The Miraculous
The Miraculous: New York
11. (Harlem)
By Raphael RubinsteinTroubled by a remark recently made to her by a social worker—that avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with black people—an artist conceives of a conceptual project that will engage New York City’s African-American community. To this end she enters a float in the African American Day parade, a Harlem procession that occurs every September along Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.
The Miraculous: New York
12. (Chelsea, Fifth Avenue)
By Raphael RubinsteinIt’s the summer of 2016. A gallery on West 20th Street offers its space for a month to a political action committee started by two artists. The show features art works that will be diffused as billboards and advertisements to engage voters in the November election.
The Miraculous: New York
13. (Meat Packing District)
By Raphael RubinsteinA young artist enters a museum on the opening day of a biennial exhibition of contemporary art. He makes his way to one work in the show, a well-known painter’s depiction of a murdered 14-year-old boy lying in a coffin. Inspired by an infamous 1955 lynching, the painting is titled Open Casket.
The Miraculous: New York
14. (NoHo)
By Raphael RubinsteinAfter being stranded in Japan throughout the Second World War, during which he survives the 1943 firebombing of Tokyo (for the rest of his life whenever he sees something that has been burned he mistakes it for a human body), a Korean artist returns home to join the faculty of a new university fine art department.
The Miraculous: New York
15. (East Village, Union Square)
By Raphael RubinsteinAt 2:50 AM on a September night in 1983 a 25-year-old artist is arrested by NYPD Transit Police for writing graffiti in the First Avenue station of the L Train. When police officers bring him, bound at the ankles and with an elastic strap running hog-tie-style from his hands to his feet, into the Union Square Police Station they decide that he is mentally disturbed and must be transferred to Bellevue Hospital.
