In the basement of a co-op in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the superintendent’s workshop includes all the usual accessories, like screwdrivers and saws, a bare floor and a vise grip, as well as a whole lot of paint — but it’s not that kind of paint.
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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
José Enrique Tarazona Ocharán at work.
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Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Naja Quintero, who works at a child care center in New Jersey, shows a piece made with recycle products.
This super, Hiram Rodríguez, is a painter. Most evenings he can be found sitting in that narrow room with a brush in his hand and a canvas propped up on his workbench, just next to a circular saw. And for the next few weeks, two of his finished works will hang in another office space where the delicate urgency of artistic endeavor is not generally the first thing that springs to mind: the headquarters of 32BJ, the country’s largest building service workers union.
For the last eight years, 32BJ has invited its members, who spend their days working as doormen, porters, janitors and window washers, to submit their artwork for a monthlong art show. Each year it has quietly grown, bringing more paintings, photographs, poems and sculptures to hallways sheathed in sharp fluorescent light. And behind each agitated portrait and every glowing photograph that hangs in this giant union, there is the shared reality of nearly every artist’s experience.
“It doesn’t pay medical,” said Robert Santorelli, a carpenter, a photographer and a doorman at 301 East 78th Street on the Upper East Side.
Nonetheless, the artwork piles up.
José Enrique Tarazona Ocharán, a painter and musician from Peru, started working as a doorman about 10 years ago so he could afford to buy instruments. He supplied two large pieces this year, composed of fragmented photographs and brightly colored paint. Naja Quintero, a union shop steward from Ecuador who works at a commercial building in New Jersey, submitted a three-dimensional scene of vibrant pink and yellow flowers made of discarded paper and Styrofoam. Radislav Krstic, a window washer from Bosnia and Herzegovina, supplied a striking abstract painting of sharply twirled reds, oranges and black.
“I have maybe 200 paintings in my home,” said Julio Pantoja, who has been a janitor on Wall Street for 31 years. “I put them under the bed, in the closet. I had to take a lot of the canvas off the stretchers to roll them up.
“I was just working, going home, then working, going home,” Mr. Pantoja continued. “I started painting to feel good, to feel something.”
https://www.32bjarts.org/
Post time: Sep-03-2017