NY Daily News Rewriteman Sees His Article Become Art
Most newspaper reporters are resigned to the fact that their stories, whether in print or online, will eventually line a birdcage or appear on a webpage that fades into digital obscurity.
But New York Daily News rewriteman Corky Siemaszko recently had the experience of seeing one of his articles become the subject of a work of art.
Siemaszko's story about Celina Cass, a missing New Hampshire girl who was found dead in August, prompted artist Stephanie Tichenor to create "Celina Cass. Detail," in which the face of a teddy bear is sewn into a piece of pink gingham, and surrounded by jagged black lines.
Tichenor told Barista.net that she "couldn't bring myself to imagine what had happened" to Cass, so her piece "focused on the toys that were left behind."
Tichenor's piece is part of a larger project started by Maya Joseph-Goteine called "365 Days of Print," in which more than 100 multimedia artists use news stories and headlines to create works that convey the experience of reading a newspaper.
The works touch on a variety of themes and events. "The 9/11 Decade," by Jamie House, is a montage showing the World Trade towers amid an explosion of flame. A newspaper headline appears across the lower part of the picture, and in the middle is a woman, dressed in business attire, seated in an office.
Cecil Howell's "Cloud" shows shadowy, ghostlike figures emerging from lines of news copy, with the caption: "The world as a cloud of information, identities, labels, tweets, statuses - words and numbers, rather than color and light."
Some of the works incorporate dollops of media criticism. Eric Enright's "Praise Jesus" depicts the front page of the New York Post with the piece's title appearing at the top as a large, boldface headline.
The rest of the page is blank.
In the caption accompanying the work, Enright notes that its inspiration was a Post cover celebrating Yankees catcher Jesus Montero, who had just hit his first Major League homer.
"Out of context, however, I found it a very appropriate headline for this conservatively-biased and sensationalistic tabloid," Enright writes. "I simply can't imagine, for example, a context where the Post would run a headline such as 'Praise Allah!'"
And then there's Sean Jerd's "NYT September Fifth 2011," which shows advertisements for the kind of high-end products that frequently appear in The New York Times - Cartier watches, Louis Vuitton boots and so on - superimposed over the paper's front and editorial pages. Jerd's message about the uneasy union of journalism and commerce is clear.
Tichenor, for her part, didn't have to look far for a journalist whose work she would follow; Siemaszko is her neighbor in Montclair, N.J. But she didn't tell him right away what she was doing. "I looked at what stories he did, but he didn't know what I was working on until later," she told Barista.net.
In fact, Siemaszko served as Tichenor's muse more than once. His article on how apes at Washington's National Zoo sensed the east coast earthquake seconds before it began inspired a piece called "Earthquake Warning System," which shows what appears to be a gorilla shouting "danger" from a mountaintop.
Siemaszko said Tichenor's work about Cass was "an insight into how this particular reader internalized a story I happened to write. I have built up a lot of callouses from writing thousands of stories about tragic deaths. This was a reminder for me that tales like these matter to people. That they touch people."
He added: "What Stephanie did was a real tribute to a little girl she might not have otherwise known about."
"365 Days of Print" is being exhibited at New Jersey City University until Oct. 27.
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