It is worth clicking through to the original link to see the picture of the artist and the wall she painted.
Special thanks to Heather for the tip.
Tulips and Two-By-Fours - New York Times: "Urban Tactics
Tulips and Two-By-Fours
Bill Zules
“I wanted to paint little flowers around the perimeter,” said Pasqualina Azzarello.
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By JAKE MOONEY
Published: August 6, 2006
PASQUALINA AZZARELLO, an artist from the Dumbo section of Brooklyn, likes to distribute her work through unorthodox channels; she once painted 500 rocks she had gathered from the waterfront, then took nighttime walks around the neighborhood to leave them where people would discover them in the morning.
One night in March, she set out for the corner of Front and Jay Streets, where a 32-story residential tower is going up, on a similar mission. She took paintings of flowers that she had made on pieces of wood, propped the pictures up against the construction fence and slipped away, hoping they would be carried off to happy homes.
In the world of New York construction, where the shop talk often is of tons of steel, thousands of square feet and billions of dollars, art on scraps of wood is small potatoes. But sometimes slight tales are worth telling, especially when, as in Ms. Azzarello’s case, they involve surprises, and unusual alliances.
The people who found Ms. Azzarello’s paintings early the next morning happened to be the site construction workers, and they did not snatch the artwork away as she had expected. Instead, they screwed the pictures to the site’s blue plywood fence, just down from the building permits. It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship, on a busy corner of a neighborhood where long-established artists complain of rising rents and the costs of development.
Two nights later, Ms. Azzarello, who stands a little over five feet tall, with a bob of short black hair, was sitting in Superfine, a popular restaurant and bar near the construction site, when a friend walked in with something to show her. Outside by the paintings, someone had set out a glass jar, and in it were 12 dollar bills and some change.
The money had been left by the workers. “Maybe she could buy some paint, some brushes,” Jimmy Vita, the site’s foreman, remembers thinking.
At the time, Ms. Azzarello didn’t know where the cash had come from, but she took the gesture as a good omen. “When I saw money sitting in that jar in New York City in the middle of the night,” she said, “somehow a certain vitality became apparent to me.”
As it happened, Ms. Azzarello, who is 31, had a bigger notion for the construction fence, which encloses a former parking lot where she had once displayed and sold her paintings. “I wanted to paint little flowers around the perimeter,” she said. “I love the grass growing through the sidewalk. To me, it’s this little reminder of how life keeps living.”
Emboldened by the impromptu tip jar, she approached Mr. Vita, who has silver hair and the tan, thick forearms of someone who works outside. “I introduced myself as the person who made the flowers,” Ms. Azzarello said, “and Jimmy Vita said” — here she adopted a tough-guy voice — “ ‘Pasqualina, thank you so much. We love the flowers.’ ”
She told him about her idea for the fence, she said, “coming from the assumption that there’s no way they’re going to let me do that.”
“Number one, they’re busy people. And who needs something else to worry about?”
Mr. Vita listened, clicked on the walkie-talkie he keeps clipped to the pocket of his jeans, spent a minute talking to Kenny Temple, the site’s Teamsters foreman, clicked off, and told Ms. Azzarello to stay safe and to paint to her heart’s content.
“I assured her that nobody from the job would bother her,” he said, “and if they did, then let me know, and we’d do what we had to do.”
She set to work along Front Street, painting a row of white tulips 18 inches high along the fence’s bottom edge.
“I felt like I was 5 years old,” Ms. Azzarello said recently, sitting in Superfine in paint-splattered jeans with a dab of primer on one of her fingers. “I was sitting in the dirt painting flowers around the construction site, and to me that’s what it’s all about, because I’ve always been interested in the construction site as a location where changes take place, and whether or not I like the changes, I think it’s important to look at them and to regard them, to work with them.”
MS. AZZARELLO, who has seen artist friends forced by high rents to leave the neighborhood, said the flowers were a direct extension of her thoughts on development. But aside from a few studiously general remarks — “Personally, I love old buildings” and “I also love a big sky next to a river” — she is keeping those thoughts to herself.
The tulips did lead to at least one conversation, with Alex Hurwitz, a project manager for the Hudson Companies, the site’s developer, who spotted them and asked Mr. Vita whether Ms. Azzarello might want to paint the entire fence, top to bottom. “I said, ‘Well, I’m sure she would, for a price,’ ” he said.
What followed was a two-hour talk between developer and artist in a coffee shop on Front Street. It ended with Mr. Hurwitz commissioning Ms. Azzarello to paint the entire fence. “Not to sound corny, but it’s very Dumbo,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “It’s a very artist-friendly neighborhood, and we don’t want to do anything to interfere with that.”
Ms. Azzarello would not say what she is being paid — she said she did not want to set a “going rate” for her services — but clearly the deal has meant a much larger canvas for her. She savors her hours of painting and talking with the curious people who stop, drawn by the many flowers, the occasional bird or sun, or the small messages — “Thank You” or “What does Humility Require?” She will be painting the fence through the summer, she said, and then she hopes to exhibit and sell the panels from the wall.
As promised, the workers have not bothered her. To the contrary, they gave her a hard hat, which they encouraged her to wear when there is falling debris. Sometimes they even give iced tea to her, and tell her about their own hidden artistic sides: one man has painted hundreds of duck decoys; another has a daughter pursuing a Master’s of Fine Arts at Brooklyn College.
One day, said Ms. Azzarello, a brawny worker approached her with a question: “Can you paint a flower on my hat?”
“I said, absolutely,” she said. “Big, broad-shouldered, big muscles, wants a flower on his hat.”
Mr. Temple, sitting in the condo’s sales office during a break, said the workers noticed Ms. Azzarello’s long hours and the intricacy of her work.
“She’s one of us,” Mr. Vita said, smiling.
“She’s not in the union,” Mr. Temple, tall and goateed, added, with a barely perceptible smile of his own.
Mr. Vita laughed.
“She’s an apprentice,” he said.
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