Forrest Myers

Forrest
Myers:

The gateway to SoHo.
599 Broadway, just south of Houston Street, NY

“The Wall,” commissioned in 1973, covered about one-sixth of an acre on the side of the building at 599 Broadway, just south of Houston Street. It was essentially a kind of dimpled field — 42 protruding aluminum beams evenly spaced.

Its parts have been in storage since 2002, perhaps never to be on display again. The building’s owners wanted to put advertising billboards in its place.The city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission unanimously approved, with little or no community opposition, a compromise reached by the creator of “The Wall” and the owners of 599 Broadway. It calls for advertising to go up on some of the space where “The Wall” once stood, satisfying the owners. But one floor above that, and illuminated at night, “The Wall” can return, satisfying the artist, Forrest Myers.

via nytimes, here..

"Well, at that time it was us against the world. But we also thought we would change the world, and not necessarily political but how people saw stuff. And we wanted everybody to be able to do it. And now that its happened we’re not sure its such a good thing."

- Forrest Myers

"I consider myself a SoHo Pioneer. I came [downtown] in 1962 and they were building the world trade center where I and other artists were living and I actually got run out of there too, they were going to demolish buildings… And so I moved to SoHo and people said why are you going to SoHothere’s nothing there but a bunch of trucks.Well at that time there were a lot of spaces for rent, not only in SoHo, but other places. Artists lived downtown… there were so few artists when I came to New York it was just odd. There were about 400 artists."

- Forrest Myers, via Soho Journal. here..





Forrest
Myers:

The gateway to SoHo.
599 Broadway, just south of Houston Street, NY




-----------------------

Québec libre !

Armand Vaillancourt, sculptor

"One of his best known sculptures, Québec libre ! is representative of the relationship between Vaillancourt's art and his political convictions. It is a huge concrete fountain, 200 feet long, 140 feet wide and 36 feet high sitting in the city's financial district at the Embarcadero Center. The night before its inauguration, Vaillancourt inscribed Québec libre! in red letters, to note his undying support for the Quebec sovereignty movement and more largely, his support for the freedom of all people. The following day, seeing that the city's employees erased the inscription, he jumped on the sculpture to reinscribe the sentence many times.

Some years later, the fountain became the object of a polemic involving U2's singer Bono. During a free concert, Bono climbed the sculpture to write Rock & Roll stops the traffic, referring to the power of rock. 20,000 people were in fact in attendance and blocked some of the neighbouring streets. Reacting to the act, the city's mayor declared that she deplored the sculpture's vandalism and that this kind of act could be punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. Vaillancourt was then contacted to learn if he supported the gesture, which he answered by going to U2's concert in Oakland the following day, where he wrote "Stop the madness" on the stage, in front of 70 000 people. He defended Bono's gesture, after a speech on injustice, declaring that graffiti is a necessary evil as young people do not generally have the same access to newspapers, and media in general, as politicians do to express themselves."

all images by Armand Vaillancourt