RE:Construction Launched November 13, 2007   At a time when Lower Manhattan is experiencing one of the largest public and private construction undertakings in the nation’s history LMCC and The Downtown Alliance respond with Re:Construction, a project that channels the energy of Downtown’s rebuilding process by recasting construction sites as “canvases” for innovative public art and architecture. PUBLIC ART WALKING TOURS   Lower Manhattan Cultural Council is pleased to present a series of three theme-based self-guided audio walking tours exploring the meaning, reception, and context of public art in Lower Manhattan.

ACCESS RESTRICTED Selected dates through 2008   A nomadic lecture series which opens to the public rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Lower Manhattan.

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Programming at the Council stokes the cultural life of the city with art, ideas and imagination.
We encourage art where it’s least expected, stimulate conversation around the ideas of the moment, and continually burnish and tarnish the links between culture and capital from our nook in New York’s Financial District.

We curate, produce and commission a wide-ranging array of art installations, performances, and symposia -- from the wildly popular summer series, Sitelines, to the hard-hitting Cities, Art and Recovery summits, from the nomadic lecture series, Access Restricted, to the downloadable Public Art Walking Tours, from the Social Sculpture to the Off the Record Commissions.

Each year, we take on a theme as the focus of our programming.
Wide in scope but sharp in focus, the theme allows the artists we work with to illuminate the idea from many different vantage points and serves as the thread to connect our various audiences to each other.

In 2006-2007, our programmatic focus was on the idea of amnesia.

Under the theme Amnesia: The Spectral Life of Cities, we want to encourage innovative art and ideas, and critical debate about the contemporary cultural life of cities. We are looking for and at those aspects of urban life -- places, events and people -- that are forgotten, invisible, masked, disappeared or obscured in the present.

The idea of “amnesia” has particular meaning for downtown New York.

One of the oldest parts of the city, its very ties to that past have been abruptly attenuated by the events of September 2001. What aspects of the past have been obliterated by recent catastrophe? How is the relationship to time and the nature of memory transformed by such an event? How does the imagination of a future pivot on retrieving an often equally imagined past? These are among the questions that propel this initiative.

The question of historical trauma, memory and memorialization have been at the forefront of any discussion of rebuilding in downtown New York.

Psychologically, amnesia is often the response of the body to a traumatic event, one that covers the site of pain to permit a type of living. In proposing this rubric, when thinking of cities recovering from disaster, we also mean to consider how forgotten narratives might grant resilience to the daily life of the city. Must the small stories and events that trip in and out of urban memory compete with the more monumental focus on a singular memorialization?

Through this initiative, which includes a new commission, and will come to encompass public art projects, city cross-talks, tours and other programs, we are interested in provoking a critical relationship to everyday life, in drawing audiences to little known locations, and in bringing sharply into focus, if only for a moment, a fragment of urban experience that is easily overlooked.