on view: March 19 - May 19, 2001
Opening reception: April 14, 5-7 pm

Paradise Building: A Celebration of Prospect Park

Matt Freedman

From March 19 - April 14 five myles’ Artist in Residence Matt Freedman will create a panoramic mural of Brooklyn’s nearby Prospect Park with the assistance of neighborhood children. Unlike the panoramas popular in the nineteenth century, which presented the viewer with a 360 degree view from a single central vantage point, Freedman’s painting installation will simultaneously present many different aspects of the park as it was, is and will be.

Paradise Building will examine the history of Prospect Park as a visionary project and a social phenomenon: Freedman will depict a series of park sites and events at a variety of times of year and at various points in the park’s development. The park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, intended to create a resource for city dwellers, a place where nature could heal and ennoble the soul and as a work of art. The park has grown in beauty and significance over the 130 plus years of its existence, amply fulfilling Olmsted and Vaux’s farsighted design and humanist vision.

For many of the people living in the surrounding areas, such as five myles’ Crown Heights neighborhood, the park represents their closest and most profound connection with a non-urban environment. The Paradise Building project is intended to involve the children in the five myles community in a contemplation of the park’s role in their lives and in the city’s history itself. They will be invited to contribute images to the painting from their own experiences and to work on a part of the panorama that deals with the park’s future.Visitors will be welcome in the gallery during the construction of the project beginning March 19th with the exhibition opening on April 14th.

Sculptor and writer Matt Freedman is a resident of Brooklyn. Previous mural installations include projects at the Florence Lynch Gallery in New York, Smack Mellon Gallery in DUMBO and at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. Freedman has received generous support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.