Meet The UCA Muralists: Catherine Rutgers, Drive Time Radio

When artist Catherine Rutgers moved to her apartment just off Church Avenue in 1988, she says the strip was quite a different place.

“I could get everything I needed within a few blocks on Church Ave,” she explained. “There used to be a hardware store, a luncheonette. There weren’t so many phone stores, and the 99-cent stores hadn’t taken over.”

She’s seen those changes happen over time, and that change is constant. And at the moment, in part because of the Uncover Church Avenue project that is installing one of her murals on The Farm on Adderley Restaurant Supply Annex/Drive Time Radio Show space at 1111 Church Avenue, Catherine says that change is having a positive impact on the community.

“The thing that’s so exciting about having Am-Thai and these other places is that these blocks at night are dead,” she said. “When it gets dark, it’s like, where did everybody go? So if you can get a little bit of positive nightlife going on down there, that’s going to be great. When people start having reasons to come out, the livelier it is, and the better off you are.”

Catherine sees the changes to Church Avenue as a good example of the broken windows theory, where you fix the small problems before they have a chance to escalate into larger ones.

“When I first heard about that, I understood the concept to be a positive one,” she said. “If you care for your environment, people take pride in it, and they become more involved and invested in it, and so when you fix those small things, you build community.”

She believes that the Church Avenue BID’s UCA initiative is just the sort of project that will help connect and engage the neighborhood.

“The way that Uncover Church Avenue has handled it is so perfect,” she said. “Getting people involved, soliciting artists from the neighborhood, getting the community to vote. It’s just right.”

Getting to her involvement in this project has been an interesting path. To go back a little way in her career, she was working as copy chief for a consumer electronics magazine until April 1, 2001, when she left to start her own business for her art. She scheduled her website launch for September 11, 2001, and as you might expect, the launch, and the business, didn’t go so well.

“The bottom just fell out,” she said. “There was no work coming into New York. It could not have been a more disastrous time to start an art business.”

But in trying to build the business, to publicize it and create a website, she found a new artistic outlet in the digital medium. “Why don’t I try to fool around with this?” she thought. “Why try to make it perfect, to look exactly like the three-dimensional work?” And that’s where it started, and it’s what she’s been doing since 2001.

Because she had been doing (and still sometimes does) three-dimensional artwork before that time, she has a lot of resources for her digital manipulations. She’s using things that originate in the 3D world for source material, she explains.

“It’s collage–it’s multi-dimensional, but it’s on a screen,” she said. “I like to take these technologies and tweak them to my own devices.”

One of the reasons she loves living here is the access to nature, which she uses as a source material. She tends two gardens around her building, and pays attention to all the daily changes in the world around her.

“I’m very much aware of my environment, and I’m interested in the natural elements,” she said. “If you look closely enough at almost every urban environment, there are things growing, things that are alive that we didn’t put there.”

So when she thought about the murals on Church Avenue, she thought of the idea of using the spectrum. “It’s based on a natural phenomenon,” she said. “I think that’s one of the reasons people respond to them.”

She considered the needs of the store owners, current and future, as well. She left space if the owners ever want to add anything to it, and the wide lines will be easy to repair in case of damage or graffiti. Not that she believes anyone will target any of the murals, something she came to understand when she worked on another one in the ’80s.

This is not her first mural, and not even her first one on a roll-down gate. She was living as a squatter in an abandoned building in the South Bronx (the tenants eventually ended up owning the building), and one summer she decided to add some color to the security gate on the storefront downstairs.

“I had a step ladder, and I worked at night by spotlights,” she said. “It took me two days, and it was great. People from the neighborhood, ones I didn’t know, would come by and bring me something to drink, and would make sure I was okay. We were in the graffiti capital of the world, but this was never tagged the entire time that I lived there.”

It’s that sense of community, of people looking out for each other, that Catherine hopes her art can help foster. That, and just making her neighbors’ days a little brighter.

“We need more color, people thrive on it,” she said. “Hopefully I make art you can live with.”

All this week we’ll be introducing you to the artists behind the Church Avenue Business Improvement District’s Uncover Church Avenue murals, which will be painted this spring on roll-down gates along Church between Stratford and Argyle Roads. They’re going to need volunteers to help prep the gates for painting—we’ll let you know when, but if you’d like to sign up, contact Melissa Skolnick, Program Coordinator at the BID at 718-282-2500 ext 63237 or MelissaSk@churchavenue.org.