CROWN HEIGHTS — When Lane Sell moved to Crown Heights in 2011, he didn't know much about the neighborhood's history, but he became curious about it while discussing his new home with friends.
"They said, 'Isn’t that where there was a big riot?" said Sell, the owner and founder of Shoestring Press, a Classon Avenue print shop he opened in February, referring to the 1991 Crown Heights riots that shook the city. "So, I started trying to figure out what that meant.”
Sell said he only “very vaguely” remembers hearing about the riots, which were sparked when part of a motorcade carrying Lubavitcher leader Rabbi Menachem Schneerson struck two 7-year-old black children, killing one of them, on Aug. 19, 1991.
After researching the events, Sell quickly became intrigued by the complicated racial and political legacy of the incident, especially given his own racial and ethnic makeup, as a Jewish native of the Virgin Islands.
“It’s a Jewish West Indian neighborhood and I’m a Jewish West Indian,” said Sell, who's been working on a piece of artwork for the past year that grapples with the legacy of the riots.
“I got interested in figuring out some way to make a piece of art that was...not so much about the riot, as about the complexity of trying to understand something like that,” said Sell, who explained his work is not necessarily focused on the historical timeline, or even the racial issues or political fallout of the incident, but on the process of trying to make sense of it at all.
The result is "75-Foot Riot," two banners covered in overlapping texts and photographs from and about the riots, silkscreened by hand in blue and white paint.
LoadingArtists Lane Sale and Meredith Degyansky create 75-foot banners about the Crown Heights riots at Shoestring Press on Classon and Bergen.
On Wednesday, Sell and a fellow artist, Meredith Degyansky, were busy imprinting one of the banners with words from “Fires in the Mirror,” Anna Deavere Smith’s play about the riots, which Sell read as part of his research about the violence. Though snippets of words and phrases like “the Rebbe’s Cadillac,” “ambulance” and “people showed their anger” can be read on the fabric, most of it is a blur.
And once the words are painted on thickly enough, he said, he will overlay images of photographs, like one he has of the lobby of Gavin Cato’s building, the boy killed in the car accident that sparked the riots.
“One thing doesn’t make sense until it’s put up against its opposite,” he said of the design.
Sell said he is able to complete the work because of a “modest” grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, but he has yet to find a home for the piece, which he hopes to set up in a labyrinth-like exhibit of two concentric circles that visitors can walk through. He said the piece would fit in a large room or warehouse space of about 30-by-30 feet.
Once he finds a location for it, he hopes the banners are seen by a “neighborhood audience," he said, “especially people who have not been here for a long time.”
“If people saw it and were a little more cognizant of the fact that there is a lot of history in this neighborhood...I would say that would be a real positive,” he said.
Shoestring Press is located at 663 Classon Ave. between Bergen and Dean streets.
