I met Valado through Ethan Pettit, an urbanist with a long history in North Brooklyn who used to be a co-director with me at the Collective: Unconscious performance space on Ludlow Street in the late Nineties. Pettit showed drawings of the land mass between the East River and the Newtown Creek-- the shipping canal was recently designated a Superfund site by the federal government and the area just received a $25 million community benefits package from Exxon Mobil as compensation for the massive decades-old underground oil spill. In one drawing, a statue of a Romantic figure inspired by Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog stands in a grandiose public plaza overlooking a view of the landscape from above, as if surveying it from the point of view of a helicopter, or maybe a massive skyscraper in Sunnyside, Queens. The absence of 20- and 30-story high-rises zoned for the waterfront in the piece--as in all of the works in the show--only defers the question of how the city will accommodate the million residents projected to arrive in the next decade, but I love the big gesture.
