OPINION:
One man’s trash may well be another man’s treasure, as the saying goes, but residents of the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington know the difference. They ordered the garbage hauled away.
“It’s embarrassing,” D.C. councilman Marion Barry says of “The New Migration,” an avant-garde art exhibit in two long-vacant storefronts near the run-down intersection of Good Hope Road and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in Southeast. Mr. Barry, once the mayor for life who’s now the alderman for Ward 8, has an eye for art, too. The exhibit was imposed on his ward earlier this month by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
It’s one of 25 publicly funded exhibits, which cost $500,000, part of the “5x5” citywide art festival that runs through December.
“The New Migration” consists, in the description of Washington City Paper, an alternative newsweekly, of “wilted leaves, splintered wood and musty car seats” in one of the two storefronts, and “old tires and three skeletons” in the other. “The debris flows to the ceiling and presses right against the bay windows,” the reviewer said, “flaunting itself to pedestrians.”
The refuse was collected and assembled into the displays by Abigail DeVille, an artist from New York City who collected random “found objects” from Washington to Florida. She says the piles of junk are intended to evoke the “Great Migration” of black Americans who moved north during the Jim Crow era.
It’s hardly a flattering portrayal of the migration, and does nothing to lift the spirits, as art was once intended to do. Blight makes a migration to a struggling, down-at-the-heels neighborhood.
After a barrage of complaints telephoned to the District’s Call Center — 311 is the number residents can call to request trash removal — the arts commission relented and the art was to be hauled way.
“The intention of the project is to challenge and engage audiences through art, but never to offend,” the commission said. “As good stewards of the public trust, [the commission] has determined to remove the installation from its current location.”
Unfortunately, organizers are seeking a new place for “The New Migration.” One appropriate exhibition space might be the Fort Totten trash transfer station, where it would be safe from critics.
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