FRED DUIGNAN | Art & the Mills: F.DUIGNAN & Neighbors

Paterson & the Mills

F.Duignan & Neighbors

In 1983, Paterson initiated subsidized housing for artists in two old abandoned
mills in the newly designated Great Falls / SUM Historic District. These two
former silk mills were among many empty factory buildings in the district that
had once manufactured a variety of products including locomotives, guns,
cotton, and especially silk and machinery. Manufacturing had moved to the
South and abroad over the decades and silk had been replaced by rayon. In
the 1980s, all types of artists (painters, musicians, poets, photographers, and
arts workers) were invited to apply to live in the new housing with the hopes
of establishing a creative community and a shop and gallery center for the
City.
Paterson: Art & the Mills- F. Duignan & Neighbors focuses on the visual artists
who lived in the refurbished mills from the 1980s to the early 2000s and some
who still live there today. This exhibition asks what artist housing does for the
artists and what it can, or sometimes cannot, do for the community. This
heterogeneous group of art makers shared this housing, the neighborhood, and
engaged in a raucous, creative interaction. It was much like a ragtag university
housing with open studio doors, lots of noise (jazz musicians), aesthetic
arguments, and good parties and bars. The work and role of painter Fred
Duignan acts as an anchor for the exhibition with his expressive views of the
Mills, the Great Falls, and his portraits of many of the early artist residents.
Among other things, Duignan had played a role as organizer of exhibitions and
made tenuous connections to New York City. For a handful of years, he was
Curator of Contemporary Art at the Paterson Museum within the District,
(1992-97), bringing shows and eccentrics from NYC, exhibits from Korea, and
showcasing Mills artists.
Many of the core artists are in this exhibition. Their work gives an idea of the
breaking of creative boundaries fostered by this unorthodox community and
period. One finds crossovers of painting, sculpture, creative photography with
poetry, music, technology, and the probing of the industrial and social/political
realities. There is darkness and light, conscious and deep unconscious, and the
urban realities of this raw, energetic place. Though not fully supported by the
City in terms of development of needed studio, exhibition, and café spaces,
the artists offered to the neighborhood and to the broader city, artistic
outreach, critical investigations, teachers, local characters, help with arts
programs, school murals, and books of photography which show the changing,
deteriorating, beautiful historic roots of Paterson. Not quite a new Soho but a
new ragged, significant energy center developed.

                                                                                           -Sara Lynn Henry, Curator