Fort Greene Park will soon be beautified with a new mosaic installation paying homage to three of the neighborhood’s literary greats.
Pieces of Poetry: a Community Mosaic Celebration, a community-generated project led by Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Courtney McClosky, will celebrate the 200th birthday of America’s poet laureate Walt Whitman and the legacy of two other Fort Greene literary heroes, Marianne Moore and Richard Wright.
Park volunteers collected buckets of broken glass from the park’s running trails and hillsides as “a historic remnant of the park’s neglected past.” McClosky then used hundreds of broken glass shards and turned them into a mosaic depicting a bookshelf containing the titles of famous works by the three authors.
In addition, she held several workshops with students from P.S. 20 The Clinton Hill School, The Greene Hill School, Science, Language & Arts International School and Brooklyn Technical High School to create the mosaic pieces.
The mosaic will be installed near the Monument Plaza in late April and will kick off the Whitman Bicentennial festivities, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy announced. The installation will be on view for one year.
Fort Greene Park and NYC Parks will host an official opening reception with refreshments provided by Peck’s on Myrtle Avenue on Saturday, May 4, from 11:00am to 1:00pm. The event is free and open to the public.
What won’t be beautiful is when they cut down 58 large mature healthy trees and build a 43-foot plaza down the center from Myrtle ave, perfect for skate borders and commercial use. The beautiful 11 Zelkovas on the platforms of the steps will be gone so that those who run up and down the steps for exercise will be running without any shade. So sad that the Fort Greene Park Conservancy thinks that arborcide is a good idea. Imagine all those Zelkovas, Honey Locusts, London Plains and Norway Maples (not invasive but regulated in New York State) lying cut down across the park.