These Artists Live in a Homeless Shelter

Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at an unusual art show in Brooklyn. We’ll also look at how short trips on Citi Bikes brought in big money for some riders.

The gallery space looked like any gallery space, with whiter-than-white brick walls, high ceilings and tallish tables where guests could stand with drinks and hors d’oeuvres.

But this gallery, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was different: It was in a complex that houses one of the city’s largest migrant shelters.

The art on the walls was the work of two men who have lived in the shelter for several months. One of them, Roger Miranda, a former art professor from Venezuela, painted some of the canvases under the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Shelter managers noticed him leaving for his open-air studio, easel in hand, and figured out that he was an artist with talent and aspirations. They soon found a place in an office where he could leave his canvases — when stacked together, the paintings were too bulky to store by the cot he sleeps on. Eventually they moved his cot to a larger space where he could set up a makeshift studio.

Then a manager showed Miranda’s paintings on a text message thread to other officials of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs the shelter. “Everyone said, ‘Who is this person?’ and ‘We should have a show,” said Adam Shrier, a spokesman for the agency who got involved with the shelter’s hospitality and logistics team, as preparations for the show began.

To agency officials, the show was a testament to the way everyone settled into their roles at the shelter, especially staff members who have come to know the migrants who have moved in since it opened last year. “There’s a relationship that develops with the people in our care that goes beyond what you see in a data report about how many meals were served or how many vaccines were provided,” Shrier said.

The shelter houses more than 3,000 people — 2,400 single adults and 800 parents and children. Their presence unsettled neighbors in nearby Clinton Hill even before a stabbing outside the complex in June and two fatal shootings nearby in July. Some residents said last month that they were sympathetic toward migrants who had fled violence and repression — but they were unhappy with trash on nearby streets and encampments that appeared under the expressway and in a park. Migrants can stay in the shelter for 30 or 60 days, but can ask for extensions.

Miranda, 77, said his last show was at the University of Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela, several years ago. He said he taught art for 30 years after earning a doctorate in 1981. But, he said, “I could not accept the political system that we have.” Since he left, the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, declared himself the victor of a disputed election.

Miranda said that painting in the shelter had been difficult “because there’s a lot of noise here,” so he tried the parking lot under the B.Q.E. He described one of the canvases in the show, “Immigración,” as an abstract portrayal of the difficulties he had experienced on the way to New York.

The other artist in the show, Marcos Ferrera Batista, said that his surrealist drawings showed the faces of asylum seekers he had seen on the way to New York from Brazil. He said that the journey had included being kidnapped in Mexico while trying to find his children, who had fallen into the hands of traffickers. Before he escaped and crossed the border into Texas, the kidnappers demanded a ransom from relatives he had left behind in Brazil, he said.

He said that a church group had paid for his airline ticket to New York and had given him the address of the shelter.

Ferrera Batista — who once toured with a circus troupe and played drums with a samba-reggae group — said that art had served as therapy as well as a means of storytelling. He said that the faces in his drawings showed the anxiety and fear of migrants he had met and “the pain they went through.”

In the drawings, he said, “They’re always in the dark. But there is always a light in the distance.”

Weather

Partly sunny with a chance for showers, with a high near 77. Slight chance of showers in the evening, with a low around 64.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Oct. 3 (Rosh Hashana).

The latest Metro news

Cuomo’s handling of Covid: Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York, said he could not recall seeing or revising a New York State Health Department report on how the state handled the early stages of the pandemic.

Migrant help: As public sympathy for migrants decreases, a group of New York’s most powerful philanthropies is planning to spend millions of dollars this fall on efforts to make asylum seekers more self-sufficient.
The police push back on criticism: Police officials defended the officers involved in the subway shooting in Brooklyn on Sunday, saying that they would release footage from the officers’ body cameras in the “next couple of days.”
Atlantic City child abuse: Marty Small Sr. of Atlantic City, and his wife, the superintendent of the Atlantic City schools, were accused of beating and punching their teenage daughter.
MAGA fashion show: The America First Patriotic Designer Showcase, a conservative-themed fashion show, was held at a warehouse amid clusters of suburban office parks on Long Island.
What we’re watching: Randy Mastro, former deputy mayor of New York City, who withdrew his nomination to be the city’s top lawyer, and Mark Green, a former public advocate, are the guests on “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” which airs at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. [CUNY TV]

Making money by gaming Citi Bikes

A few Citi Bike riders have figured out how to make big money from what my colleague Christopher Maag said was the perfect New York hustle. It worked like this: Borrow a Citi Bike, ride it one block, wait 15 minutes, then ride it back.

And pocket several thousand dollars a month — under ideal conditions, and with a lot of work.

Citi Bike uses various tactics to keep bike stands from being too full — or empty. The bike-sharing program, which is operated by Lyft, has trucks that drive around the city carrying workers and bikes. The workers drop off the bikes where they are needed.

But Citi Bike also has a program called Bike Angels for users who move bikes in exchange for points they can cash in for items like water bottles, backpacks, membership discounts and gift cards. Some ultracompetitive Bike Angels began trying to rack up the most points. Citi Bike called them Power Angels.

A few users then figured out how to maximize the financial benefits. How they do it is somewhat complicated, but it involved using Lyft’s app to keep track of which stations needed bikes — and exploiting the algorithm that awards the points. The users do this by what is known as “station flipping,” moving bikes from a full Citi Bike stand to a mostly empty one — and back again, after 15 minutes, the length of time for the algorithm to reset.

When the flippers return the bikes to the stand they had emptied in the first place, the algorithm credits them with the most points possible.

Lyft relies on tens of thousands of Bike Angels and says that fewer than 10 have engaged in flipping. A few Power Angels earn enough money to pay some bills: One legendary Bike Angel, known to other riders only as Tommy, was rumored to have earned $60,000 last year.

But last month Lyft sent an email warning flippers to stop or risk being kicked out of the Citi Bike program.

No flipping means less income. But Bike Angel work still pays. The current top Angel goes by the username NS143. In the first 18 days of September, NS143 accrued 19,394 points, worth about $3,800.

METROPOLITAN diary

At the Ballet

Dear Diary:

In fall 1983, the Joffrey Ballet was reviving “Parade,” a brilliant ballet combining the efforts of Satie, Massine, Cocteau and Picasso, at City Center.

As we waited for the program to start, an older woman seated next to me asked if I was excited to see this great work.

Although I know little of dance history, I did my best to explain to her what we were about to see. She smiled, nodded and asked a few questions, and then the performance began.

At intermission, she turned to me.

“What do you think?”

I answered enthusiastically, deploying the little knowledge of dance that I possessed.

She was equally enthusiastic but much better informed.

“Well, since we have bonded over dance,” I said, “I should introduce myself. My name is Gary Clinton.”

She smiled and shook my hand.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Gary,” she said. “My name is Agnes de Mille.”

— Gary Clinton

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Steven Moity and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].