The Federico García Lorca Murals Walking Tour

Thursday, 
July 18
10 a.m. – Noon
Bushwick, Brooklyn

Co-sponsored by Artmakers Inc
and Lorca in NY: A Celebration

¡Special guests!
Edward Hirsch, 

poet and Garcia Lorca scholar
Electa Arenal,

translator and prof. of Hispanic literature

INFO: www.lorcanyc.com/program

The murals can be visited on their own. See locations in right hand column.

Kayla Welbanks, Consul General of Spain Juan-Ramon Martinez Salazar, Jane Weissman, poet and Lorca scholar Edward Hirsch, translator Electa Arenal, Jules Hollander, Nick Pelafas, Camille Perrottet and Inigo Ramirez de Haro, Consul, Cultural Affairs.

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The New York Times  

N.Y. / Region

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/08/nyregion/a-mural-of-a-spanish-poet-in-bushwick-confounding-and-enchanting.html?ref=nyregion&_r=0

Side Street

A Mural of a Spanish Poet in Bushwick, Confounding and Enchanting 

                                                                       David Gonzalez/The New York Times

By DAVID GONZALEZ

Published: July 7, 2013

A huge portrait of Federico García Lorca peered out onto Stockholm Street in Bushwick, painted on a drugstore wall alongside verses from “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne).”

Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.

But out on the sidewalk, one man groused.

“That doesn’t make sense; everybody sleeps under the sky,” said Hector Morales, a retired construction worker. “Maybe that’s something from an older era, but it doesn’t mean anything to young people today. ‘Stay in school. Don’t do drugs.’ That’s what they should have put.”

Out by the wall, two artists — accustomed to the entire gamut of popular reaction evoked by their latest mural — painted their fourth of the Spanish poet and playwright in this Brooklyn neighborhood. The point of community art is to engage people, even those confounded by their proposition (or, like Mr. Morales, confused by prepositions).

“People ask all the time what’s this poem about,” said Jane Weissman, one of the muralists. “I tell them to read it, and visualize the images — like the resurrection of dead butterflies. A lot of them are metaphors for something else. Unfortunately, I don’t know what for. At the end they’ll have all these images and feelings. It seems to work.”

The neighborhood might get more insight on July 18, when several scholars will lead a walking tour among the murals. Though Ms. Weissman and her colleague, Camille Perrottet, started their walls two summers ago, their final piece coincides with a major celebration of García Lorca, including an exhibit at the New York Public Library.

The mural was inspired by García Lorca’s sojourn in New York in 1929 and 1930, when he studied at Columbia University and traversed the city. Brooklyn pops up in his work a few times, said Walter Krochmal, an actor and García Lorca aficionado who helped found Lorca’s Route in New York, an annual event that brings to life words and moments from the poet’s time here.

Those experiences — witnessing the Wall Street crash, segregation, the gap between rich and poor — affected him deeply. It also, Mr. Krochmal said, altered his ideas about poetry.

“His trip to New York blew his entire metric structure apart,” Mr. Krochmal said. “He stopped using Spanish verse and went to an odd internal rhyme.”

Ms. Perrottet was similarly inspired when she first went to Bushwick a few years ago to visit her son, who had recently moved there. Granted, she was a kindred spirit, having devoured García Lorca’s work years ago. And though she had not done a community mural in a while, she thought Bushwick would be a good place to paint a series of walls based on “Sleepless City.”

“This is a great neighborhood,” she said. “It is so full of life. It’s full of different communities.”

It is also filled with the kind of striking contrasts that did not go unnoticed by the poet then or the muralists now. A mix of people pass by the work in progress each day, from young hipsters to longtime residents. Most days, a produce truck is parked nearby, with fruits and vegetables arrayed under a small tent.

People walk, stop and read the verses in English or Spanish. Some are puzzled, others are pleased — even if they are not quite sure why. Some have taken to the wall’s participatory angle, where they are invited to put a colored dot on a grid of local streets to show where they live. During last year’s mural project, a local family had its three children help out every day. This year, one passer-by pointed out an incorrectly translated word.

García Lorca would have appreciated the touch of the surreal on the sidewalk. He would have no doubt appreciated the neighborhood, given his progressive political leanings — which cost him his life in 1936 when he was executed by Fascists.

“He had, like the poet, his ear against the wall,” said Electa Arenal, a retired professor at the City University of New York, who will read “Sleepless City” in Spanish during the July 18 walk. “This neighborhood seems to be multicultural, but that does not mean people know about each other. The walls may contribute to them getting to know one another.”

García Lorca met his fate with his back against the wall in Spain. He lives on with his words on a wall in Brooklyn, where they enchanted Asnev Jimenez one recent morning.

“It’s pretty, that poem,” said Ms. Jimenez, a recent immigrant from Mexico. “You should walk around with your eyes open to understand what it means. Every word of that poem signifies something pretty.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 8, 2013, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mural of a Spanish Poet, Confounding and Enchanting.