Painting the Town -- Museum of the City of New York

Nedra Newby received her education in visual arts at Georgia State University and the State University of New York at Albany before studying for an advanced diploma in printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design in London on a Fulbright grant. She returned from England in 1979, intent on pursuing her career in New York City. When prohibitive rents extinguished her hopes of settling in the newly fashionable artists' district of Soho, she adjusted her search to the Lower East Side, locating a studio at 71 Clinton Street. Newby's middle-class values conflicted at once with the alien street culture of this rough, run-down, arson-scarred neighborhood. She began to draw her surroundings as a way to come to terms with the ills of poverty, crime, and drug addiction that impinged on her everyday experience of the cityscape. By 1982 a series of diaristic paintings was evolving from her meditations on "the social structure, and the people and places of this troubled and hostile but sometimes beautiful environment."¹

Abandoning traditional urban realism, Newby employed her canvases as blackboards that she superimposed with decorative, lexigraphic statements reflecting her impressions of the Lower East Side. A few cartoon-like figures, appearing as black, outlined blocks scratched from a ground of underlying color bands, humanized these terrains of words. The interaction of chromatic typography with such anchoring forms -all etched in a patchwork of neon hues -seems at once nervous, playful, and schematized, suggesting the safeguard that formal color and graphic studies offered to Newby as a strategy for ordering the neighborhood's darker actualities.

Murder on Clinton Street is a fantasy inspired by the violence that tarnished Newby's daily travels through the Lower East Side. The composition is moored by the images of a prostrate woman (revealed as the artist) and an attentive dog (her protector and companion) enmeshed in a local street map of intercrossing colored lines on a dark, intimidating background. Within this grid, a density of place names gives way to occasional narrative phrases like "never never land" and "life on the lower east side." Just as the Times Square Zipper flickered late-breaking news to curious onlookers, Newby conveys the painting's subplot in the illuminated, message-bearing silhouettes of the two interlocked characters: "nedra lays dead on clinton street shot down by bullets from a speeding car / the rivington dog looks on in dismay / the rivington dog wonders why why why." A pool of words spelling "blood," a cluster of which expose a vivid red understripe, spills onto the pavement from the figure's head. Given the locational context of this imagined incident, one could read Newby's word bulletins and psychedelic palette as allusions to the blights of graffiti and drug trafficking that riddled the Lower East Side during her period of residence on Clinton Street.

Through teaching and the increased exposure of her work in local group and juried exhibitions, Newby endured in her ambition to support herself as an artist. She continued to develop her "scratch-through" figures and writing as colorful patterns that activated the surface of her canvases, often in compositional series that used consistent pictorial elements differentiated by their unique bands of underlying color. By the late 1980s, Newby had moved to the suburban perimeters of New York City, where she continues to work.

Notes:

1 Quoted from artist's statement, July 15, 1983, one of two essays submitted by Nedra Newby to the Museum of the City of New York when Murder on Clinton Street was initially lent to the Museum's special exhibition Painting New York (1983 -1984).


Murder on Clinton Street 1982 Nedra Newby (b. 1949) Acrylic on canvas, 54 X 42 Gift of the artist, 84.40
Nedra Newby received her education in visual arts at Georgia State University and the State University of New York at Albany before studying for an advanced diploma in printmaking at the Central School of Art and Design in London on a Fulbright grant. She returned from England in 1979, intent on pursuing her career in New York City. When prohibitive rents extinguished her hopes of settling in the newly fashionable artists' district of Soho, she adjusted her search to the Lower East Side, locating a studio at 71 Clinton Street. Newby's middle-class values conflicted at once with the alien street culture of this rough, run-down, arson-scarred neighborhood. She began to draw her surroundings as a way to come to terms with the ills of poverty, crime, and drug addiction that impinged on her everyday experience of the cityscape. By 1982 a series of diaristic paintings was evolving from her meditations on "the social structure, and the people and places of this troubled and hostile but sometimes beautiful environment."¹ Abandoning traditional urban realism, Newby employed her canvases as blackboards that she superimposed with decorative, lexigraphic statements reflecting her impressions of the Lower East Side. A few cartoon-like figures, appearing as black, outlined blocks scratched from a ground of underlying color bands, humanized these terrains of words. The interaction of chromatic typography with such anchoring forms -all etched in a patchwork of neon hues -seems at once nervous, playful, and schematized, suggesting the safeguard that formal color and graphic studies offered to Newby as a strategy for ordering the neighborhood's darker actualities. Murder on Clinton Street is a fantasy inspired by the violence that tarnished Newby's daily travels through the Lower East Side. The composition is moored by the images of a prostrate woman (revealed as the artist) and an attentive dog (her protector and companion) enmeshed in a local street map of intercrossing colored lines on a dark, intimidating background. Within this grid, a density of place names gives way to occasional narrative phrases like "never never land" and "life on the lower east side." Just as the Times Square Zipper flickered late-breaking news to curious onlookers, Newby conveys the painting's subplot in the illuminated, message-bearing silhouettes of the two interlocked characters: "nedra lays dead on clinton street shot down by bullets from a speeding car / the rivington dog looks on in dismay / the rivington dog wonders why why why." A pool of words spelling "blood," a cluster of which expose a vivid red understripe, spills onto the pavement from the figure's head. Given the locational context of this imagined incident, one could read Newby's word bulletins and psychedelic palette as allusions to the blights of graffiti and drug trafficking that riddled the Lower East Side during her period of residence on Clinton Street. Through teaching and the increased exposure of her work in local group and juried exhibitions, Newby endured in her ambition to support herself as an artist. She continued to develop her "scratch-through" figures and writing as colorful patterns that activated the surface of her canvases, often in compositional series that used consistent pictorial elements differentiated by their unique bands of underlying color. By the late 1980s, Newby had moved to the suburban perimeters of New York City, where she continues to work. Notes: 1 Quoted from artist's statement, July 15, 1983, one of two essays submitted by Nedra Newby to the Museum of the City of New York when Murder on Clinton Street was initially lent to the Museum's special exhibition Painting New York (1983 -1984).