This Side of Paradise

What We Do

This Side of Paradise

1125 Grand Concourse, Bronx, New York

Description

No Longer Empty and Friends of the Andrew Freedman will open the doors of the Andrew Freedman Home on April 4, 2012. The Home once built to be a haven, a paradise, for the rich elderly who had lost their fortunes. Bequeathed by millionaire Andrew Freedman, the Home provided not only food and shelter but all the accoutrements of a rich and civilized life style – white glove dinner service, a grand ball room, a wood-paneled library, billiard room and a social committee who organized concerts, opera performances and the like.

For the last 30 years, Mid Bronx Senior Citizens Council, one of the largest nonprofits located in and serving the South Bronx, has been providing community services and hosting events for the community from these expansive halls and ballroom spaces. Today, Mid Bronx Senior Citizens Council and No Longer Empty are collaborating to bring you This Side of Paradise, an exhibition to the past to reconnect with the vision of Andrew Freedman and bridge the time to today’s Bronx and its realities.

The exhibition and its extensive public programming onsite and offsite will draw together the economic and social history of the Home with the present day realities of the Bronx and its residents.

The selected artists' will work in a site-specific manner and will respond to such issues as memory, immigration, storytelling, aging and the creation of fantasy that the original concept of the Home “being poor in style” suggests.

This Side of Paradise will celebrate human ingenuity, the strength of the human spirit and the resilience needed to fashion beauty, hope and rejoicing from the simplest of resources.

This project is a collaboration with the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council and is made possible by the generosity and enthusiasm of Bronx Council of the Arts, A Blade of Grass Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation and Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.