Visual artists Golnar Adili and Blane De St. Croix displaced from Brooklyn studios during 2012 hurricane preparing for exhibits of MacDowell Colony work.
Two MacDowell Fellows granted emergency residencies supported by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation will be exhibiting new work created during those residencies this year.
When Hurricane Sandy slammed into New York on October 29, 2012, it flooded six artist studios at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. It was the halfway point in a year-long stay when six feet of water filled the basement-level studios -- including those of Golnar Adili and Blane De St. Croix -- at the visual arts program, ruining supplies, tools and worst of all, wiping out work.
“The really sad part about it,” says Golnar Adili, one of the six visual artists occupying studios at the time, “was losing my father’s archives: letters, cassette tapes, books, research writing about everything from politics to poetry, videotapes of classical music concerts…. I had the treasure of all this material and it became an obsession.”
Adili, a MacDowell Colony Fellow in the winter of 2007, was working on a project using her father’s personal and politically related correspondences, and documentation of concerts he organized in the Iranian community as an anti-Shah activist living in the U.S. Adili’s father died 12 years ago and she was using his hand-written letters as inspiration for visual works that explored their relationship.
She was overseas when the hurricane made landfall and says if it weren’t for friends of hers in Brooklyn, all might have been lost. “Thank God the photographs and most of the written material was salvaged,” she explains, adding that most of the books had to be thrown out and that the real loss was in the form of video-taped interviews her father had conducted over the years with artists and musicians.
While Adili considered her options, a friend sent The MacDowell Colony a letter explaining the tragic situation “and MacDowell reached out to me without her even telling me about it.”
Historically, The MacDowell Colony has reached out to artists in crises, looking to support those affected by such events as the two world wars and more recently making contact with artists after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Sandy, the Colony contacted other artists as well, but Adili’s specific situation made her eligible for the Pollock-Krasner funding and her friend’s letter helped the Colony locate her.
As a result, Adili brought the saved photos and what was left of the archive to Putnam Graphics Studio where she spent almost the entire month of April splitting “the days between making and organizing and scanning, and accomplished a lot.”
Much of this work will be on exhibit beginning January 25 at the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles as part of a two-woman show called “Displacements” with Samira Yamin.
“The work kind of really flew out of me,” says Adili. “I had been looking at [the archive] for a while and the trauma of the flood pushed me as well. I just threw myself into it, and never knew I could make so much in a month.”
Blane De St. Croix is another MacDowell Fellow who benefitted from an emergency residency funded by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation when he was likewise forced out of Smack Mellon by Hurricane Sandy.
“No one fully realized what was going to happen,” De St. Croix says, “and the East River came right up to the building.” He was in the process of working on some sculptural pieces and lost drawings and numerous small collages that were studies for large-scale work. In addition, the barometric pressure in the area dropped so precipitously that large cans of acrylic and latex-based paint in the studio popped their tops.
“All this paint was floating around and everything was contaminated with sewage and brackish water,” he says, explaining that in addition to all sorts of work, the tools and supplies he collected over the course of five or six projects were ruined and useless. “In my case,” says De St. Croix, “I just filled a dumpster. You never realize what you have stashed in a studio.”
But with shows coming up and suddenly no access to studio space, De St. Croix was thinking about applying to other programs when a letter arrived from The MacDowell Colony offering time and space to continue his work in the wake of the storm.
“I couldn’t build what I needed to build sculpturally and MacDowell gave me a chance to set up a studio again for a compressed amount of time and allowed me to work through some of the things I wanted to do,” he says. “The stay also allowed for the expansion of these collages I was working on.”
De St. Croix, who had been in residence in 1982 and 2008, used the three weeks in Peterborough for some needed isolation to focus on research and developing some new ideas. “I didn’t really want to go backward,” he says, “I really wanted to move forward. So when I got to MacDowell I started working on these large ink drawings for larger work.”
He put those ideas into practice and followed it up with a research trip to the Arctic over the summer. As a result, a whole body of work initiated by his latest MacDowell Colony residence will be shown in May at Fredericks & Freiser in New York.
