In the 1960s, well intentioned urban renewal visionaries demolished nearly all of the New Haven neighborhood that was home to new arrivals during the great waves of early 1900's immigration. By declaring the area a slum not worthy of preservation, they left this city with little visible historical memory beyond that of the British colonists. Decades later, The Cultural Heritage Artists Project for the Orchard Street Shul developed first in response to an urgent community need: one synagogue had survived the erasure of several historic buildings, and the small group who inherited the building from their immigrant parents needed to raise awareness of the plight of the building itself. As artists, we quickly identified an opportunity to engage an important American story, one that stirred our imaginations and challenged us to make personal a history that is important to all Americans, regardless of cultural background. As the project developed, we were joined by historians and computer visualization researchers. Our research was supported by an initially bewildered Jewish Historical Society, who came to embrace the interaction with artists whose research led to new ways of presenting and interpreting.
New media approaches were not required for the project, which only stipulated that artists visit the site and respect the cultural heritage of this particular community. Nonetheless, digital imaging infused the entire venture, making visible memories and associations that existed only in depths of historic documentation and long buried photographs. Forgotten photographs were brought to life on dresses, on stones, in video and oral narratives, and wide variety of other installations. Images of the Shul itself were hidden in bits of glass, reconfigured on walls, and animated in videos more painterly than real. Even the more classic paintings and prints used digital processing at some point, and beyond process, the very act of coming together was facilitated by a private website created for the purpose of sharing research, documents, and evolving projects.
From the beginning, this exhibition was only partially about the Orchard Street Shul. The driving force behind the exhibition was working with the evolving trends of artists taking control of an increasingly overly curated art world, where works have to be "current" (as in done in the last 2 years) and simultaneously follow some trend that artists must intuit. Older works that are before their time go unnoticed, as do current works that are on another subject. This is not the first show that has asked artists to create new works, but one of the first that we know of the combined this with Community Art, a sense of purpose, and backed up the art with scholarly contributions
The two-fold purpose carried us through months of research and dialogue, culminating in an exhibition and project book. If any project could unerase an obliterated past, this project did so with such force that 500 people lined up to see the exhibition on a cold December Opening Day. Our audience affirmed our experimental approach: artists can indeed engage community through purposeful exhibitions.
for a view of the exhibition, see:
http://culturalheritageartistsproject.org
