CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/24/2021

Cy Gavin imagines a future in 'Young, Gifted and Black'

Cy Gavin's 2016 oil painting "Underneath the George Washington Bridge" is reproduced from Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists, a Staff Pick every day, but especially during Black History Month. Gavin writes, "In 2010, when I moved to the city, the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy was at its most robust, accounting for a record 685,724 stops in 2011… After Floyd v. City of New York and a resulting NYPD mandate requiring officers to justify the reason for a stop, that number had dwindled by 2016 to only 12,404—the year I made this painting. In the context of a nationwide discourse on police brutality, stop-and-frisk makes simply walking the streets, parks, or really anywhere police convene feel dangerous—not only for the disproportionate risk that existing has assigned to me, but because of a heightened sense of embitterment from a police force so unflatteringly and publicly spanked in 2013. Blue Lives Matter rallies and an endless stream of inflammatory remarks from the city’s police commissioner at the time seemed only to bolster officers to strut even more menacingly around the streets. In the case of Washington Heights, however, cops skulked along in unmarked cars, often tricked out with chrome rims and booming sound systems or, less commonly, in repurposed yellow cabs, turning on their sirens and lights simply to shock residents into a moment of confused and repulsed acknowledgment. Inhabiting a city that playfully threatens to destroy you at a whim becomes exhausting. The privacy of this location under the bridge allowed me to draw, read, write, and think critically about the world without the crushing awareness of being relentlessly observed. Here, I found I could bring a notebook and plan actionable steps for the future—and I could more readily imagine a future…" ⁠