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Excerpts
from the New York Times article:
February
21, 2001
On a Harlem Block, Lines That Divide and Ties That Bind By AMY WALDMAN
...Pamela Gartrell, an arts teacher with three years on the block, volunteered
to forge a children's hip-hop troupe. Each Saturday they rehearsed, feet
flying and hearts pumping to the sounds of Destiny's Child. Ms. Gartrell
tried to instill professionalism along with the fancy footwork: "You cannot
just roll up when you want to." On Dec. 9, the day of the tree-lighting,
129th Street feels electric. In Gallery X, it looks as if a crate of art
supplies has exploded, as Ms. Erbil, Ms. Gartrell and others help the
children make ornaments. The hip- hop posse rehearses one last time, Ms.
Gartrell pushing hard: "You are the 129th Street dancers Ñ it's time to
act like it."
 ...
Gulsun Erbil, a Turkish artist, opened Gallery X in 1998 in one of Mr.
Westvind's buildings, where she also lives. She has a dream of a Harlem
Biennale in 2002, but finds that the color of her skin sometimes mutes
the enthusiasm toward her project. "They should look at it not like I'm
a white woman," she says. "They shouldn't put me down." She does not see
herself as an activist, but she welcomes anyone to her openings. The children
come, for the art or for the free food. "Do you think exposure changes
people?" asks Pat Simon, who runs a community office on the block for
the Abyssinian Development Corporation, the nonprofit organization that
has helped redevelop the area, as she observes one opening. To Ms. Erbil
and others, the answer is yes. "If white people do things here it has
benefit," says Franz Vila, an artist exhibiting last summer. "It contributes
to the lives of these black kids. White people don't need this gallery.
They have galleries in SoHo."
... The block's Southern intonations and the palette of pigmentation transport
Fred Mitchell back to his Mississippi childhood. He is 77 and white, an
Abstract Expressionist artist and an accomplished raconteur. But his connections
on the block seem few, even after some three years here. After a racially
tinged encounter with a neighbor, he has kept to himself. His motto now
toward his neighbors: like ships in the night. In 1930, James Weldon Johnson
wrote that Harlem was, unlike most black ghettos consigned to cities'
borders, at the "heart of Manhattan." For that reason, he warned, it would
probably not last as a black area. For Mr. Mitchell, such change is the
natural order of things. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz said to him
that he had seen seven different New Yorks out his window. Harlem itself
was once Irish, Jewish, German. "This is New York," Mr. Mitchell says.
"Change sweeps across whole parts." ...Mr. Mitchell also shows with Gallery
X...
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