Whatever a New Yorker’s grievance of choice with the city may be – our shambolic farce of a transit system, overdrawn social services on their way to complete collapse, the rapid vanishing of state-subsidized third spaces – everybody’s really talking about the same thing.
The issue at the heart of every societal ill is budgeting, and the issue at the heart of budgeting is the misallocation of funds to the staggeringly swollen coffers of the New York Police Department. Burning through upwards of $10bn annually, the NYPD’s waste causes vaster, more insidious damage than the program of person-to-person violence and systemic harassment that’s sparked protests of greater frequency and passion in recent years. By hoarding such a hefty fraction of the taxpayers’ money, they’re sending the people and city they claim to protect into the poorhouse.
The Museum of Broken Windows, a free exhibition from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the social justice-oriented creative agency Soze, zeroes in on the economic dimension of police reform with their new show 29 Million Dreams. Every day, the NYPD uses up $29m that could be redirected toward forms of betterment imagined by the eclectic collection of politically conscious artworks that fill the pop-up exhibition at 216 Lafayette Street.
Co-curators Daveen Trentman and Terrick Gutierrez have wallpapered the foyer (and, they add with a chuckle, the bathroom) with printouts of damning bar graphs and news articles chronicling the innumerable measures by which current mayor and former NYPD captain Eric Adams has funneled the power of capital toward his old buddies. But within, the creative personal statements in an array of mediums emphasize the human stakes of a public debate many still treat as an intellectual exercise. As one wall declares in bold red text, the police are defunding us, and we can’t afford to wait much longer to turn those tables.
“We wanted to focus on the dreams that are deferred when we’re spending $29m on police every day,” says Johanna Miller, director of the NYCLU’s education policy center. “When the mayor tells us we don’t have money for this or for that – we have so much money! It’s just been spent already. As they say, a budget is a moral document.”
Dollars and cents have weighed on all involved with this undertaking in the past few weeks, as city government and Mayor Adams hash out the budget for 2024 over at city hall, about 10 blocks due south of the gallery space. The Museum of Broken Windows, named for the controversial policing philosophy under which punishing low-level crimes purportedly reduces the likelihood of more serious crimes by fostering an atmosphere of lawfulness, first launched in 2018. New York was chafing under then mayor Bill de Blasio’s overzealous policies, but the situation has drastically worsened since Adams took office and bolstered the NYPD as the largest force in in the US. He presented himself as the law-and-order candidate on the campaign trail, and has since been bullish about the construction of a “superjail” that will bring the Big Apple the dubious honor of hosting the tallest detention facility on the planet. The NYCLU recognized that the time had come to leap back into action.
“I think there’s a bigger movement in the philanthropy world to bring together arts and activism, something we’ve leaned into because it allows us to reach people in a whole new way,” Miller says. “At the NYCLU, we’re lucky enough to have artists in residence on staff, and we’ve been working with a whole new group of artist ambassadors. In a lot of ways, we’re very well-positioned for this. There’s so much conversation about funding for the police and the city budget, at least on the left, but it can be so technical and dry. It’s all numbers. This felt like the perfect thing, to put a face and images and movement to these ideas.”
One face in particular draws the eye of visitors right off the bat with Russell Craig’s giant portrait of Breonna Taylor hanging over the anteroom, keeping watch as if in silent judgement. Variety of scale invites us to consider the equally essential macro and micro of activist action: Jesse Krimes’s Rikers Quilt hangs two stories tall, while just around the corner, Jeff Gipe’s studies of subway stop-and-frisks each fit on to a MetroCard. On the adjacent wall, the painting Never Needed Police Departments from curator Gutierrez contrasts a brilliant yellow background with one of the floodlights the NYPD run all through the night in neighborhoods they consider high-risk, at a wattage damaging to the human eye. Upstairs, a series of photographs from Kisha Bari casts sex workers in a light of honor and dignity, shot with an “Annie Leibovitz cover of Vanity Fair” aura of prestige.
“I’ve been a social justice photographer for a long time, mostly on the streets, but with a lot of portraits as well,” says Bari. “This project speaks to a lot of things I feel very strongly about. With these initiatives, we’re never not working to create a better life for marginalized groups. I’m mostly just inspired by everyone else’s work.”
The second floor houses the startling End to End Burners, the former prisoner Marcus Manganni’s sculpture that approximates a hostile chandelier in its concentric layers of acrylic toothbrushes topped with hand-made razor blades. Down the hall, past a curved bookcase of the same sort used in prisons, stands an open area that will provide a makeshift event space for readings, panels and all manner of performances. The coordinators hope to create a small, temporary, yet meaningful community around the nucleus of the museum, a model of the more humane New York attainable with increased citizen input on budgeting. “It was very important to the NYCLU and to us that this exhibition be free and open to the public,” says Trentman, a founding partner of the Soze Agency. “We tried to put ourselves in a central and accessible location, right in the middle of a few different train lines. We want to get as many New Yorkers in here as possible.”
The team behind the museum recognizes that art can only accomplish so much in a political battle, all the while proving that there’s so much art can accomplish. 29 Million Dreams reframes the third-rail topic of police defunding from pie-in-the-sky radicalism to unassailable common sense, diligently laying out how every avenue of city life improves when the NYPD isn’t taking a dime of every dollar. This hope for how much we stand to gain is juxtaposed with a bitter remembrance of all that’s already been lost, the rhetorical concepts given weight and immediacy by the individuals hanging in their balance. Puncturing the bloat isn’t just a financial imperative, but a moral one as well.
“You can’t have a movement with just words,” says Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU. “Words are good. But movements are made of people. Images grab you and make themselves understood in a way that words can’t. Anyone can walk in off the street and appreciate the impact of our almost police-addicted society.”
Museum of Broken Windows is on display at 216 Lafayette Street in Manhattan until 6 May
