In order to make my piece site specific, while also a painting, I decided to make a mural. A mural is of course by definition fixed in place, painted on the wall, and so site specific. I also wanted it to be site specific in concept, and so the mural should be a product of its location, just as a chandelier made of old belt buckles found in the factory would be (another piece in the show). I decided that I would paint a mural of the L&L taxi service / detective agency from Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn (1999).  In Lethem’s novel, L&L was located at Smith and Bergen – the same block as the Invisible Dog, so this mural refers to the history (albeit fictional) of the city block that is its location. It would also be a tribute to Lethem, who grew up in the area and still lives around the corner.

As we (I was helped by  Don Liestman, Michael Hilsman, and Josh Jordan) worked on the mural, passersby would recognize the subject matter and tell us that they knew Lethem as he lived in the neighborhood. So, once the mural was done, I asked a friend who works in publishing if she might be able to get a message to Mr. Lethem. Within an hour or two Jonathan was in touch and was very kind to agree to meet me at the mural. Jonathan was super generous with his time (especially as he was only a few days from the launch of his latest book Chronic City) and spent some time with Josh Jordan and I checking out the mural. He even came to the opening a few days later. 

 

Motherless Brooklyn has an ongoing theme of (as Frank Minna would say) “Wheels within Wheels” – or different layers of truth so that things are always more complicated than they might seem at first glance. With this in mind, I asked Josh Jordan to paint Frank Minna’s portrait within my mural, so as to create a painting within a mural, wheels within wheels. Josh generously agreed and his portrait of the departed Frank Minna is my favorite part of the piece. It turned out that Josh is also a big fan of the book (and lives on the same block in Greenpoint where Frank Minna was killed and stuffed into a dumpster in the book). While the Motherless Brooklyn mural is my piece, I think of the portrait of Frank Minna as an autonomous work of art functioning within the mural – or at least a reference to Josh, and this text serves as its footnote.