My partner, Cathy Nicastro, and I spent the week that includes Valentine’s Day in Manhattan. We love walking the streets of the city. Whether walking through Central Park, mid-town, Harlem, or the village, we took in the sights and sounds, the diverse colors and voices of a city of residents and tourists. My Fitbit says we walked 49 miles.
We found a city alive with ideas, ideas about caring for others, making the invisible visible, encouraging diversity and achieving equality. Although the mainstream media treat the left as a marginal presence in U.S., when we attended the theater and visited the city’s museums and libraries, we found a vibrant left-influenced humanistic culture that buoyed our spirits.
On our first night in the city, we heard the impassioned voices of demonstrators opposing the genocide in Gaza. Like so many, we are in pain over the continuation of the slaughter. It was late at night for us, so we didn’t join the demonstration, but we felt at one with the protestors. We planned on going to one or another pro-Gaza event at the People’s Forum, a left-wing educational center and gathering spot, but the weather led to a cancellation. As long as the tragedy keeps unfolding, we will find ways to join with others in seeking peace and justice for the Palestinians.
On Thursday evening, February 15, 2024, we attended an event at Columbia University entitled “Time – In Conflict and Poetry.” Sponsored by the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution, poet in residence Pádraig Ó Tuama led in a discussion of three poems with a focus on losses experienced by the people of Gaza and by European Jews. Listening and taking the time to resolve conflict are essential were Ó Tuama’s themes. The poet is continuing to hold sessions on that evening’s themes both in person and on zoom.
While in the city, we saw two plays, & Juliet and Merrily We Roll Along. We organized our trip to the city around tickets we’d purchased to & Juliet’s Saturday February 18 matinee after we heard an engaging interview with the play’s author, David West Read. & Juliet is a feminist reimagining of Shakespeare’s Juliet, who wakes up after Romeo’s death and decides not to kill herself. I purchased the tickets to Merrily’s Valentine’s Day matinee at the box office a few hours before the performance. The play moves backward in time to reveal how the main character’s misery stemmed from his pursuit of wealth and success at the expense of meaningful work and friendship. The performances in both plays were outstanding; each had wonderful music and raised important issues about how to live a purposeful life.
As outstanding as were the plays, free library and museum visits were the highlight of our trip. We visited the American Folklore Art Museum and the New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at 42nd Street, the Jefferson Market Library, and the Library for the Performing Arts. Although we’d visited the Schwarzman building before, we learned new things about the building’s architecture by taking a tour of the building.
A few weeks before, we’d enjoyed the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures from its collection of 56 million items. Among the highlights of that continuing exhibit of 250 pieces at the Schwarzman Building are an “Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis, in care of the Silent Majority,” by James Baldwin, a sculpture of a political prisoner by Elizabeth Catlett, portraits of Mary Wollstonecraft and John and Alice Coltrane, and Charles Dickens’s desk and chair. In the audio guide to accompany the exhibit, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith comments that Catlett’s work “came from a place of Black pride, and often sought to lift up the Black community—especially Black women . . . . [Her] art reflects the oppressions experienced by both Black Americans and indigenous Mexicans, and speaks to universal themes of freedom and justice.”
On the morning before the performance of & Juliet, we headed south to visit the stunning Jefferson Market Library on sixth avenue at10th street; it was our first time viewing the building. A grass roots movement of Greenwich Village resident in the early 1960s had saved the beautiful structure, which was originally a courthouse, from developers and from “government by dimwit which would lease out the city’s patrimony for a few dollars.” The library has a great children’s collection and is just a joy to visit. It is proof, moreover, that grass roots citizens’ activism can make for a more livable city.
At the American Folk Museum, we were impressed by the exhibit Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North, which continues through March 24, 2024. The exhibit includes 125 works that include paintings, needlework, and photographs, it focuses on how African-American figures are both included and excluded in images of the U.S. North in the early part of its history. The curators succeed in asking us to use a broader lens as we look at historic images from the North and to drop the common assumption that early African-American history took place only in the U.S. South.
The high point of our week was visiting the exhibit, “Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance 1900-1955,” at the Library for the Performing Arts. The exhibit, which closes on March 16, 2024, includes a remarkable group of photos, drawings, costumes, dance videos, and other documents that highlight the diversity and radical ideas that have stirred dancers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The library website explains: “Through an examination of war, exile, inequality, and injustice, the exhibition constructs a new narrative of 20th century modern dance performance with a fuller, more inclusive history focusing on the exiled and marginalized dancers that catalyzed modern dance.” Among the dancers brought to light are Katherine Dunham, Edith Segal, José Limón, Edna Guy, Michio Ito, Pearl Primus, Uday Shankar, Anna Sokolow, and Si-Lan Chen. Cathy, a former dancer, and I were equally fascinated by the beauty and diversity and radical working-class content of the exhibit.
Our biggest disappointment was our failure to get to the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for “The Ways of Langston Hughes: Griff Davis and Black Artists in the Making” exhibit. We were trying to fit the visit to the Schomburg in before our reservation to participate in the “Time – In Conflict and Poetry” event. We got off the train to walk a bit to the Schomburg when two things happened –a call from my daughters seeking some assistance plus the realization that I’d put us on the wrong train. Although we ran out of time on our February trip, the Hughes exhibit continues until July 8, 2024, so we’ll be able to view it on our next visit.
Last fall we’d explored the Schomburg exhibit “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration” and saw a remarkable documentary film, “The Five Demands” by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss about the 1969 takeover of City College of New York (CCN Y) by African American and Puerto Rican students. The mass incarceration exhibit included compelling works by both current and former prisoners as well as works by artists “whose practices expose aspects of the carceral state.”
I’d graduated CCNY in May 1968 and while there had worked in the DuBois Clubs with some of the white students supporting the 1969 strike. In March 1970, as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, I’d help create the Coalition to Support the Black Action Movement (BAM). A ten-day strike by BAM, supported by the coalition, won an agreement from the administration to implemented most of its demands. At a time when we face what seem like insurmountable barriers to saving Palestinian children from genocide, remembering episodes like that depicted in “The Five Demands” can help sustain us.
There is so much to see and do in New York City that our brief winter experience represented just one approach to enjoying what Manhattan has to offer. One must wonder, however, at a larger culture in our country that encourages fear and loathing of not only New York but of urban centers as a whole.
New Yorkers, like all of us in the U.S., need Medicare for All, more funding for education, and reasonably priced housing for everyone. They don’t need National Guard troops on subways nor random bag checks. We felt safe walking all over Manhattan and taking the subways. We want freedom of movement not policies that condition us into leaving in fear.
Love, not hatred, and reading books, not banning them, are the things we need. Visit New York and have the time of your life. For those who live there, go see the many wonderful free exhibits on view every day.