The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project
A public art installation by
Whitfield CoLabs
To be installed on Dean Street
between Third and Fourth Avenues from April 15 to May 15, 2014
The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project
What creates a queer
neighborhood? A gathering of places
queer people call home. In the late 1960’s through the 1980’s, for a number of gay
men, the block between Third and Fourth Avenues on Dean Street in Brooklyn was
their neighborhood and distinguished, for a while, by an outward display of
domesticity and pride of place. For a while, because these neighbors, had a
gardener who filled their front yards with hardy large violas, and create a
place known to the inhabitants in and around the area as Pansy Patch.
In the spring of 2014,
Whitfield CoLabs will commemorate the transformation of that block with a public
art installation recalling the visual pleasure of these gardens while exploring
what it means to make a home as a LGBTQ person. Highlighting stories gathered
in Queer Home Sweet Home events that
will inform a Queer Home Manifesto that will be written during A Queer Home Summit in November, The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project will
help us envision the happy and healthy queer home of the future.
The installation will consist
of eight 4’w x 2’d x 3’h wooden planters filled with pansies. In a cavity beneath the container that hold
the plants will be installed PIR Motion Sensors,
equipped with mp3 players utilizing an SD card for the pre-recorded
audio. The sensors, brought to the surface of the planter, will detect
light change: once a threshold is reached with a change in the light
surrounding the planter, the mp3 track will play a narrative. Once the
user leaves the sensed area, the audio will cease. Additionally, once
sunset occurs, an LED lighting inside the planter will complement the colors of
the planted flowers. Emanating from the speakers will be edited stories of
queer home life that have been recorded during Queer Home Sweet Home sessions in the fall of 2013. The exterior of the planter will be
silkscreened with text from the manifesto produced during the Queer Home Summit.
Recognition of
the individuals who contributed to this project (with their permission) will be
inscribed into the lower section of the planters. At the end of the project, the planters will
be donated to the community.
Preliminary Phase: Queer Home Sweet Home
Queer Home Sweet Home is a series of workshops designed to gather stories
about the queer experience of the notion of home. How do we define home? What defined that as
we grew up? What defines that for us
now? What is the home we imagine? How do we go about realizing that
concept? These convenings have been specifically
seek to record the experience of diverse groups of queer people of varying ages
and backgrounds. Their stories will
edited for inclusion in motion activated loops that will be intrinsic to The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project. These stories will also provide the
background for A Queer Home Summit at
which a manifesto will be produced geared to codifying what queer people should
be able to experience and achieve in their home lives.
Queer Home Sweet Home story gathering sessions will take place on:
Saturday, Oct 5 from 2:30 to
4:00 at Great Small Works, 20 Jay
Street
in association with the On the (Queer) Waterfront:
Brooklyn Histories sponsored by the
Pop-Up Museum of Queer History
Tuesday, Oct 15 from 6:30 to
8:30 at Brooklyn Community Pride Center,
4 Metro Tech Center
Tuesday, Oct 29 from 6:30 to
8:30 at Brooklyn Community Pride Center,
4 Metro Tech Center
Saturday, Nov 2 from 2:30 to
4:30 at Great Small Works, 20 Jay Street
as well
Queer Home Summit will be held on:
Saturday, Nov 16 from 2:00
to 4:30 at Brooklyn Woods, 125 8th Street
The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project: Background
By late 1960’s, the block
between Third and Fourth Avenue on Dean Street in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill, had
become the home of a community of gay men, many of whom lived in rooming houses
and communes, were young, working class, and active in NYC’s layered gay
culture. To define the community and
beautify the rundown gathering of wooden townhouses, one of the building owners
hired a young gay man to serve as the neighborhood gardener, tending to the
small yards in front of their homes. The
gardener embraced the task and planted pansies throughout the string of
gardens. Eventually the area became know
as Pansy Patch to the inhabitants, the surrounding community and the local
bureaucracy including the police. Among
the neighborhood’s most famous occupants was Ernest Aron, later known as Liz
Debbie Eden, the transsexual partner of John Wojtowicz, the gay man whose story
was the basis of the film, “Dog Day Afternoon.”
In addition to these
residents, that block was also home to Sarah J. Hale High School which would
eventually be designated a “failing” school by the Board of Education. In the last decade the school has become the
Brooklyn High School of the Arts, a successful magnate school
(www.brooklynartshs.org).
Since that period the block
has been home to generations of queer people who took part in successive waves
of gentrification transforming the area from a low income largely black and
Latino neighborhood to an affluent, largely white enclave of nuclear
families. This classic gentrification
story was influenced by AIDS and the fact that it hastened the turnover of
ownership of these properties, as well as the major Central Brooklyn real
estate project in the old Atlantic Terminal railroad yards (now The Barclay
Center,) two blocks away.
Whitfield CoLabs, under the
direction of Tony Whitfield will seek to unearth the history of that area
during a Pre-AIDS era when an early wave of gentrification took place and the
neighborhood, characterized by group or communal living, was known as Pansy
Patch.
The Project’s Genesis
With the redevelopment of Atlantic Terminal in its
early phases numerous articles appeared on the area. One in particular caught the attention of
Tony Whitfield, then a resident of the block of Deans Street between Fourth and
Fifth Avenue (one block closer to the contested real estate. That article was written by Josh Goldfein in
the Village Voice under the title, “Beyond Pansy Patch.” (www.villagevoice.com/2004-01-13/news/beyond-the-pansy-patch/) It
revealed a history of the neighborhood that he had not known despite the fact
that he was queer and recognized the presence and relative comfort of the
neighborhood for queer people. For Whitfield, who was ultimately pushed out of
the neighborhood by the wave of gentrification that ensued, the story of Pansy
Patch remained resonant and spurred on the development The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project.
To date support for the Pansy Patch Queer Home
Project has been provided by The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History with funds from
the Brooklyn Arts Council and the DUMBO Business Improvement District, as well
as In-kind contributions from The New School.
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