“the lungs of the city???”

subtext:

The Western tradition of ‘nature’ is separate from the secular, quotidian life, and requires the ‘purity’ of nothing, and noone. Yet, this is not reality. Therefore, the egregious efforts to construct the imaginary of Western nature and ‘outdoors’ came to fruition with the genocide of indigenous people, the forced location and then relocation of Black and brown communities, and the ongoing degradation of non-human habitat. Seneca Village was cleared for the creation of the lungs of New York City-- Central Park. As Black people struggled through violent discrimination in lower Manhanttan, many began to seek refuge in enclaves, such as Seneca Village. On the corner of Central Park West, between 83rd and 84th, near the Arthur Rose Pinetum was an autonomous, prosperous and communal village of fully functioning institutions and cultured Black families. Through a successful campaign of untrue racial narratives of the condition and likeness of its inhabitants, Seneca Village was destroyed by city officials for the creation of Central Park. 

art description:

Centering the map of the Seneca Village neighborhood, and interspersing the depicted structures with black lungs serves two purposes: first, the recognition of life and the ‘individual’ that is abstracted and deduced to the representational lines and squares of streets and homes that bear deep meaning for the community; two, to establish the political justifications for discards, or diseased bodies that are byproducts of the industry, as it marks space for exploitation versus for preservation. The infected lungs are premonitions for the Black residents that were displaced from Seneca for the construction of the ‘lungs of the city,’ or Central Park. The migration of mostly indigenous, Black, brown, and poor bodies from desired space to undesirable space has almost always coincided with their poisoning and the slow death of benal pollution. The sketches of lungs are shown through the middle of the piece with the intention of using the map as an allegory of the body, and the locations of various black lungs serve to recognize the dispersing and totality of pollution throughout the entirety of the body, by way of spatial injustice. The directionality of these sketches seek to point toward the displacing of these communities. As such, the legacy of this displacement proves the histories of the conceptions of ‘pure,’ ‘wild’ ‘nature’ is impossible and can only exist at the bodily destruction of indigenous and black livelihood/spirit. The body has often been the subject of art, but the surrealist invocation of spirit and desire, also being stolen from the agency of these communities, is equally as vicious.