Launched as part of The Shed’s inaugural year program, ‘Open Call’ is a large-scale commissioning program for early-career NYC based artists. Esteban Jefferson’s contribution consists of two paintings of a street memorial at an intersection in Brooklyn that are dedicated to his friend Devra Freelander, who passed away on that corner. On the street corner where she died, a community of Freelander’s loved ones have maintained and added to a grassroots memorial adorned with flowers, candles, and photographs that is full of vibrant colors reminiscent of her neon sculptures. For We Love You Devra Freelander, Jefferson will create a pair of large-scale paintings of this street memorial, tracking the resilience and growth of the site over one year.
This guerilla memorial grew as her loved ones assembled it, creating a living sculpture wrapped around a lamppost. One of the paintings depicts the memorial the day after Devra passed away; the other painting shows the memorial one year later. I met Devra when we were both artists-in-residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s (LMCC) Workspace Program from 2016 to 2017. At the time, the nine-month residency was held in the old Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters near Wall Street, and we gravitated toward each other as the two youngest artists participating.
(…) The paintings are intended to be read from left to right, chronologically for a Western viewer, in order to tell the story of this memorial over time. The first one depicts the memorial on the day after she passed: there are flowers wrapped around the lamppost, balloons and candles. Pedestrians are milling around, checking things out and leaving candles and bouquets. The memorial has a ghostly presence. This wasn’t planned, it is just how the painting came out. The second painting captures the scene one year later. No one is there, and the form of the memorial has shifted. It’s now looped up and over the lamppost because the scaffolding that had been on that corner has been taken down. The colors of the flowers remind me of the colors of Devra’s sculptures.
–Esteban Jefferson