Current | Lee Brozgol & Charles Jarm: Eldridge & Mulberry

Powers | Lowenfels presents Lee Brozgol & Charles Jarm: Eldridge & Mulberry. This exhibit will be hyper-local—our gallery is located at Stanton & Eldridge, while Brozgol worked on Eldridge, and Jarm close by on Mulberry Street. April 15 - May 23, with an opening night reception on April 15, 6-8 pm.

Lee Brozgol’s “Tenement Series,” graphite drawings from the late 70s to early 80s, depict the gritty Lower East Side that Brozgol (formerly Brozgold) knew so well. 

Brozgol (1941-2021) was part of the same scene as Martin Wong, Anton van Dalen, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and even Jane Dickson (though she was more of a Times Square figure). Lee was a queer Sephardic Jew, a fixture of the neighborhood for half a century, and worked tirelessly as an activist, community organizer, and social worker. 

Brozgol’s brick-by-brick drawings and obsessive attention to street trash and detritus, as well as the architectural designs of balconies and keystones, transport us to an uneasy, yet exciting, time and place and show us precisely what he saw, real and fantasy. 

The “Tenement Series” drawings complement his friend Anton van Dalen’s “Night Street” series, and his meticulous brickwork foreshadows the paintings of Martin Wong, which also feature Lower East Side architecture and brickwork.

As much as Lee’s work is about the Lower East Side, his Chicago roots seep into his style, and one is reminded of the imagist Roger Brown and some of the Harry Who artists, like Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson. 

Over his career, Brozgol worked in several mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and public mosaics. Writing for the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote of his 1994 Christopher Street-Stonewall Station murals as, “The most engaging historical homage I encountered [they were] small but surprisingly powerful.” 

In the early 1970s, Charles Jarm (1932-2021), a gay Chinese-American, lived in New York City on Mulberry, where Little Italy and Chinatown overlap. He was nearly forty years old; inspired, he began carving large wooden figures in his living room. 

Photographs from the period document Jarm working naked, chiseling the nude wooden subjects flat on the floor of his apartment. The half-sized and full-sized men and women that he carved and constructed were inventive and ambitious.

His figures are imposing and confident. Constructed of lumber-store-bought thick pine boards, Jarm carved the figures in shallow relief and then further defined them with graphite to strengthen and add volume to flat details. Each figure is distinct and likely a portrait of a friend.

The photographic documentation and performance of creating the work appear integral to the physical work itself. These contact sheets provide so much-they answer some questions, but ask so many more. 

Not only did Jarm live where Chinatown and Little Italy overlap, but his love life did, too. His lifelong partner was an Italian-American named Rocco Sacramone, a music executive with CGC Records.

When Jarm created these works, he was working against the grain; as it were, the Downtown art scene was more abstract and conceptual. In a sense, it was more like the portraits painted by Chuck Close and the Pop-Art woodblock figures by Marisol.

Figuratively speaking, as Eldridge and Mulberry run parallel to each other, Brozgol and Jarm never crossed paths; their work now meets at 53 Stanton.