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March 10, 2007 |
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We know that Roosevelt Island is a remarkable spot in the middle of the East River, combining a unique collection of historically significant buildings and ruins that draw visitors from around the City and beyond.
But it is not only champions of the past who embrace our Island. Modern artists have repeatedly been drawn here, in part because of the open spaces and remarkable skyline views we sometimes take for granted.
Southpoint has been a particular lure for artists. In 2005, the artist Ranan Lurie unveiled a remarkable series of creations entitled "Uniting Painting" that began in the grand lobby of the United Nations building, then continued across the floor and the grounds outside the building to the edge of the East River. The work then hopped across the river’s western channel to the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, where multicolored panels were anchored to the ground on a 100-square-foot piece of Southpoint, where it remains today. Roosevelt Island’s choice as the location for the painting was part of the artist’s goal of enticing viewers to imagine it continuing to distant shores.
In fact, we are in discussions with Mr. Lurie about enhancing the work as it exists on Roosevelt Island.
We have recently been chosen as the location for a new two-day installation, also taking advantage of the open space in Southpoint, that should be installed just before the Fall for Arts Festival. The artwork, entitled Confinement of the Intellect, is being brought by artist Thom Sokoloski and his creative associate, Jenny-Anne McCowan, from its current installation in Toronto.
The artwork consists of a series of tents, described in Toronto as "a large-scale installation that proposes the archaeological encampment as its metaphor, where the dig for ruins is replaced by a dig for the collective memory of mental health of a specific place and time."
The artists cited a book by Geoffrey Reaume entitled Remembrance of Patients Past as a motivation.
"Though the names were changed due to Canada’s privacy legislation, the book revealed a fascinating, yet startling, time period for mental health between 1870 to 1940," Mr. Sokoloski wrote on the Toronto installation. "The creative collaboration examined how insanity was treated in an era that went from confinement to intervention, that is to say, from containment to medication."
Roosevelt Island, of course, was the place where New York City placed institutions that were deemed undesirable, including a mental hospital, a prison, a smallpox hospital, and the like. In fact, Welfare Island, the name of the Island before the 1960s, was chosen because it was the location for those deemed outcasts from society because of illness or lawbreaking.
The Renwick ruins, which are slated to be stabilized as part of the renovation of Southpoint being overseen by the Trust for Public Lands, was conceived as a smallpox hospital when it was built in the 1850s and was later converted to City Hospital and a nursing school residence in 1875.
The Octagon Tower just north of the Island’s center is the remnant of a City mental hospital, built in 1842. It was immediately a center of attention, both for the magnificence of the architecture by Alexander Jackson Davis and for the notoriety of the conditions in which patients were held. In 1887, a reporter for the New York World named Elizabeth Cochrane, who was known as Nellie Bly, feigned insanity and went undercover as a patient at the hospital, where she exposed deplorable conditions, including the use of inmates from the Island’s Blackwell Penitentiary as nurses.
It’s not a history to be proud of, but it is a history we forget at our peril. If the installation of Confinement of the Intellect artwork shines a light on that history, even as it engages our minds, then it will have done more than entertain.
And it is coming here to Roosevelt Island.