Date of Submission

Spring 2024

Academic Program

Studio Arts

Project Advisor 1

Kenji Fujita

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Apt 2B

I have comfort in the haphazard mess that I grew up in. 502 East 11th Street had an accumulation of stuff from my grandmother, grandfather, mother, father, myself and the creatures we were willingly and unwillingly surrounded by.

After my grandmother died, her debt was passed through to my mother who was forced to sell the 1830s tenement apartment building my mom and I both grew up in. All I could think about were the spatulas and wooden spoons that had fallen behind the stove and pennies that had wedged themselves in the cracks of the floorboards that we could never retrieve.

I was told that 502 had been the first building on the block. I was told that it was a sausage factory that became a nunnery and then our apartment building. Now it’s an Air B & B, a destination spot for tourists. What they don’t know is that this building was cockroach and mouse-infested and across the street from an abandoned building, known as The Rock, which was used by squatters and drug dealers.

Jay Rosenblum, my grandfather, an artist, had his studio on the fourth floor of 502. He passed away before I was born, but I remember wandering through his crammed studio, picking up his pipes and paintbrushes and shuffling through his records. The surrounding dust that had settled on everything created an outline of the objects that I would carefully place them back into.

Living in a dilapidated apartment building with so much untouched family history just a floor above me made it feel like I was in this pocket of the old East Village that was quickly becoming paved over and gentrified. I remained unaware of the drastic changes taking place until I no longer had the time capsule of our apartment building to compare the old to the new.

Apt 2B is a ceramic-based artist's studio apartment. All the clay used was reclaimed or foraged and processed by me. I smuggled 20 pounds of clay from the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, Canada, where my family has a small cottage that I call the “Shit Shack”. It holds the remaining family ties to chaos and, if anything, Apt 2B resembles that place the most.

Aleda Rosenblum Katz

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Download

This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.

Share

COinS