Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Fort Greene Park Honors Literary Greats with 'Pieces of Poetry' Mosaic

The community art project celebrates the legacy of Fort Greene icons Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore and Richard Wright.
Fort Greene Monument, BK Reader
Fort Greene Monument Plaza. Photo credit: Fort Greene Park Conservancy/ FB

Fort Greene Park will soon be beautified with a new mosaic installation paying homage to three of the neighborhood's literary greats.

Pieces of Poetry: a Community Mosaic Celebration, a community-generated project led by Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Courtney McClosky, will celebrate the 200th birthday of America's poet laureate Walt Whitman and the legacy of two other Fort Greene literary heroes, Marianne Moore and Richard Wright.

Park volunteers collected buckets of broken glass from the park's running trails and hillsides as "a historic remnant of the park's neglected past." McClosky then used hundreds of broken glass shards and turned them into a mosaic depicting a bookshelf containing the titles of famous works by the three authors.

Pieces of Poetry by Courtney McClosky will come to Fort Greene Park later this month.
Pieces of Poetry by Courtney McClosky will come to Fort Greene Park later this month. Photo credit: Courtney McClosky/ IG

In addition, she held several workshops with students from P.S. 20 The Clinton Hill School, The Greene Hill School, Science, Language & Arts International School and Brooklyn Technical High School to create the mosaic pieces.

The mosaic will be installed near the Monument Plaza in late April and will kick off the Whitman Bicentennial festivities, the Fort Greene Park Conservancy announced. The installation will be on view for one year.

Fort Greene Park and NYC Parks will host an official opening reception with refreshments provided by Peck's on Myrtle Avenue on Saturday, May 4, from 11:00am to 1:00pm. The event is free and open to the public.




Comments