About

In the Summer of 2010, Spectres of Liberty and The Art School in the Art School, collaboratively created The Great Central Depot in the Open City, a multi-phased creative endeavor asking the question: Is Syracuse an Open City today?  The project took the form of a month-long store front Open City Workshop with public programs, a public cultural event with a large-scale media installation, and an on-line radio station. 

For over a year leading up to The Great Central Depot in the Open City, the group researched Syracuse’s rich abolitionist history as a point of departure for the project.  Syracuse, known as the Great Central Depot of the Underground Railroad, was home to many abolitionist leaders and we decided to focus upon Reverend Jermain Loguen.  Within his autobiography Loguen challenged the city of Syracuse to be a leader and model for other cities - to be, as he termed it, an “Open City”.  Even with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851, Loguen charged the city to actively break the law and help fugitive slaves reach freedom.

The term “Open City” resonates as a timeless idea, pertinent today as it was in the 1850’s.  We noticed that Syracuse had monuments and informational plaques throughout the city acknowledging its abolitionist history – and that there was room to ask, how does this history live and connect to issues today?  Can Syracuse still be called an “Open City”?

To actively explore these questions we created the Open City Workshop at XL Projects space in downtown Syracuse, where we were open 6 days a week.  In addition, we planned three weeks of programming and discussion directly relating the history to present conditions in Syracuse.  During the first week we organized a series of presentations and gatherings focusing on different relevant topics.  

The first was a panel discussion, called “Open Access, Open Art”, and was created in partnership with the Community Folk Art Center. Brenda Cave-James, a local storyteller, opened the evening with stories and poems about Jermain Loguen and his mother. Discussion followed and included Dr. Kheli Willets, Academic Director of Community Folk Art Center, Dr. James Rolling, Chair of Art Education at Syracuse University, Rachael Gazdick, Executive Director of Say Yes Syracuse, Kimberly McCoy, ArtRage Gallery, and Joanna Spitzner, founder of the Art School in the Art School. 

The second event was “Open Boundaries”, discussions about boundaries and mobility within Syracuse.  Researcher and writer Jenna Loyd coordinated the panel.  Participants on the panel included Caroline Kim, Aly Wane, Meaghan Chapman, and Kafui Attoh. The discussion focused on how the freedom to move and freedom to stay in Syracuse relates to transportation justice, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ communities. During this same period of time, the immigration crisis in Arizona was attaining national public attention. 

Our third event, “Open Options”, featured a film by Kendall Phillips about Syracuse Civil Rights and CORE in the 1960s.

The fourth event was “Open Economy Ice Cream Social”, sponsored by Milk Not Jails and FREE! Families Rally for Emancipation & Empowerment.  This event was an ice cream social (with locally produced ice cream) to highlight alternatives to the prison economy present in rural New York State. MILK NOT JAILS asserts, “If rural NY’s economic survival depends on my habits, I’d rather drink their milk than send my child to their prison.” Through a social mixer environment, people ate ice cream and discussed the rural prison economy located in the Syracuse area.  During this first week of events, this was our best attended.  

Our fifth event, organized for a Friday evening, was the “Open House Party” with local DJ Jesse Stiles.

During the three-week Open City Workshop, we also ran a web-cast radio station and letterpress print shop.  Each event was filmed and audio recorded to be then made available through the online radio station. The radio station also interviewed over 30 individuals on their views about Syracuse as an Open City today.  Some of the interviewees were people we reached out to, including folks from the Syracuse Peace Council, ArtRage, the Syracuse Cultural Workers, and Alchemy.  Other individuals were passers-by who came to the Workshop during our open hours.  Others were attendees of the planned events.

The print shop also continually ran through the duration of the Open City Workshop.  Pulling from Jermain Loguen’s writings and phrases that arose from the discussions and events, we created hundreds of letter pressed posters that were hung throughout the workshop space. We chose phrases for the posters that resonated across history, and, interestingly, people often found it difficult to discern if a piece of text was from the 1800’s or today.  

Since the beginning of this project, we envisioned creating a culminating cultural event that would make visual the concepts developed through the discussions in the Workshop. The ideas, site, local history and current concerns would be animated through both 19th and 21st century moving image technology (zoetropes and digital projection) at an outdoor site where, in the 1800's, 5000 abolitionists held a meeting. The zoetropes would formally reference the time period when Abolitionists were making critical headway against slavery and simultaneously cinema was being born.

Prior to and during the programming, print shop and radio station, we constructed three bicycle-powered zoetropes with design and construction help of bike specialists Gaylen Hamilton and Travis Tench.  Animations were placed inside the zoetropes illustrating three main ideas: awaking (to injustice present around us), communicating with others, and taking action (against the injustice).  Digital animations were created using the text gathered from the events and historical research.  The zoetropes were sheltered by tents that would house the digital projectors during the culminating event.  At the culminating event, the tents and interactive zoetropes would reference the 19th century “Anti-Slavery Fairs”.

Rain was forecast for the day of the culminating event and so we held it in our back-up indoor location.  We transformed the Open City Workshop from a discussion hall, print shop, radio station, and construction site into interactive exhibition of posters, zoetropes, video projects and audio from the series of interviews. Held during the downtown festival “Taste of Syracuse”, our culminating event benefitted from the city’s large-scale public fair by having hundreds of visitors throughout the evening.  The installation created a space for the abolitionist history and contemporary interpretations of an Open City to come together with an audience.

The installation remained in XL Projects for three additional weeks and then was exhibited at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, New York.  The posters were also exhibited at the Community Folk Art Center. The next phase of the project is to edit the hours of footage collected during the Open City Workshop and culminating event, The Great Central Depot in the Open City to place both on the Spectres of Liberty web portal and in exhibitions including the upcoming "Local Histories" at UNC Chapel Hill.

Partners for this project include the Community Folk Art Center, The Matilda Joslyn Gage Home and the Art School in the Art School. This variable media art work is made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by Stimulus funds from the New York State Council on the Arts a state agency and the Lambent Foundation. This project is made possible, in part, with Funds from New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program, a State Agency and the Cultural Resources Council a Region Arts Council, and The Experimental Television Center’s Finishing Funds program is supported by the Electronic Media and Film Program at the New York State Council on the Arts.