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For immediate release Public Art Fund presents? Paul Ramirez Jonas Storefront flag installations bring alternative historical calendar to neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. On View April 17 - May 29, 2001 New York, NY - Beginning April 17, 2001, the Public Art Fund presents a multi-site installation utilizing festive flags bearing a unique historical almanac of information by artist Paul Ramirez Jonas. Using the multi-colored flags often found decorating town squares, street fairs and bodegas, Ramirez Jonas creates Every Day, a string of vinyl, brightly colored swatches that form a calendar highlighting important historical moments, cultural holidays and ordinary events. At five locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens these colorful flags mark five local businesses with many zig-zagging strands and help mark the everyday as out of the ordinary. Every Day replaces the blank surface of the brightly colored promotional flag with texts and images that create a calendar in which each individual flag represents a day of the year. The resulting almanac is a record of different events that took place on each date, and reinforces the idea that everyday is significant. However, unlike the usual display that declares that an important event took place, this project simply states that something happened on this day - a celebration of the victorious, the disastrous and the mundane. The calendar entries include satellite images of catastrophic hurricanes, personal diary entries from persons famous and unknown, the phases of the moon, and important news headlines and obituaries. Ramirez Jonas gathered the information for this project from such diverse sources as the New York Times, The Herald Tribune, the historical weather data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Historical Significant Events Imagery Database and the personal diaries of such historical and literary figures as Lewis and Clark, John Woodhouse Audubon, Che Guevarra, Kathe Kollwitz, Virginia Wolf and Louisa May Alcott, amongst many others. Although all the events are specific to the dates, all references to the year they took place have been removed, thus collapsing the chronology into the same unspecified time. The personal diaries are written in the first person leaving the author's identity anonymous. The headlines are edited to remove all authors' names. The only remaining proper names are those of hurricanes and countries and cities from around the world. The resulting timeline juxtaposes the named and the unnamed, reflecting the permanent and ephemeral, the remembered and the forgotten. For example, some of the flags read "July 13: Felix," "January 6: Jazz Trumpeter died at age 75 . . ." and September 11: Ousted leader dies at 72 in exile. Ruled for 20 years until he was ousted, died in exile here today at Medical Center after a long battle with heart, kidney and lung ailments. He was 72 years old." Locations for Every Day are:
Every Day is a project of the Public Art Fund, commissioned through In the Public Realm, a program of site specific proposals and projects by New York artists. In the Public Realm is supported by The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Office of the Brooklyn Borough President, The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, The Silverweed Foundation, The Chase Manhattan Foundation, and friends of the Public Art Fund. About Public Art Fund The Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs. # # # Contact:
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