A gallery celebrates its non-neighborhood with exhibitions on the nature of wasted space.

By Tess Taylor
The Metropolis Observed
October 2001

South Bronx residents and visitors gather at the Vacancy Gallery (below), where artists interpret the local landscape (above).
The South Bronx is one of the places Jane Jacobs mourned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When Robert Moses brokered the Major Deegan and Bruckner expressways, the neighborhood was axed to become a thruway to more desirable destinations--and to facilitate what has since become a great American pastime: the commute. On ramps above the area, tides of cars head elsewhere. The land in their shadows seems functionally abandoned.

But a group of artists is arguing that in-between space might be fertile as well. In a meditation on left-behind landscapes, David Graham and Rob Nelson have opened an art gallery at an on-ramp to the Bruckner Expressway. The Vacancy Gallery sits next to a McDonald's window and a drive-through flower stand, and from now until the end of October it will be home to a series of explorations into the nature of commuting. Curator Grady Gerbracht calls the exhibition Back and Forth.

"For the two blocks where commuters [get off the expressway to] avoid tolls on the Triborough Bridge, the street looks clean and even has wrought-iron tree guards," Nelson says. "Beyond that, it looks empty. But we get interesting visitors: there's a guy who builds miniature motorbikes; a few folks from the art world. Sometimes commuters who were looking for roses from the flower stand wander in. There are also a lot of people who live here."

Offsite:
Hours, directions, current events, and an exhibition archive for the Vacancy Gallery can be found on the gallery's Web site, www.vacancygallery.org.
Wherever the visitors come from, they will see a variety of comments on the nature of getting here. Susan Jahoda addressed and sent letters to buildings that had been demolished to make space for the freeway. As if condemned to wander forever, her envelopes are crossed and recrossed with the mark "return to sender." In a wry tribute to the road map, artist Danica Phelps designed a series of mapping systems that inventory the paths of her days in increasing detail. Color-coded with icons for money earned and time spent paying bills, working, or waiting for transportation, her elaborate systems of self-accounting occasionally devolve into unexplained tangles.

Other exhibits are meditations on waste. Gerbracht, also a photographer, has taken evocative pictures of the weird swaths of cracked concrete, evicted furniture, and dumped TVs that litter the neighborhood. "People try to leave what they don't want," he says, "as if no one lives here." According to Gerbracht, this is fitting. "We think of commuting as wasted space, wasted time. But maybe the problem is thinking of it as waste. Here we ponder, we form new thoughts. We think about things we might not otherwise. We're free to daydream."

So how are the artists going to convey this message to the passing tide of commuters? By appropriating another commute space, of course. "We're setting up a pirate radio station," Gerbracht says, "to broadcast neighborhood hip-hop and gallery announcements as ambient messages up to the freeway."


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