As a New York City based artist, Riccardo Vecchio was recently granted a NYC Artist Corps Grant. The Grants were established to engage the public across New York City's five boroughs, as an integral part of the city’s recovery as New York continues to emerge from the pandemic.
Vecchio’s grant project, titled ‘31 Degrees’, takes two approaches. The first, centers around a participatory art installation with the community, while the second, takes place indoors, continuing the theme of the project in a more traditional gallery setting. The goal of both arms of the project focus squarely on facilitating learning exchanges, and to provide a platform for dialogue to address issues of climate and environmental injustice, made more urgent with each successive climate change induced disaster. The project anticipates working together with local grassroots organizations who are currently engaged in bringing attention to issues of systemic racism in their struggle to resolve environmental injustices, as well as educational and cultural institutions.
The project’s title, ‘31 Degrees’, takes its name from a recent collaborative study, part of a larger heat-mapping initiative in cities across North America, which heat-mapped parts of upper Manhattan and the Bronx, helping identify areas where environmental justice issues are a concern. The study found that due to low levels of tree coverage and green space, poorer neighborhoods, predominantly communities of color, are disproportionately negatively impacted by heat. Not only is heat distributed unequally in NYC, creating what is known as urban heat islands, but its distribution follows other patterns of inequality such as race and income inequality. ‘31 Degrees’ references one particular day in July when the temperature difference varied by that amount from one upper middle class area in Manhattan, to one of the city’s poorest communities of color in the Bronx. It is well known that the history of racist redlining and disinvestment that began in the 1930’s has translated to fewer trees and parks in these communities. But, what may not be as familiar is that this has been responsible in creating higher temperatures and levels of air pollution. Coupled with low access to air conditioning, working class and poor communities of color are more likely to suffer from obesity, asthma, and cardiovascular disease, and twice as likely to die from heat exposure as white New Yorkers
(NYC Dept. of Health).
For ‘31 Degrees’, Vecchio took inspiration from old masters such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), two artists considered the first landscape artists in the western canon, who were painting trees and landscape without religious or other context, appreciating nature for its own sake. With this background, Vecchio has created drawings of trees originally native to the New York area, like pines, fir and spruce, but less widespread with the onset of climate change.
For the participatory piece of the project, the drawings will be translated into murals to beautify areas where walls are more prevalent than trees. Each drawing will be printed as a poster sized sheet, and with the collaboration of the public, they will be wheatpasted onto donated wall space to create site specific tree designs imagined by the participants themselves. Postering the drawings with wheatpaste, a sustainable material, harkens back to the days before social media, when posters were a prevalent part of the urban landscape. With a history of delivering news and political opinion, postering as a form of localized messaging, has been used by groups who often could not afford to advertise, or subversively without permission on private property, pasted over stencils of ‘post no bills’. Wheatpasting the poster sized drawings allows the community to have a hands on experience in the creative process. The indoor manifestation of the project anticipates displaying the original works as individual pieces, together with smaller scale murals, utilizing the posters to create several unique location driven pieces. The goal of both embodiments of the project is to empower and encourage continued community engagement around issues of equality.