HU Exclusive: Giving You The Keys To The Museum of Broken Windows In NYC
On Sunday, August 30, Hollywood Unlocked got to take a look inside The Museum of Broken Windows; a pop-up experience in New York City featuring powerful work of artists from around the country.
Now, this wasn’t just your ordinary exhibit. The Museum showcased the “ineffectiveness of broken windows policing, which criminalizes our most vulnerable communities.”
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Speaking with Daveen Trentman, executing producer of the museum, she explained how broken windows is a policing strategy that was popularized in a 1982 Atlantic article which claimed that by cracking down on minor offenses like selling loose cigarettes or jumping a subway turnstile, cops could protect communities from more serious and violent crimes.
This method resulted in police harassing, criminalizing, and brutalizing communities of color and less unfortunate people in general. Trentman went on to say that it’s unfair and needs to end now.
She also explained how important it was to get the message across through art.
“Art just reaches people in a way that other things can’t,” Miller said. “This exhibit will make people uncomfortable, and that’s the purpose, It’s an uncomfortable truth.”
Trentman was right. The art was not only powerful and moving but the message was loud and clear through each piece.
Along the walls, self-portraits painted on top of all the paper documents the one artist received during his incarceration, and framed newspapers announcing the deaths of African Americans at the hands of NYPD. An artist named Jeff Gibe created a series of Metrocard art, which depicts actual scenes he has witnessed in subway stations as a result of “Stop and Frisk” policy.
Another artist hung over 1,000 toe tags from the ceiling with the names of people who were killed by the police in 2016. There were plenty of other pieces that definitely spoke volumes.
Trentman also shared the big message she wants everyone, including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio to get from this pop-up museum.
“Mayor De Blasio who ran his campaign by promising police reform has done a lot to get stop-and-frisk numbers down. But what he hasn’t done is end broken windows, and we want to be the leaders to end national criminal justice reform, and it would have to absolutely stop by ending broken windows.
Take A Look At Some Of The Art Below:
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