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East Village Arts Group Raises $3K to Beautify Construction Sites

By Julie Shapiro | January 5, 2012 8:08am

EAST VILLAGE — Tamara Greenfield is looking for a few ugly construction sites.

Greenfield, executive director of the East Village-based nonprofit Fourth Arts Block, has raised more than $3,300 on the website Kickstarter to expand its ArtUp program to spruce up unsightly local scaffolding and dumpsters with art.

"We're a neighborhood that's in a pretty rapid transformation," said Greenfield, "There's no reason for there to be a big ugly wall of construction for months and months — there should be opportunities to do art projects."

Since ArtUp started in 2008, its artists have decorated scaffolding at 70 E. Fourth St., construction dumpsters nearby and the empty sidewalk on Extra Place with brightly-colored murals.

Greenfield is now expanding the program, and hopes residents will submit ideas for places that need a bit of art. They typically use paint to decorate the wooden sides of construction scaffolding, concrete sidewalks, and the sides of dumpsters.

"If people have sites to suggest, especially if they know who owns [them], we're happy to do some of the negotiating process," Greenfield said.

Before turning a site over to an artist, Greenfield has to get permission from the owner and the contractor who is doing the construction.

ArtUp's most visible project to date is the sidewalk mural on Extra Place, a formerly derelict alley near East First Street and the Bowery that was repaved and sanitized as part of the Avalon Bay residential development.

Many locals were sad to see the alley's transformation from a CBGB hangout to a sterile pedestrian plaza, but ArtUp injected some of the neighborhood's history back into the space with 500 square feet of sidewalk paintings, Greenfield said.

The vibrant, eye-catching work by Abe Lincoln Jr., Jon Burgerman and Ellis Gallagher, aka Ellis G, is about more than just decoration — it also gives a taste of local flavor to an otherwise nondescript space, Greenfield said.

"We wanted to get it to be more active and engaging," Greenfield said.

ArtUp also gives East Village artists a way to display their work publicly, addressing themes that might otherwise get lost in the neighborhood's rapid development, Greenfield said. Other ArtUp murals have included references to feminist history and bilingual poetry written by local children.

To donate to ArtUp or suggest ideas for future public art projects, visit Fourth Arts Block's website.