Thursday 11/13/08- I came back to Syracuse late last night. It is good to be home. I love visiting people but there’s something about having all of your quirks accounted for… like having the right size coffee mug at hand or always having a pillow with the right level of fluffiness to use. Anyway, it didn’t take me long to jump back into the gallery scene. I went to two openings tonight… one at the Warehouse Gallery and one at Light Work. It’s the one at Light Work I really want to talk about. Specifically, I’ve been looking forward to seeing what Nancy Keefe Rhodes is up to and am really glad I was in town for the opening…
First, allow me to introduce Light Work, a nonprofit organization focused on photography. It’s located on the Syracuse University campus but is known and recognized internationally. They have an artist-in-residency program as well as a publication, Contact Sheet, and a state of the art community darkroom facility. I used to work there so I could say a lot more…
Each year Light Work gives out three grants to support local photographers and tonight was the reception for their exhibition. This year’s winners are Kathy Morris, Paul Pearce and Nancy Keefe Rhodes. Read the press release here: http://www.lightwork.org/news/pr/2008_lwgrant_recipients.html
15th Ward, Photo by Marjory Wilkins, Exhibition by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
That last name is a bit unusual. Nancy Keefe Rhodes is more of an arts journalist than a photographer. She received the grant to prepare an exhibition of photographs by Marjory Wilkins, a Syracusan who has been documenting the city through photography for a good 60 years. The exciting part of this project has to do with an area of the city that no longer exists called the 15th Ward. Marjory Wilkins’s photographs form a portrait of a once vibrant neighborhood inhabited by African American and Jewish populations. It was torn down to make room for I-81 to be built through the “heart” of Syracuse. Oddly enough, it seems that the 15th Ward was the “heart” and now, decades later, I-81 is still seen as a concrete scar separating the university on the hill from the city down below. It is a physical representation of the social problems Syracuse has, which is why the Chancellor of SU, Nancy Cantor, has started a project called the Connective Corridor to reunite the university with the city, but that’s another story…
I learned about the 15th Ward in 2002 while reading 100 years of the Daily Orange. When I first came to Syracuse I was hired to be a co-editor of the 100 year anniversary book of SU’s newspaper, the Daily Orange. Between the other editor and myself, we read 100 years of Syracuse University’s history.
During my reading, I learned nine professors and 51 students from Syracuse University along with 18 others were arrested from September 13-20, 1963, for protesting the demolition of the 15th Ward. They had participated in “sit-ins” at urban renewal sites on State Street, Harrison Street and Townsend Street organized by CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and the NAACP to stop demolition work. The charge was “willful intrusion on real property” with a penalty of $500 (in 1963 dollars) or a year in jail. At first, SU tried to place them on disciplinary probation, but the University soon came to its senses. The protests from the university community showed an unprecedented level of university interest in city affairs.
Although many of the urban renewal policies of the 1960s proved with time to have been at the least, unsuccessful, the issue the protesters had with the demolition of the 15th Ward was not with these policies but with the relocation of the residents. The idea was to relocate residents throughout the city, forcing neighborhoods to become more diverse and integrated, but it didn’t really work out like that. According to a Sept. 17, 1963 article in the Daily Orange, “CORE alleges that Negroes forced to move because of urban renewal are being relocated in other Negro areas and in low-rent districts which are turning into Negro ‘ghettoes.’”
In a moving account titled “Black and White Buttons” by Sandy Myers published on September 19, 1963 in the Daily Orange, Myers explains the rational behind the protests. “‘Why are those people deliberately breaking the law and getting themselves tossed in jail?’ / We can’t answer for those whom police have arrested, even those who are personal friends. Perhaps one of them once had a friend who was denied something- a job, a home, service at a lunch counter- because of the color of his skin. Perhaps another once looked down at the Negroes — and then stopped to think why he did it. / Nearly all of the students and faculty members involved, however (and we cannot speak for the others, since we do not know them well enough) act from a deep sense of personal conviction. It takes nerve to get tossed into jail for a night. It takes sheer, old-fashioned guts to place in jeopardy a college career or a future job in order to fight for something in which you believe.”
Later in Sandy Myers’s account she states the issue clearly. “This is America, home of the free and land of the brave. This is America, where everyone is given equal rights. This is America, where 18 out of 19 landlords in Syracuse reject a family who fill all the necessary requirements except one- the color of their skin.”
In the catalogue essay for the Light Work exhibition, the 15th Ward is described as “a vibrant, often beautiful, multi-ethnic enclave with African American, Jewish, Native American, Polish, Italian and Greek residents…” It is ironic that during a period of desegregation (the 15th Ward schools were desegregated one year earlier in 1962) policies were inflicted that created “Negro ‘ghettoes’” that still exist in Syracuse today.
It is my opinion that the decision to tear down the 15th Ward and build I-81 is one of the worst Syracuse has ever made… right up there with filling up the stinky Erie Canal with concrete instead of cleaning it. I’m not alone. There’s a certain affection for the 15th Ward that continues today. Former residents still meet occasionally to remember their old neighborhood. More and more recently there have been projects like that of Nancy Keefe Rhodes popping up to archive and represent this important piece of history.
Light Work reception for 2008 local Grant Recipients
Marjory Wilkin's brother standing next to a picture of himself as a boy on a bicycle
Marjory Wilkins and Nancy Keefe Rhodes
When I heard that Nancy Keefe Rhodes had received a Light Work grant to tackle the subject of the 15th Ward through Marjory Wilkin’s photographs, I was instantly sold. Nancy is one of the most thorough and sharp arts journalists working in Syracuse at the moment. She is a former host of Women’s Voices Radio on WAER and currently writes film reviews regularly for the City Eagle. (I was a guest on her radio program a few years back… In case you’re interested, the audio is still online here:http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=162715962)
The photographer, Marjory Wilkins, is a bit of a local legend. I had the pleasure of meeting her at the opening. Her photographs and the exhibition in general is larger than the subject of the 15th Ward. The photographs evoke the presence of the African American photographer documenting a personal and social side of life not depicted in the media or counter-culture of the time. Nancy Keefe Rhodes explains in the catalogue, “As documentary photographs they record history, whether recent or remote, that is “minority” history – that is, history often, outside of its own community, either ignored or contested by stereotypes.”
It is clear from reading the catalogue and from meeting and hearing Marjory Wilkins’s family and contemporaries, that Mrs. Wilkins has been an inspirational figure in the community for over six decades, inspiring a host of creative types around her by way of her view of the world through a lens. Now, years later, her photography has become an invaluable resource to remember a place now destroyed and community with a charm unknown to those outside of it. I thank both Marjory Wilkins for being a role model and documenting the world she loved and Nancy Keefe Rhodes for taking important steps to restore, archive and represent this piece of history.
Thank you both and thank you to Light Work for funding this project.
See Darryl Hughto’s photographs from the opening reception here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhughto/sets/72157609375310642/
