Artists Registry

In the summer of 1978, after the second World Trade Center Tower was finished and before the highway below was demolished to make room for another glass-faced building with its grand lobby planted with palm trees, downtown artists Tia Ballantine and Brendt Berger decided that to use that highway as an open air studio, creating one painting 800’x75’ as an act of love, a gift to the people of NYC, one that might transform urban blight to urban park. Their work would appear as a stark B&W painting for those in the towers but would double as an exuberant garden of color and shape for those below, suitable for people, working men and women. The highway was a perfect canvas, washed clean by summer rain, in a perfect location. Every person who worked in an office facing the river could look down and see the painting, watch the process of art, and then enjoy for years the finished ‘canvas,’ and neighborhood residents could visit the abstract garden as it grew. It wouldn’t be a flash in the pan, here today, gone tomorrow. Although the highway would never again carry cars, it was not scheduled for immediate demolition.

Materials were not a problem; the artists had access to hundreds of gallons of high quality exterior grade surplus paint that could be easily transported, day by day, little by little, to the site in shopping carts. And so, one night, long after midnight, they brought gallons of white paint up to the highway and laid down the basic structure of the painting. Using rollers to create a wide variety of geometric shapes – circles, triangles, travelling lines – they created first the basic outlines of the central diamond and then the chevrons bending from that center. When dawn arrived, the space, 800’ x 75’, had been claimed, and for the next six weeks, the artists returned to develop the painting, daily dancing color and line onto the surface, watching an idea develop into welcoming space. The highway, once a symbol of urban blight, positioned beneath Trade Towers became an unexpected surprise. As the painting grew, more and more people arrived to enjoy lunch while sitting on the newly painted highway dividers, transformed to inviting colorful benches, or to ride bicycles lazily along the lines that threaded from one side of the painting to the next. Roller skaters pirouetted from circle to circle, and joggers stepped lively from one shape to the next. It became a happy place to be, a garden of shape and color on the surface and a striking abstract painting from above.

Completed in August of 1978, it remained undamaged on the highway’s surface for five years – until the highway itself was demolished. No colors faded; no paint chipped or peeled. It was a friendly place, a sanctuary for weeds and color separated from the speed of the city. Neither artist currently lives in NYC. Tia Ballantine lives in the Sonoran desert north of the Mexican Border where she continues to paint and write. She continues to show her paintings and has published five books of poems and a book of short-short stories, all available on Amazon. Brendt Berger lives in Southern Colorado where he manages the Museum of Friends, housing a collection of art amassed during Ballantine and Berger’s twenty-five year marriage plus some works of art donated by Berger’s current partner, Maria Cocchiarelli.