Giuliani persecutes Chinese Street Artists
ARTISTpres
the Police
NY Times January 18, 2000
[The NY Times article follows these brief comments]
The Giuliani administration’s ongoing mistreatment of street
artists including the Chinese portrait artists, is emblematic of this
Mayor’s hostility to the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of free
speech, to minorities and to those who dare to criticize him. As
the main plaintiff in both of the federal lawsuits mentioned in the
article and the president of the street artist advocacy group
A.R.T.I.S.T., I get an intimate view of how this policy works
each and every day. During the course of our first lawsuit this
supposedly pro-art administration went so far as to claim before
the U.S. Supreme Court that visual art doesn’t express ideas and
was therefore unworthy of First Amendment protection. When
the Federal courts ruled that the City’s licensing policy for street
artists was blatantly unconstitutional Giuliani’s lawyers
immediately created a virtually identical permit system for artists
in NYC Parks requiring us to file a second lawsuit. The illegal
harassment of artists has never ceased for one single day during
the entire six years Giuliani has been in office. Now, unable to
require a license of us and unable to intimidate us into silence
the latest tactic is to have the Mayor’s Street Vendor Review
Panel close off any street we sell on to all forms of vending.
Does any rational person actually believe that the congestion in
Times Square or in SoHo or on the street in front of the Museum
of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum is “caused” by street
artists? Can one take seriously the Giuliani administration’s
position that thousands of permanently installed concrete
planters emblazoned with the logos of the Business Improvement
Districts that obstruct midtown sidewalks and thousands of
newspaper vending boxes on street corners are not a public safety
problem but that a few Chinese portrait artists sitting on little
stools by the curb are?
This administration has no respect for anything but dollars.
Human rights, the U.S. Constitution and public opinion are mere
impediments to the fulfillment of its corporate police state
agenda. According to many of the Chinese portrait artists in my
group, they had more freedom to sell their work in Communist
China than they do on the streets of Mayor Giuliani’s New York
City.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
3133 Brighton 7th St #6CR
Brooklyn, NY 11235
ARTIS...@aol.com (718) 743-3722
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
The ruling by the Second circuit Federal Appeals Court
[Lederman et al v City of NY/Bery et al v City of NY Docket
Nos. 95-9089] and the complaint in the second street artist
Federal lawsuit concerning the Parks artist permit [Lederman et
al v Giuliani 98 Civ. 2024 (LMM)] are both availiable at
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
NY Times January 18, 2000
Chinese Artists in Times Sq. Draw a Crowd, and the Police
By EDWARD WONG
On a recent chilly night in Times Square, Zhang Zhun leaned
over a blank canvas with his charcoal pencil. The businessman
sitting for him smiled nervously. Wisps of hair appeared after a
few strokes, then eyeglasses, then the bridge of a nose.
After arriving from China last year, Mr. Zhang, 46, joined a
community of a dozen or so Chinese portrait artists in the neon
glow of Times Square. Fixtures in the area, many set up shop
every evening in the shadow of the unfinished Reuters Building
on Seventh Avenue between 42nd and 43rd Streets, hanging
celebrity portraits on the plywood construction fence and
hawking their skills to passers-by.
Most of the immigrants speak almost no English and worked as
artists or art teachers in China's largest cities. One said he had
emigrated to New York because of the art community, another
for freedom.
But since construction began in earnest last year on the Reuters
Building, Mr. Zhang said, police officers have been trying to
clear them off the sidewalk almost every night.
"They come around and say, 'No portrait, no portrait,' " he said in
Mandarin, shivering in a winter jacket. "They don't like what we
do."
As if on cue, a police officer barreled through the crowd, in a
scene suggesting the frenzied strokes of a de Kooning. "All of
you have to pack up and leave," Officer Robert Salmon yelled at
the artists.
"Although the sketch artists are sketching these people, they're
doing something illegal," he told the tourists. "They're causing a
crowd to gather."
Sidewalk artists are not required to have a vendor's license,
because the First Amendment protects freedom of expression.
But police officials said the artists' presence had forced
pedestrians into the street, jeopardizing lives. "Once the
construction began," said Lt. Stephen Biegel, a police
spokesman, "tons of tourists started roaming out into the flow of
traffic."
Safety concerns for pedestrians, he said, supersede the First
Amendment rights of the artists.
Lin Ming, 35, another portrait artist in the group, said that even
four years ago, the police would only occasionally force them to
leave the sidewalk. But last year, Mr. Lin said, the police visits
became more frequent. Sidewalk space, sometimes shared by
Chinese calligraphers, shrank when the plywood fence went up
around the lot last January.
