounds
A multimedia art exhibit in Fort Greene examines the neighborhood-changing going on all around it.
City Limits
by David Alm
Fort Greene — “The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks,” at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, 80 Hanson Place, Brooklyn. Open Wed. – Sun, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Suggested donation $4, through May 16.
Anyone who’s lived in New York for a while has done it: Walked down a familiar block and remembered the old days – even three or four years ago – when that yoga studio was a bodega, that multinational bank was a local business, and you could rent a one-bedroom apartment for under $2,000.
Depending on your politics, income and connection to a place, such changes can be a welcome sign of new amenities and safer streets, or symptoms of a kind of urban cancer. And few places in the city reflect such trends more in recent years than the neighborhoods of northwest Brooklyn. Take a walk through Fort Greene, Clinton Hill or Bed-Stuy today and you’ll barely recognize the world filmmaker Spike Lee immortalized two decades ago in his classic "Do The Right Thing."
“The Gentrification of Brooklyn: The Pink Elephant Speaks” brings together more than 20 artists to inspire thought and conversation around these seismic shifts in New York’s fastest-growing borough. Centered at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Fort Greene, the four-month-long project combines art exhibitions with discussions, a play, a poetry reading and other events to reach beyond black-and-white diatribes and polarizing prescriptions.
...With the controversial Atlantic Yards construction site looming just beyond MoCADA’s front door, “The Gentrification of Brooklyn” sounds a quiet alarm, one that grows louder the longer you listen.
NoLandGrab: "Do the Right Thing?" Not any more, apparently. Spike Lee attended Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards groundbreaking last Thursday.
Posted by eric at March 16, 2010 10:37 AM