To preserve and to protect vanishing signs: activism through art, ethnography, and linguistics in a gentrifying city

Abstract

This article explores how a semiotics of the artistic aesthetics of New York City storefronts is deployed as activism against processes of gentrification and redevelopment. We examine how this creative endeavor by two local photographers compares to our own ethnographic and linguistic interventions uncovering and addressing storefront signage in gentrifying Brooklyn. We also compare this art activism to the ways in which developers and nations use art in various ways in the service of their placemaking goals. In doing so, we highlight both the innovative power of artistic framing to preserve and protect storefronts as salvage anthropology as well as the limits of this effort. We conclude with a discussion of how ethnography and activist art can yield different, yet critical mobilizations in the pursuit of maintaining multicultural communities and diversity in the neo-liberalizing city.

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