(Updated Friday morning with Yale gallery response.) We’d love the money. But higher artistic principles are at stake.
That, in effect, is Artspace’s response to an offer by the Yale University Art Gallery to donate a controversial new public-art piece by celebrated street artist Believe in Believe (BiP) for an annual fund-raising auction.
“We will honor your request and make it known to the Yale University Art Gallery that we cannot accept their proposal,” Artspace Director Helen Kauder wrote to BiP Thursday.
“We are also moved and grateful to you for your very generous offer to make another work that could be included in our fundraiser, and we hope that its realization and its existence will continue the dialogue generated around the questions that your efforts raise — can art can exist independent of markets and commodification? Can the artists in a community — those that give birth to the community and bring life to the streets — be the ones to define and have a say in what public community — or what public art might look like in the first place?”
BiP responded late Thursday that he “support[s] the gallery and artspace for being willing to advance public art.”
And Yale gallery chief Jock Reynolds weighed in Friday, saying the next move is BiP’s.
The piece that sparked all this attention and debate is a faux historical bronze plaque that BiP affixed to a brick front wall of the Yale gallery on April 1 — setting off one of New Haven’s great cultural debates in the process.
The gallery removed the plaque right away. Then, as Independent readers voted in favor of preserving the piece, the gallery decided to save it from the trash. It mounted a one-day exhibit by the front door. And it announced that, unless BiP reclaims the sculpture, the gallery would donate it to Artspace, the downtown gallery and arts-promotion organization, for an annual auction. BiP stated that he doesn’t want the piece back. He wants it exhibited at Yale.
BiP praised the gallery’s actions and intentions while philosophically disagreeing with the decision. Art shouldn’t be auctioned, he declared. He suggested the piece be exhibited at Yale or destroyed. (He also Tweeted, on April 4: “as much as this is my life’s work, I feel sad arguing about art when a few blocks over from the plaque, 16 year old kids are being shot.”)
That sparked much philosophical debate at Artspace, of course. Director Helen Kauder sent BiP a letter Thursday informing him that following all that debate, the organization concluded it should heed his wishes and not accept the piece for auction.
BiP responded Friday on Twitter by announcing he will make good on a promise to deliver a replica of the piece for the Artspace auction. “so proud of @artspacenh and @helenk today for showing backbone. keeping promise, giving their auction the only backup plaque i made,” he wrote.
That said, she made the case for why the auction helps support local art. She invited him to follow through on an offer to donate another piece. She also invited him to donate materials associated with the controversy over the plaque and/or to participate in an upcoming show on “Vagaries of the Commons.” The show, opening in late July, wrestles with just the kind of concerns that BiP has put in the public forefront these days, Kauder wrote: “the porous boundaries of what is deemed public and private space, and who criticize the policing and rapid privatization of the commons. The show looks specifically to New Haven to see how we can use the marginalized spaces within the public-private binary to claim common ground for public use and will examine the legal systems that deem what type of art is suitable for funding as public art.”
Click here to read Kauder’s full letter.
Click here and here to read some of the reader debate generated by BiP’s piece and Yale’s reaction. Click here and here to read previous stories on the episode.
Reached Thursday through an intermediary, BiP insisted he would not take his plaque back from Yale.
“you know i’d never ever ever take that plaque back,” he wrote in text-messages relayed to the Independent, “or accept anyone taking it back on my behalf.”
“i can’t say “no one can take this from the public domain” and “then turn around, take it back for myself and sell it, that’s bullshit.”
“let the plaque get destroyed by the gallery so we can finally be over all this,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Yale gallery chief Jock Reynolds has been communicating with BiP over next steps, much as Reynolds took a personal interest in another underrecognized New Haven artist, Winfred Rembert, back in 2000, offering him his first major exhibition on the way to eventual national acclaim.
Reynolds reported Friday:” I will now await BiP’s decision as to whether he wishes to retrieve his plaque from YUAG himself, send a personal representative to do so, or have YUAG transfer the plaque to Artspace so that it can be further exhibited there this summer as he has been invited to do by its director and curators. YUAG will be happy to honor whichever course of action the artist now chooses.”
I'm glad that Artspace is doing the right thing and honoring BiP's intentions of preserving public art. It is now YUAG's turn to follow suit--they should keep the plaque for the gallery, keep it so that people can literally see their right to public art preserved.