APRIL 21 - APRIL 28 2011

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WEEKLY REPORTANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION

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Al Orensanz’sCorner Eric Ferrara’s Books Review

At Angel OrensanzFoundation Repin Museum at Orensanz !

Hot From The Archive Warspell, a call to disarm

On TV Arts from the Orensanz

World News Sidney Lumet, a friend forever

Al Orensanz’sCorner Eric Ferrara’s Book Review

Within a span of two years, social researcher Eric Ferrara has come out with these two pocket books that bring back to life the tradition of commitment, humor and vision that has characterized the main writers of Lower Manhattan for several decades.

I work myself in a New York landmark place in the Lower East Side. We get tourists and visitors every day. Before one of our interns meets them, I sometimes have the chance to greet them. They are mostly European, from Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy and more recently quite a few come from Spain and from an assortment of states of the Union. I always look at their hands to try to discretely recognize their guidebooks. Inexorably, they come from the same European publisher but in different languages. American visitors come most often with professional tour guides, with no books in sight. They prefer to be driven around and being given segments of no more than ten minutes each for every location.

Eric Ferrara is filling a gap with his books for the highly educated, yet eager to absorb the colorful, the anecdotic, the charring, and sometimes the alarming and perplexing. People expect to hear and see in Lower Manhattan the quaint, the primitive and to find the inexpensive. With a terse yet seductive style, Eric Ferrara gives us the internal significance and character to every building, space, event or character he talks about. I, personally, believe he should have given more space to a few other subjects such as the Russian revolutionary participation of our neighborhoods, the role of our predecessors in the origins, and the development of American music, theater, literature, cinema and progressive ideas. I am sure that Eric Ferrara

will come one day with the connections to our neighborhoods and impact of the McCarthy witch hunt as it pounded Lower Manhattan like no other land in the country. I, for one, cannot wait to read another tome from The History Press about the locations that still remain as witnesses of the Americanization of the Jewish masses; and conversely of their permanent impact in the American landscape.

In both books Eric Ferrara gives us extremely substantial and updated bibliographies, many of such titles are available in the Internet. The Bowery carries a supplementary bibliography of 46 titles. The street numbers operate as chapters. A Guide to Gansters, Muderers and Weirdos… carries a bibliography of 40 titles. In both books the street numbers appear as sequences of his narratives, keeping that way the neighborhoods as the overall characters of his narrative and of our progressive advance into the territory of Lower Manhattan.

Al Orensanz, Ph.D

Eric Ferrara. The Bowery. A History of Grit, Graft and Grandeur. History Press, Charleston and London, 2011; 126 pages, maps and images; $16.99.

Eric Ferrara. A Guide to Gangsters, Murderers and Weirdos of New York City’s Lower East Side. With a forward by Rob Hollander. History Press, Charleston and London; 191 pages, with indexes and illustrations.$19.99.

Hot FromThe Archive Warspell, a call to disarm

Warspell sculpture in Sidney Lumet’s movie “Daniel” (1982) final sequence

By 1982 the sculpture of Orensanz became well known internationally for his creation of space, multidimensional situations, environments, where the multiplicity of elements matches a plurality of meaning, purpose and aesthetic levels of understanding. His organic and structural conceptions blend in amazing systems where the piece of art and the spectator are being interlocked in an ongoing process of self-definition.

WARSPELL (1982), a sculptural construction has taken 5 months for Angel Orensanz to complete. This complex 12 foot high wooden sculpture toured the streets of New York in a massive parade from Chelsea up 7th Avenue to 42nd Street and then East to the UN Building grounds joining at the end the peace protest in Central Park on June 12th in response to the Special Session on Disarmament at the UN.

The author sees his work as a visual metaphor for society’s ambivalence of growth and decay. WARSPELL captures and promotes the idea: something oppressive is growing in our everyday experience and reality. In the end we can be destroyed by it. We must be capable of dispelling such insidious element in our midst and cast it out. Since the early Greeks drama and art have been a purifying device.

