TONY STANZIONE: ENTRADA BIENVENITO
Image: Tony Stanzione, Entrada Bienvenito, recycled doors, metal frame, hardware / ©Tony Stanzione
PRESS RELEASE / FALL 2002
To coincide with the inaugural exhibition in the newly founded Black & White Gallery, Tony Stanzione created the first installation for the outdoor project space in September of 2002. After seeing his work in the files at Socrates Sculpture Park, gallery founding director Tatyana Okshteyn had invited the artist to produce an installation just a few months earlier, and the result was an appropriate opening work for the space. Titled Entrada Bienvenito, a series of seven found wooden doors hung inside a 25-foot steel frame. Pivoted at the center, rather than the sides, the doors spun open and closed as people passed through them. Conceived in the early 1990s shortly after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Stanzione had originally intended the piece to run along a political boarder, but had never found a venue. "It could go on forever," he said of the work, "which is why I liked the finite dimensions of the outdoor space; it added shape and a sense of location." Blowing in the wind and colored in shades of red, brown, and white reminiscent of the California desert, the doors created a monument to, in the artist's words, "natural migration," still a timely subject some ten years after the work's original conception, and one fitting a new gallery in a neighborhood built by immigrants from other countries and—more recently—other boroughs.