A victim of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, a 1920s tap dancer, and a radical political activist are just a few of the influential women you’ll meet in New York City-based artist Adrienne Ottenberg’s site-specific art installation at the Museum at Eldridge Street. 28 Remarkable Women…and One Scoundrel features mixed-media portraits of nearly thirty women who lived and worked on Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. Each of the figures in this diverse group of women left a unique mark on the history of the city.
On February 20th, join Ottenberg for a special artist-led tour of her exhibit with Untapped New York Insiders! This tour is free for Insiders and registration opens on February 6th at 12pm ET. Not an Insider yet? Become a member today and use code JOINUS to get your first month free!
“The first whisper of this exhibit came to me in the 1990s when I first saw the Eldridge Street Synagogue in all its faded glory,” Ottenberg told Untapped New York, “At that time, as the beauty of the building was literally falling down, it made me think, what else has been lost here?What stories were not written down?“
As the synagogue underwent renovations, and its beauty once again came to light, Ottenberg was compelled to bring those lost stories to light as well. Standing on the Women’s Balcony which overlooks the grand main Sanctuary, “I thought of the women who would have been here in the heyday of the synagogue and the women who would have been in the surrounding neighborhood,” says Ottenberg, “Who were they? I wanted to reach out to the past and meet them.”
The Lower East Side was fertile ground for change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Women stepped up into roles previously unavailable to them and fought to make changes in education, equality, and justice. For this installation, Ottenberg chose to focus on female artists and activists of the time.
Among the 29 women featured, there are names New Yorkers will likely recognize such as Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words are inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and Louise Nevelson, the famous sculptor, or Frances Perkins, the first female to be a member of a president’s cabinet. Other names may be less familiar, such as Elizabeth Tyler, one of the very first Black nurses in America, who worked at the Henry Street Settlement, and that singular scoundrel, Stiff Rivka, a pickpocket mentioned in police reports. “I went by which stories moved me,” Ottenberg says of how she narrowed down the list of women.
Images Courtesy of Museum at Eldridge Street
Each portrait featured is superimposed with maps and architectural details of the Lower East Side neighborhood. Ottenberg, who combines traditional drawing and painting with digital media in her work, earned an MA in geography at CUNY to learn more about computer mapping. For this installation, “the maps I used were mostly from the early 1900s– insurance maps, a fireman’s map, manufacturing maps, a transportation map, and tourist and housing maps,” says Ottenberg, “I wanted the women to have maps that related to some aspect of their lives or experiences of the neighborhood.”
For example, while creating the portrait of journalist Zoe Anderson Norris, Ottenberg used a map that “listed public buildings, places of recreation, churches, and hotels–a map that she could have used, and would have suited her style of targeted undercover investigative reporting.” The portraits of these women appear almost ghost-like, printed on gossamer silk or cotton banners hung in seven different locations throughout the Museum’s gallery and historic sanctuary.
The installation is accompanied by is accompanied by an illustrated catalog made by Adrienne Ottenberg and an audio guide. In the audio guide, 29 people–Eldridge docents, staffers, colleagues, the artist, and descendants of the historic women– lent their voices to the women in the show. Hear it at this link!
28 Remarkable Women…and One Scoundrel will be on view through May 5th. Join Untapped New York Insider for a special tour of the exhibit with Ottenberg on February 20th!
Nicole Saraniero is the Insider-in-Chief at Untapped New York, leading our Untapped New York Insiders membership program. Nicole graduated from Hofstra University with a Bachelor of Science in Televis