WARSPELL played a significant role in the following events:

June 12, 1982 / 8:00 AM – It presided over a Sunrise Service on the grounds of the General Theological Seminary (175 Ninth Avenue, between 20th and 21st Street. Poetry, music and Jewish, Christian and Islamic prayers were presented and a commonly shared breakfast

took place for all members of the public.

June 12, 1982 / 10:00 AM – Angel Orensanz disassembled WARSPELL and the various elements of which it is made were handed over to 50 actors and members of the public. The bearers walked with pieces from Chelsea via the UN building and arrived to the peace protest in Central Park.

June 12, 1982 / 12:00 noon – The crowd delivered the sculptural elements to Angel Orensanz who reassembled WARSPELL in a process that stressed the endless contingencies of world construction and deconstruction. The legendary Sidney Lumet, who just passed away on this week-end, used this peace protest as the final scene for his film “Daniel” (1983) Starting with a close-up of young Ellen Barkin and Timothy Hutton in the title role, the film ends with a pan of the Orensanz sculpture and the huge crowd on Central Park’s Great Lawn.

June 17, 1982 / 8:00 pm – WARSPELL sculpture and performance premiered in its entirety at THE DOOR (618 Avenue of the Americas, between 18th and 19th Street.), a visual performing arts event by Angel Orensanz in collaboration with playwrights Heidi Sonier, Lynn K. Pannell and Alexandra Colmant. The theme was found collectively, namely PEACE/WAR, drawing upon the atmosphere of the country and particularly of New York City in the spring of 1982.

Click Here for the video

Angel Orensanz Foundation, Inc.

Angel Orensanz with his sculpture Warspell

At Angel OrensanzFoundation Repin Museum at Orensanz !

When the famous social realist artist Repin decided to live the rest of his life in his Saint Petersburg house called “The Penaty”, he did not know the story would be part of History. Natalia Borisovna Nordman - Repin’s companion -, as well as other famous photographers devoted their time to document Repin’s life and house. As the wheel of history turned, many things were destroyed and the photos became not only an artistic value but also a historical tool to reconstitute the past. During his maturity, Repin painted many of his most celebrated compatriots, including the novelist Leo Tolstoy, the court photographer Rafail Levitsky, the scientist Dmitri Mendeleev, the imperial official Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the composer Modest Mussorgsky, the cellist Aleksandr Verzhbilovich, the philanthropist Pavel Tretyakov, and the Ukrainian poet and painter, Taras Shevchenko. The photos reveal the artist’s friendships and feature them in the natural and truthful atmosphere of “the Penaty”.

Angel Orensanz Foundation features an exhibit presenting these photos in order to allow the public to dive in Repin’s environment and understand the context of his late pieces.

On view at our galleries from May 17th.Opening reception: May 17th, 6-8 pm

Repin with family and friends (Repin Museum, Repino, Russia)

World News Sidney Lumet, a friend forever

Sidney Lumet directing The Rachel Aria at Orensanz’s (Photo by Millennial Arts Productions)

Sidney Lumet met Angel Orensanz for the first time in June of 1982 during the one million crowd protest and rally against nuclear weapons in Central Park. There was a large contingent that started in Chelsea and moved up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. The group, “the people of Chelsea” brought a disassembled sculpture of Angel Orensanz, to reconstruct it in the Park, as a contribution of Chelsea to the nuclear disarmament rally. Then, way into the sea of people, the artist saw a film crew approaching his installation, young actor Timothy Hutton, followed by Sidney Lumet and a film crew. Timothy Hutton plays the title role of “Daniel” in Sidney Lumet’s film, the son of American Communist leader and suspected spy Julius Rosenberg, resident of the Lower East Side, just a stone away from our building (played by Mandy Patinkin). Julius and Ethel Rosenberg certainly had been active members of the American Communist Party, founded by John Reed, another resident of our neighborhood and now buried in the Kremlin. Sidney Lumet’s film, is one ne of the most gripping and sobering stories ever told in America, as it appears in the novel by E. L. Doctorow, “The Book of Daniel” (1971), a fictionalized version based on the story of the Rosenbergs. The film’s last scene shows the huge crowd of Central Park and the 25 feet tall sculpture of Angel Orensanz.

