Throughout May, the public art project MONTH2MONTH is sending eight lottery-selected participants (and some of their partners) to spend four nights in either “affordable” or “luxury” housing in New York for a project that deals with gentrification in the city. The homes on the “affordable” end of the spectrum are located in the East Village and Bushwick neighbourhoods, while the “luxury” residences are located in Gramercy, Chelsea, lower Manhattan and the Upper West Side.
The project has been organised by the artists William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton, and is produced by More Art, the non-profit educational group that focuses on social justice. Powhida and Dalton first collaborated shortly after the financial crisis struck in 2008, creating a set of “condolence cards” for the art world that addressed how the market was shaping the lives of the artists, dealers and collectors who were on the edge of an economic bubble.
Every weekend, around a dozen collaborators are slated to host panels and performances that reflect on current housing policies and “the class struggle that is gentrification”, Powhida and Dalton told The Art Newspaper in a joint statement. On 14 May, for example, the artist duo Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine (Oasa DuVerney and Mildred Beltre) will host an event titled Gentrifiers Anonymous, inviting visitors to “confess their sins” of urban displacement, large and small. On 21 May, several comedians will join forces for an improvisational work that will attempt to answer how the characters in the 1990s television sitcom Friends could afford their enormous Manhattan apartments, among other questionable living situations in pop culture.
“We find that many discussions on gentrification involve the role of the artist, described in colonial terms as a ‘pioneer’ of some ‘undiscovered’ neighbourhood, [which] elides the fact that there are already residents living in these communities who are [consequently] displaced”, the artists say, adding that “white artists moving into neighbourhoods can be seen as the enemy by existing communities who all know the formulaic nature of what happens next—the bodega gets a makeover into a 24-hour deli with kale chips and craft beer, generic condos start appearing and rents rise quickly.”
“While [gentrification] takes many stakeholders who have more power and money than the most artists will ever possess, artists are still the social canary whose cultural value is used to mark the beginning of the end of the [gentrification] process,” Powhida and Dalton say.
• To RSVP and for the full line-up of events, which will be live-streamed, visit the MONTH2MONTH website.
