Richmond Barthé’s Brooklyn Frieze in amNewYork

Today, amNewYork ran an article about the state of Richmond Barthé’s public art “Green Pastures: The Walls of Jericho,” an NYC LGBT historic site located at Brooklyn’s Kingsborough Houses since 1941.

The article was spurred by Stonybrook Universtiy art professor Michele Bogart, who expressed concern for the artwork’s state of disrepair. From amNewYork:

“The reader was Michele Bogart, a former vice president of what is now the city’s Public Design Commission. She had heard that the art was in trouble and was shocked at the state of the panels when she went to take pictures of them on Friday, a surprising and imposing freestanding art-deco wall in the middle of the towers. There are open joints, hairline cracks, large holes or disfigurations between some of the dancers’ legs. All can lead to worse problems when rain seeps in, and ice and snow.”

Barthé, who was gay, is considered one of the most important sculptors of African American modernism in the first half of the twentieth century, known for work portraying religious subjects, African American history, notable performers and for public work.

This public work is the artist’s largest and was originally intended for the wall of an amphitheater at Harlem River Houses. That amphitheater was never built and the piece was installed, without Barthé’s consultation, at the Kingsborough Houses in Brooklyn.

To read the full story, click here.