Sidney Lumet came to the Angel Orensanz Foundation in other occasions such as in 2003 to shoot a “music video”, a breathtaking interpretation of Eléazar from Halevy’s opera “La Juive”, performed by Neil Shikoff. “Rachel, quand du seigneur” is indeed one of the most poignant lyric compositions of the grand theater. While shooting his short film that took its title from the aria, Sidney Lumet and tenor Neil Shikoff enjoyed days of fun and creativity together. Parts of the stage design were later

incorporated to the Foundation building as permanent reminders.

Mandy Patinkin, who played the father in Lumet’s “Daniel” presented at the Foundation his concert “Mamaloshen” that attracted close to 20,000 people during the Summer of 2000. “Mamaloshen” could well be the best work of Mandy Patinkin. After his premiere at the Foundation, “Mamaloshen” moved to to the Belasco Theatre in Broadway and then to a national tour through the US and Canada. A producer of the show told me during recent a walk through Broadway that every time his team presentes this show throughout the country and Canada the crew assembles and they say for themselves: “Let’s try to replicate the atmosphere of The Angel Orensanz Foundation”.

E.L. Doctorow, the author of the script of “Daniel” (1971) also wrote the original novel on which the movie by Sidney Lumet is based. He was born in 1931 in The Bronx, so poignantly and affectionately depicted in “Daniel” the movie. He is the writer as well of “Welcome to Hard Times” and the world acclaimed “Ragtime”. His prose and dialogue are charged like no other book that recapitulates the spirit of the 1940’s and 50’s; and “The Book of Daniel” is a very, very gripping and socially charged story, one of the most conscientiously minded novels in contemporary America. He came later to the Angel Orensanz Foundation (2003) for a lecture and dialogue with his mass of readers that filled to capacity the Foundation main hall, during a festival organized by The New Yorker. He was so happy to meet Angel Orensanz in such emblematic building. The Foundation’s MNN weekly TV program produced an episode about that lecture that is available in our files.

Derek Bently

On TV Arts from the OrensanzArt events recorded at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York City (2003-2011)A weekly TV program on Manhattan Neighborhood NetworkEvery Tuesday at 7:30 PM Time Warner Channel 67

Arts from the Orensanz” is a program of contemporary art and cultural events carried live on Norfolk Street. The program also features newly edited videos based on the foundation’s rich archival collection of work created by Angel Orensanz.

PROGRAM

April 26, 2011, 7:30 pmThe DeadDocumentary recording at the first stop (Angel Orensanz Foundation) of the Grateful Dead’s Taxi Tour in New York on April 9, 2009.

May 3, 2011, 7:30 pm“About Human Rights” by Al Orensanz Ph.D. The interviews Al Orensanz recorded in the fall of 2008 were dedicated to Human Rights discussions in reflection to the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights in Paris, 1948.He talked with French politician Jack Lang, who currently serves in the National Assembly, and with Dr. Noel Brown, President of Friends of the United Nations. Previously, he served as the Director of the United Nations Environment Program, North American Regional office.

May 10, 2011, 7:30 pmPublic Art Installations of Angel Orensanz (2011)This short film presents public art installations of Angel Orensanz and includes a panel discussion with Jonathan Goodman, Lilly Wei, Robert C. Morgan, Ruth Perez-Chavez and Ann Landi. The five art writers and curators discuss, analyze and theorize around the exhibit and book “Earth: Death-Birth” by Angel Orensanz that was part recently part of a major retrospective of Angel Orensanz at the Museum of the Russian Academy in St. Petersburg.

Producer: Al Orensanz / Assistant Producer: Maria Neri / Program Director: Klara Palotai

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