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Lucille, who worked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, describing personal reac- tions to events such as V-J Day. As a writer of historical fiction, Gaffney’s research into such relatively obscure publications and archival documents provide the means for contriving a story infused as much by universal hu- man emotions as by uncomfortable, specific truths about a recent past.
Photographer STANLEY GREENBERG is devoted to revealing the hidden aspects of New York’s infrastructures; among his best known bodies of work is a major study of the city’s subterranean water system. Greenberg has noted that his images are “intended to make people look at either places that were hidden or things that were right in front of their faces.” For this exhibition, he takes a close look at a portion of the Culver Viaduct (informally known as the Gowanus Viaduct), one of the largest struc- tures of its kind and an unlikely subject for a visual artist. Greenberg’s black-and-white photographs starkly capture an abstract web of concrete and steel, a monumental structure worn by time but now under repair. Greenberg focused on this subject precisely because of its status as an ignored form in the urban landscape. And yet it is part of our connec- tive tissue; countless New Yorkers have traveled over it for nearly seven decades. It is in such common structures, Greenberg suggests, that the history of all of us resides.
Elizabeth Ferrer
Director of Contemporary Art BRIC Arts|Media|Bklyn
Many thanks to Deborah Schwartz, President, and the staff of the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Gilbert C. Ferrer, for their generous assistance with this essay.
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