This morning I was at the Utica Avenue subway station with a group of fourth graders. The students, currently studying the rich history of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, were on their way to the Weeksville Heritage Center (a beautiful community resource that deserves its own full post). Weeksville was founded in 1838 - only 11 years after slavery was abolished in New York State - as a safe haven and cultural epicenter for free black families. Founded in part to guarantee voting rights for landholding black men, the community was a self-sustaining enclave with its own school, churches, and newspaper. Today it's subsumed by the larger urban Bed-Stuy neighborhood and dwarfed by the Kingborough Houses just across Bergen Street. But three period houses on the old Hunterfly Road still stand proud - impeccably-curated exemplars of Weeksville's heyday. The houses are curated like time capsules from, respectively, 1860, 1900, and 1930. The tiny, neat rooms and well-chosen artifacts make visible a heroic period in American existence. I highly recommend taking a tour, or taking advantage of the Society's many public programs, detailed on their website.
Before we got to the Weeksville Houses, though, we had to navigate the Utica station. I've written about subway stations before, about their utility in the classroom as historical catalogs of the people and neighborhoods they underlie, and reflect. Many MTA stations are impressive feats of engineering with lengthy histories, but we straphangers sometimes consider them ubiquitous, utilitarian shells that just help us get from point A to point B. I must admit, I have never paid much attention to the public art within so many of the system's stations. But here at the Utica station in the heart of Bed-Stuy is a breathtakingly colorful mosaic in the folk tradition of the best Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden. I asked the students to take special note of it on our walk above ground: what story does the mosaic tell? What types of people, jobs, and communities are represented? How can this mosaic inform our study of Bed-Stuy? How can our trip to Weeksville re-inform our opinion of the mosaic?
Thanks to www.nycsubway.org, I now know that the mosaic is entitled "Children's Cathedral" (why, I wonder!) and that the artist is someone named Jimmy James Green (who is he, and with what authority does he artistically represent Bed-Stuy?) What began as a trip to Weeksville suddenly now included an art investigation. Resources and tie-ins, I've noticed, are everywhere - in subway stations, on the sides of abandoned buildings, in housing project lots. Studying public art can deepen a community investigation, and often the most provocative and useful pieces, like Green's "Children's Cathedral" at the unassuming Utica Avenue station, literally commute with us every day.
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