By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
LOWER EAST SIDE — What's in a name?
For artist Carl Skelton, the story of the Lower East Side's rich immigrant history lies in the names he's been projecting on the Manhattan Bridge colonnade as part a six-week public art project.
His exhibition, Ultratope 1: Real City, uses the first names, dates of birth and places of origin of Lower East Side immigrants to light up the bridge's grand Chinatown entrance.
"That piece in a way was a question as much as it was statement," said Skelton, 49, director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, noting he had to research the overlapping immigrant communities of Chinatown, Little Italy and the broader Lower East Side before selecting whose names to project on the bridge.
"If you can't make public art without fundamental regard and consideration for the neighborhood, then in what meaningful sense is this public art at all?"
The names projected nightly on the colonnade include everyone from Pina Alleva (born 1866 in Benevento, Italy), who opened the still-standing Alleva Dairy on Grand Street; to Asser Levy, one of the first Jewish settlers in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in the 1600s; to current local City Councilwoman Margaret Chin (born 1954 in Hong Kong).
The names rotate every few minutes, offering just enough information for passersby to guess their significance.
"It becomes something discoverable, which is in a way a perfect synopsis of my experience researching the piece," said Skelton, adding he noticed a group of youngsters debating the project the night it debuted. "I wish I could do that with everything."
Skelton is accepting names for inclusion in the piece — as long as they meet his criteria of being foreign born and emigrating on the Lower East Side — and the roster has already grown to 80 people.
"It's hyper-temporary in the sense that the names can come and go, as people do, so to speak," he said. "Putting up one thing didn't displace all the others, which is one of the vices of fixed objects."
After gathering the names through a combination of speaking to locals, taking note of street signs and monuments dedicated to influential Lower East Siders, and simple online research, Skelton hopes to grow the project and possibly even extend it beyond its planned March 31 closing date.
"It would be really cool if we just ran this thing indefinitely," he said. "If there are names to put up there, put 'em up there."
The Museum at Eldridge Street is hosting a discussion and reception with Skelton on Thurs., March 3, at 6:30 p.m., 12 Eldridge St.
