Dan Witz Sticks
About the Exhibition
Dan Witz (b. 1957, Chicago, IL), working with the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, uses an exterior wall of their playhouse to install Sticks—seven large paintings that make the wall look as though it is pierced with giant sharpened sticks. This temporary installation, according to Witz, symbolically protects the neighborhood from the commercial billboard advertisements seen so often on the city’s public walls. With Sticks, Witz creates a dialogue about the encroaching commercialism on seemingly all of New York’s architecture. Created in the tradition of trompe-l’oeil murals, Witz considers Sticks to be a type of “homegrown defense” for his neighborhood.
Photo Gallery
Sticks is a project of the Public Art Fund, commissioned through In The Public Realm, a program of site-specific proposals and projects by New York artists.
In The Public Realm 1997 was supported by the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and friends of the Public Art Fund.
Related Exhibitions
Originally presented at West Broadway & Grand Street
