Esos Árboles
Esos Árboles
Artist: Molly Crabapple
On View: Entrance / vestibule of 107 Suffolk St.
Dates: August 2021 - Permanent Installation
After a prolonged period of closure, loss, revolt, uncertainty, and cautious optimism, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center is proud to announce the installation of Esos Árboles, an epic new mural from the celebrated international artist, journalist, and activist Molly Crabapple.
The mural depicts six different scenes explored over as many walls. It took over three days to install and two weeks of 14-hour days for Crabapple and the Clemente staff to conceptualize, produce and install. It includes extracts from Soto Veléz's poems translated from Spanish into Yiddish, into Mandarin translated by the artist Yao Xiao and English, bomba dancers, elderly Xiangqi players (a scene often found in Chinatown), the late Nuyorican poet/squatter activist Jorge Brandon, a.k.a. "El Coco que Habla", garment workers including the artists’ own grandmother with Yiddish verse on her Singer sewing machine, a machete wielding cane-worker (aka Clemente’s bouncer), a wooden horse or el caballo de palo in a nod to one of Soto Veléz best-known poems, La Diosa de La Ceiba, and an abandoned prison transforming into wildlife.
“I wanted to create a mural that is a post-pandemic love letter to Puerto Rico, the Lower East Side, and working people, inspired by the values this distinct cultural center and who its namesake, Clemente Soto Veléz, stand for,” said Crabapple, a Lower Manhattan artist with Puerto Rican and Jewish roots. Her series of three films, The Zo, about the kafkaesque nightmare of American prisons created with Jim Batt and Kim Boekbinder, was recently nominated for two Emmys.
