Please click on photos to enlarge.
"As our work came clearer on this wall throughout the day, we were visited by a boy on his way home from school. Alex looked at the wheat-paste photo-mural of the Lower 9th Ward post-Katrina stoop - I asked him if he might know where the photo had been taken. His first guess, “New Orleans.”
Alex got silent for a little while. He asked Max a few questions about his skateboard and then out of the blue, “On September 11th, we could feel the shaking at my school.” Then he told us his story of that day.
More boys from the neighborhood joined us and Max took them under his willing wing for a bit of legal spray-paintery. I took a moment to think about Alex and his thinking.
This young boy had "stepped into" the New Orleans/Brooklyn Portal and shared his story in the safety of strangers on a late November afternoon. For a moment the Portal had worked and the larger purpose of activating the art-making process as a way to deal with pain and connect people had been achieved. For a moment, Alex had sat down on his neighbor’s steps." Naftali Beane Rutter
Please look for the documentary “Your Neighbor’s Steps” chronicling ArtInAction’s sponsorship of “The New Oreans/Brooklyn Portal Project” coming soon to Current TV.
4 comments:
That is the most amazing mural I have ever seen- Maxime's got talent!
I agree - and I hope you saw the mural he did here in New Orleans, chronicled further down on this weblog - it was equally stunning. Remember too he had a collaborator: Naftali Rutter. The two of them worked great together and it was a great pleasure to host them in New Orleans.
this mural is beautiful and a lovely idea, very simple and very subtle! I agree that Max must be very tallented!
Todo aquello que sea favorable para el espíritu humano creador merece un aplauso como es este caso.
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