Some artists hang their celebrity portraits on that fence. "Whose
are these?" Officer Salmon asked as he began tearing them off.
Down came James Dean. Down came Kate Winslet. Mr. Zhang
sprinted to gather them up.
"It's sad, it's sad," said Melissa James, a tourist from South
Carolina, whose daughter Savanna, 4, was sitting for a portrait.
Ms. James quickly handed over $20 as the artists packed up in a
flurry.
In 1998, four sidewalk artists sued the city, asserting that their
First Amendment rights had been infringed upon by a
requirement that they have permits to sell their work outside the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The suit, which is pending, cited a
1996 federal court decision that found the city's licensing of
street artists unconstitutional. But the city argued that it could
require the permits because the land outside the museum was
owned by the city's Parks and Recreation Department.
In Central Park, another group of Chinese artists sketches each
afternoon at Wien Walk at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. To
work there, each artist pays $25 a month for a Parks Department
permit.
Laws on street vending in connection with congestion and safety
are not uniformly enforced, and vary from precinct to precinct,
said Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist and the author of "Sidewalk"
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), a study of New York street
vendors.
"Individual vendors often don't know about these standards and
can't defend their rights," he said.
The knowledge barrier is magnified when the sidewalk artists
and the police do not speak the same language, as in the case of
the Chinese portraitists. A few have been working in Times
Square for 10 years, but some, like Mr. Zhang, arrived less than a
year ago.
They charge $20 for each person in a portrait, have two to four
customers a night, and "save little by little," Mr. Lin said, for rent
on apartments, many of them rat-infested.
Most of them live in Flushing, Queens.
Mr. Lin, who came to New York in 1995, was looking for work
when he stumbled across the Times Square portraitists in 1996.
He had studied fashion design in Guangzhou University in the
capital of Guangdong province, but took up the charcoal pencil
to put food on his table. Since then, he said, he has studied at the
Fashion Institute of Technology and hopes to work in that
industry.
"New York is too expensive," he said. "It's bad for your health.
It's too crowded, too noisy. Once I'm rich, I'll move somewhere
else."
Twenty minutes after Officer Salmon had left, four artists had set
up easels again at the Reuters Building. Mr. Lin waved for three
other friends, including Mr. Zhang, to follow him.
They wandered up Seventh Avenue to 46th Street, stopped next
to a newsstand and began laying out their celebrity portraits. Mr.
Lin had his gripes about the city, but for now it was as good a
backdrop for his canvas as any.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this NY Times
article is distributed without profit or payment to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for
non-profit research and educational purposes only.
“Elizabeth Freedman, an attorney speaking on behalf of the
N.Y.C. Corporation Counsel's office [Mayor Giuliani’s 680
lawyers], explained the City's anti-art position. "Visual art...does
not express ideas", Ms. Friedman said, "and as such is not
entitled to First Amendment protection." 2/24/97 radio interview
WNYC's syndicated business news show, "Marketplace"
"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech,
literature or live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional
interest is thus minimal." -Giuliani appeal brief against street
artists having First Amendment protection, Giuliani v Lederman
et al and Giuliani v Bery et al, filed with the U.S. Supreme Court
2/24/97.
“An exhibit of the mayor's photographs opened today at a
downtown Manhattan gallery, displaying 23 of his color and
black-and-white pictures taken over the last two years. Panning
the exhibit altogether were the sidewalk protesters, who are
fighting a city requirement that they need permits to sell artwork
in parks and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Since
his first day in office, Giuliani has been waging a war on artists
and artists' rights," said painter and printmaker Robert Lederman.
"He's doing this show purely to change his image, posing as an
artist in the arts capital of the world." 5/9/98 Washington Post
"As the arts capital of the world. New York City is proud to give
our children the opportunity to nurture a future in the arts...New
York City, which is blessed with boundless treasures of art and
culture, and is filled with millions of the most talented and
creative people on the planet, should have the best arts education
in the world.” From Giuliani press release: Giuliani Declares
May 18-22, 1998 Arts Education Week
“Mayor Giuliani yesterday left open the possibility that his office
might begin screening art exhibits bankrolled by taxpayers. The
closer scrutiny would come on a "case-by-case basis,"...Giuliani's
comments came a day after he warned he would slash money to
any of 41 city-funded cultural institutions that presented works,
which, in his view, aggressively attacked religion”. -Daily News
10/6/99 Mayor Hints at Art Exams Says city might do
'case-by-case screening of exhibits
“The artist does not create for the artist: He creates for the people
and we will see to it that henceforth the people will be called in
to judge its art”. -Adolf Hitler