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Erotic artwork bares 'SoBro' culture clash

By David Freedlander, amNewYork Staff Writer
More stories | dfreedlander@am-ny.com

June 18, 2008

"Hyde Park " (2008) by South Bronx artist Emily Stedman. Ms. Stedman's paintings were exhibited at Bruckner Bar and Grilll in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx. The paintings were subsequently removed following local opposition to their erotic nature. (Jefferson Siegel, Jefferson Siegel / June 17, 2008)

Some creative types streaming across the Harlem River in search of the city's "next" neighborhood are starting to find their new home to still be more South Bronx than "SoBro."

At least that's artist Emily Stedman's conclusion after her show, "Erotic Watercolors," was pulled off a neighborhood gallery's walls when patrons at adjacent restaurant deemed it offensive.

"I expected it to be an anything goes, sky's-the-limit, open kind of place," said Stedman, 59, who left her loft in TriBeCa for Mott Haven in December after tiring of hearing people at gallery openings talk more about real estate prices than art on the walls.

"I've been in New York a long time and there's always a neighborhood where people move to -- a Williamsburg or a Long Island City, and it seemed like Mott Haven was going to be the next place. I don't know if that is still going to happen."

Her show features soft watercolors of couples or threesomes in various states of embrace. The opening earlier this month at the Bruckner Gallery attracted dozens of art patrons.

But the owner of the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a hip new dining spot which owns the gallery, ordered the show to come down after some of the neighborhood old guard -- who rented out the space for golden wedding anniversaries and the like -- considered the paintings pornographic.

"A lot of young people have moved here, but you still have a lot of old timers coming in for parties or what not," said Alex Abeles, the bar's owner. "We didn't want to take it down but you could see that it collided with the ideas of people."

Stedman, who has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and at galleries in Chelsea, said she was shocked that the show was closed, and added that it was hard to imagine something like it happening in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

The point of her paintings, she said, was to show women in tender embraces instead of being looked at as mere objects.

After decades as a reputation as the burnt-out husk of New York City, the South Bronx has been touted in recent years as the next up-and coming neighborhood in the city. Magazine articles have been written praising the gorgeous old housing stock and the trendy restaurants that are beginning to sprout up.

But change is still hard.

"Very quickly word gets out, but it's a slow go," said Barry Kostrinsky, owner of Haven Arts Gallery, one of the first in the neighborhood when it opened four years ago. "Everything moves in celestial time."

James Freeman, a sociologist at the Bronx Community College who has studied the effect of young professionals moving into Mott Haven, said it wasn't surprising that some were having trouble creating " Williamsburg north."

"It's a different scene -- it's an old fashioned and conservative Dominican and Puerto Rican neighborhood," he said. "Young white kids really do stick out. It's going to be a while before the neighborhood could accommodate the preferences and the consumer and cultural choices that they want."

The show was organized by the artist Assa Bigger, who pledged to push on and to find a space in the neighborhood where he could continue to show the kind of art that challenges.

"The neighborhood is like New York in the 40's or 50's," he said. "It feels fresh, it feels raw, it feels like something good is about to happen. Neighborhoods change. You have something new coming into an old place and you have reaction and interaction, acceptance and rejection. It's a very interesting concept to deal with."