By Tara Kyle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Miguel Luciano had a choice: roll his bright orange shaved ice cart onto the busy streets of Greenwich Village and face a barrage of questions about his permit and demands for inspection, or head to Brooklyn where he could wheel his cart around with less oversight but perhaps less customers.
It was a question that hounds many street vendors, but there was one major difference — Luciano is an artist, not a vendor, and his ice cart was one of eight pieces of art now on exhibit as part of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts' Art and Law Residency Exhibition at the Maccarone gallery.
The New York-based nonprofit group gives legal advice and education to artists and educators about their rights and how they can change public policy that affects them. The new art exhibit is the result of a six-month residency program in which artists collaborate with writers and legal scholars to examine the intersection of art and law.
The common thread in all the works explores “how art-making can perhaps intervene in the application of law itself,” said Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, the program's associate director.
The artists also look to legal battles as an inspiration for their art, like Luciano's painting, "Learning to Love Latinos," which recreates a controversial mural painted at a school in Arizona. The original artists were pressured to repaint the skin of Hispanic children in the mural a lighter shade after the piece became embroiled in the state's immigration debate.
Luciano's piece will be shown on tour throughout the East Coast.
Another residency artist, Berliner Bettina Johae, created a map of Manhattan with areas affected by eminent domain shaded red. Johae also made a series of postcards that highlight landmarks acquired in part through eminent domain, including Central Park, the New York Times building and Columbia University.
Sarmiento said he hoped the exhibit would help challenge the notion that art and law were separate.
“There’s for the most part belief that law is a thing that other people do,” Sarmiento said.
The exhibition, he said, "allows everyone to say, 'Hey, I can have an impact.'"
The exhibition runs through Friday at the Maccarone Gallery, 630 Greenwich Street. The program will also host a symposium on art and law Weds., Aug. 25, at 6 p.m., at Shearman & Sterling LLP, 599 Lexington Ave.
