Tulips and Two By Fours

PASQUALINA AZZARELLO, an artist from the Dumbo section of Brooklyn,
likes to distribute her work through unorthodox channels; she once
painted 500 rocks she had gathered from the waterfront, then took
nighttime walks around the neighborhood to leave them where people
would discover them in the morning.

One night in March, she set out for the corner of Front and Jay
Streets, where a 32-story residential tower is going up, on a similar
mission. She took paintings of flowers that she had made on pieces of
wood, propped the pictures up against the construction fence and
slipped away, hoping they would be carried off to happy homes.

In the world of New York construction, where the shop talk often is of
tons of steel, thousands of square feet and billions of dollars, art
on scraps of wood is small potatoes. But sometimes slight tales are
worth telling, especially when, as in Ms. Azzarello's case, they
involve surprises, and unusual alliances.

The people who found Ms. Azzarello's paintings early the next morning
happened to be the site construction workers, and they did not snatch
the artwork away as she had expected. Instead, they screwed the
pictures to the site's blue plywood fence, just down from the building
permits. It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship, on a busy
corner of a neighborhood where long-established artists complain of
rising rents and the costs of development.

Two nights later, Ms. Azzarello, who stands a little over five feet
tall, with a bob of short black hair, was sitting in Superfine, a
popular restaurant and bar near the construction site, when a friend
walked in with something to show her. Outside by the paintings,
someone had set out a glass jar, and in it were 12 dollar bills and
some change.

The money had been left by the workers. "Maybe she could buy some
paint, some brushes," Jimmy Vita, the site's foreman, remembers
thinking.

At the time, Ms. Azzarello didn't know where the cash had come from,
but she took the gesture as a good omen. "When I saw money sitting in
that jar in New York City in the middle of the night," she said,
"somehow a certain vitality became apparent to me."

As it happened, Ms. Azzarello, who is 31, had a bigger notion for the
construction fence, which encloses a former parking lot where she had
once displayed and sold her paintings. "I wanted to paint little
flowers around the perimeter," she said. "I love the grass growing
through the sidewalk. To me, it's this little reminder of how life
keeps living."

Emboldened by the impromptu tip jar, she approached Mr. Vita, who has
silver hair and the tan, thick forearms of someone who works outside.
"I introduced myself as the person who made the flowers," Ms.
Azzarello said, "and Jimmy Vita said" — here she adopted a tough-guy
voice — " 'Pasqualina, thank you so much. We love the flowers.' "

She told him about her idea for the fence, she said, "coming from the
assumption that there's no way they're going to let me do that."

"Number one, they're busy people. And who needs something else to worry about?"

Mr. Vita listened, clicked on the walkie-talkie he keeps clipped to
the pocket of his jeans, spent a minute talking to Kenny Temple, the
site's Teamsters foreman, clicked off, and told Ms. Azzarello to stay
safe and to paint to her heart's content.

"I assured her that nobody from the job would bother her," he said,
"and if they did, then let me know, and we'd do what we had to do."

She set to work along Front Street, painting a row of white tulips 18
inches high along the fence's bottom edge.

"I felt like I was 5 years old," Ms. Azzarello said recently, sitting
in Superfine in paint-splattered jeans with a dab of primer on one of
her fingers. "I was sitting in the dirt painting flowers around the
construction site, and to me that's what it's all about, because I've
always been interested in the construction site as a location where
changes take place, and whether or not I like the changes, I think
it's important to look at them and to regard them, to work with them."

Ms. Azzarello, who has seen artist friends forced by high rents to
leave the neighborhood, said the flowers were a direct extension of
her thoughts on development. But aside from a few studiously general
remarks —
"Personally, I love old buildings" and "I also love a big sky next to
a river" — she is keeping those thoughts to herself.

"I come from an understanding that regardless of my feelings about it,
nothing will stop that 32-story building from being built, and to a
certain extent I accept that happening," she said. "I use it as
something to work with, and if I can help create a conversation about
the human aspects of urban development, then I'm doing my job."

The tulips did lead to at least one conversation, with Alex Hurwitz, a
project manager for the Hudson Companies, the site's developer, who
spotted them and asked Mr. Vita whether Ms. Azzarello might want to
paint the entire fence, top to bottom. "I said, 'Well, I'm sure she
would, for a price,' " he said.

What followed was a two-hour talk between developer and artist in a
coffee shop on Front Street. It ended with Mr. Hurwitz commissioning
Ms. Azzarello to paint the entire fence. "Not to sound corny, but it's
very Dumbo," Mr. Hurwitz said. "It's a very artist-friendly
neighborhood, and we don't want to do anything to interfere with
that."

Ms. Azzarello would not say what she is being paid — she said she did
not want to set a "going rate" for her services — but clearly the deal
has meant a much larger canvas for her. She savors her hours of
painting and talking with the curious people who stop, drawn by the
many flowers, the occasional bird or sun, or the small messages —
"Thank You" or "What does Humility Require?" She will be painting the
fence through the summer, she said, and then she hopes to exhibit and
sell the panels from the wall.

As promised, the workers have not bothered her. To the contrary, they
gave her a hard hat, which they encouraged her to wear when there is
falling debris. Sometimes they even give iced tea to her, and tell her
about their own hidden artistic sides: one man has painted hundreds of
duck decoys; another has a daughter pursuing a Master's of Fine Arts
at Brooklyn College.

One day, said Ms. Azzarello, a brawny worker approached her with a
question: "Can you paint a flower on my hat?"

"I said, absolutely," she said. "Big, broad-shouldered, big muscles,
wants a flower on his hat."

Mr. Temple, sitting in the condo's sales office during a break, said
the workers noticed Ms. Azzarello's long hours and the intricacy of
her work.

"She's one of us," Mr. Vita said, smiling.

"She's not in the union," Mr. Temple, tall and goateed, added, with a
barely perceptible smile of his own.

Mr. Vita laughed.

"She's an apprentice," he said.

 

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