Photographs of the Port of the 1970s will be exhibited in New York

Photographic works by the Portuguese artist Elvira Leite in 1977 in Porto will be on display at the Mishkin Gallery in New York from March 13th.

[dropcap type=”background”]T[/dropcap]he exhibition, entitled “Pedagogy of the Streets: Port 1977“, will be presented on March 13 at 5 pm (five more hours in Lisbon) and will be available until 9 May at a gallery belonging to Baruch College, University of New York.

According to a statement, “Pedagogy of the streets: Porto 1977” is a set of study photographs that the painter and educator Elvira Leite carried out around the Porto Cathedral, in the Pena Ventosa area, in interaction with children and to analyze their behaviour and receptivity to new methodologies of teaching in public spaces, in the 1970s.

The exhibition counts on the curatorship of two professors of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, Lúcia Almeida Matos and Susana Lourenço Marques, who is 2016 presented the exhibition “Who taught you? – Nobody” in Porto, with the works of Elvira Milk.

The image show will gather archival materials from the Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL), a state housing program created in 1974 to respond to the housing crisis in Portugal, a project that, according to the statement, gave opportunities and hopes to artists to create better-living conditions and maintain community bonds.

The statement from Baruch College, which will host the exhibition, explains that SAAL has tried to emphasize the social and collective part of design, construction and administration, which has inspired Elvira Leite to see the public space as the stage for projects aimed at children, where children to find things of personal interest in the space around them.

The objective of the Local Ambulatory Support Service was to “develop urban renewal actions led by architects and artists all over the country, with the aim of combating housing shortages that hit the most popular classes,” wrote the University of Porto in 2016.

For its part, the Mishkin Gallery of New York describes that “for a brief but explosively creative year after the dissolution of SAAL [1976], the streets of Porto – seen as an unhealthy neighbourhood of the working class in the centre of the city – – have become a site for art, participation and discourse for and for children. ”

“Pedagogy of the streets: Porto 1977” in New York has support from the University of Porto, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Baruch College and the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences.

Elvira Leite was born in Porto in 1936 and pursued an artistic and pedagogic career after graduating from the Porto Superior School of Fine Arts in 1962.

In addition to being a teacher of primary, secondary and university education and also engaged in cultural activities, she was a consultant to UNESCO – United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and collaborated with the Portuguese government in training actions.

Elvira Leite was decorated in May 2014 by the President of the Republic Cavaco Silva with the Order of the Infante D. Henrique.