“When I came to this village, I was adamant about contributing to the village. I did not want to come and take; I wanted to give.” So says Ze’ev Willy Neumann, impish creator of works of public art that tickle the imagination, of his arrival in Saugerties 17 years ago. He has been giving to the community ever since, and now is hoping that those who have enjoyed his work will give back by helping to replace much-loved twin Love Knot sculptures in Saugerties and Woodstock that have deteriorated due to exposure to the elements.
If you visit these towns with any regularity, you know the Love Knots: glossy, lipstick-red, climbable, reclinable objects in the shape of a heart, each incorporating both an infinity symbol and a teardrop. “I wanted to make something that binds the two villages, to bring people together,” Willy relates. The concept of a loveseat caught his fancy. “At first, I didn’t want to use hearts. Hearts are yucky and kitschy. But I wanted to send a message, not an artistic statement. I decided to create a one-liner that you can draw in the air, and I wanted to make it somewhat proportional to people’s size.”
Willy approached the late local philanthropist Mark Braunstein, founder of Markertek, to fund the Love Knot project, and Braunstein donated a down payment for the materials. “The originals were layers of wood cutouts. But I should’ve coated them with resin before painting them.” The twin sculptural benches were both installed in 2013, unveiled with pomp and ceremony on the lawn of Marie’s Bazaar on Route 212 in downtown Woodstock by supervisor Jeremy Wilber and at the corner of Main and Market streets in Saugerties by supervisor Kelly Myers. “Immediately I regretted it was made out of wood,” Willy says. “Wood expands and contracts.” The two towns took ownership of the Love Knots as public art for $1 each, assuming responsibility for insuring them, and are now hosting a fundraising campaign to replace them with fiberglass facsimiles.
Since his years of operating a combined cabinetry business and sculpture studio in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, Willy had cherished a wish to create palpable three-dimensional art that would inspire a desire to touch as well as look, to “break that fourth wall. You go by a Henry Moore, you want to hug it. Same with Brancusi, who is my main influence. Blind people do not get to experience sculpture. If they go to the Louvre, they’re given a little model to touch.”
Over the decades, Willy moved from two dimensions to three and “built a nice body of art” that embodied this philosophy, including a whole series titled “Do Touch.” His leap into public art installations was inspired by 9/11, which he witnessed as a plume of smoke in the distance while installing a custom cabinet on the Upper West Side. When a call went out for a memorial sculpture to commemorate the tragedy, he submitted a proposal to install plaques at viewpoints all over New York City, whose combined perspectives would all converge on the World Trade Center site.
His concept wasn’t chosen, but he decided to create a piece of it on his own on Richardson Street in Williamsburg, near his studio. Right on the pavement, late at night and without official permission or street closure, he painted 60-foot-tall, stylized silhouettes of the Twin Towers, titled Casting Shadows. “Every year I go back to redo it. Just as memory fades, so does the paint on the asphalt. It has to do with emotion. It was guerrilla art in 2002, but by 2003 it was no longer guerrilla.”
Young Willy
Willy’s gut reaction to the destruction of 9/11 is deeply rooted in war-torn personal history. Born in Belgium in 1947 to Jewish refugees who had fled Hungary in 1944, he emigrated as an infant with his parents to the brand-new nation of Israel. His grandparents who had stayed behind in Hungary ended up dying in Auschwitz. His family were secular Jews, but embraced Zionism, viewing the Jewish state as a necessary refuge from persecution rather than “the land of our forefathers.”
He reminisces about a “beautiful childhood in Israel” in prefabricated housing thrown up in the middle of an orchard, roaming barefoot and gorging on oranges right off the trees. He was a lithe, restless child, excelling at gymnastics until a botched tonsillectomy at the age of 10 spiraled into more serious health issues. It was during a lengthy recuperation that his mother began to bring him art books, from which he copied Leonardo da Vinci drawings. “That’s how I dissolved from being an athlete to an artist,” he says. “I had all this creative energy.”
Young Willy learned to speak Hebrew well enough to begin writing poetry in it, but he was hampered by dyslexia and did not thrive in a regular high school. So, he switched to art school, where he found mentorship and encouragement for his talents, until he reached the age of compulsory military service at 16. He was then drafted into the Golani Brigade of the infantry, and was about to complete his two-and-a-half-year stint when the Six-Day War broke out in June of 1967. His unit was sent north to the Golan Heights on the Syrian border, “just before the ceasefire.” He has wild stories to tell of encounters with “undisciplined” Syrian conscripts, noting, “Most of my service was ambushes.”
Although that war was brief, the sense of jubilation in the wake of Israel’s successes in seizing territory in Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank spawned sociopolitical trends that Willy found unsettling — notably the baal teshuva movement, urging secular Jews to become more religious, wear tefillin and embrace expansionism as their historical destiny. “It turned me off,” he says. “I realized that we’re not going to give up all these places that we conquered. My parents came here to get away from antisemitism. My father came and built this country.”
He found work as an artist with a successful design firm that created currency and postage stamps for the young nation. But veterans in Israel were required to perform some weeks of service in the army reserves annually until the age of 40. When the Jordanian Civil War broke out in 1970, he was dispatched to the border with Jordan, his unit caught between the PLO and King Hussein’s troops. “We were in the middle,” he recalls. “There were nightly shootouts.”
Willy didn’t object to patrolling Israel’s remote border country, but the idea of having to go armed in a “civil setting” where he might be provoked into shooting a rock-throwing Palestinian child weighed on his conscience, and he turned down offers to take officer training. “I heard that next year’s reserve might be in the West Bank. I was just shocked. I went to my commander and said, ‘I’m not going to be an occupier. You can arrest me right now if you want to.’”
The officer took the hint, and Willy didn’t get called up again until the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where he spent half a year in the Sinai desert. In his Saugerties apartment he still keeps a souvenir of that sojourn: a dry, shriveled sprig of rose of Jericho (Anastatica hierochuntica), a desert plant that can lie dormant for years, but springs back to life when placed in a cup of water.
By then, while off-duty, he was working in the movie industry as a set-builder, prop-maker and grip. Richard Harris and Geraldine Chaplin were among the stars who came to shoot movies in the dramatic Israeli landscape. He found himself impressed by the “intellectual sons of Nazis” who had come to work on a German/Israeli production, and decided that it was high time to go back and finish his schooling. He was preparing for his exams when the sirens announcing the Yom Kippur War began to wail.
He had also met his future wife Lola, an American-born Jew who had moved to Israeli to study. When she decided to go to New York City to finish her doctoral dissertation in Musicology at Juilliard, Willy made up his mind to follow, thinking he would only stay in the US for five years. He arrived in 1974, at age 27, and what he heard and saw in the diaspora community made him change his mind: The rabbi at the Lincoln Center Synagogue, where he and Lola got married, was evangelizing a return to the Promised Land, on religious grounds rather than as a safe haven. “It really angered me,” he says.
And so, the Neumanns stayed on in New York permanently, Lola making a career teaching Hebrew to youths from affluent families who were preparing for their bar or bat mitzvahs and Willy going to work for Sound One, where many a well-known movie director came to do sound editing and mixing. “I was the guy who fixed the Moviola,” he says, in the days before flatbed editing consoles became the industry standard. The facility was located in the legendary Brill Building, at Broadway and West 50th Street. “I knew that neighborhood from reading Damon Runyon in Hebrew,” he says with a laugh.
Willy was a handy sort of employee who could throw together whatever structure was needed, and before long, “A guy asked me to make a cabinet for him.” That led to him starting his own business, renting a basement in TriBeCa and picking the brains of the cabinetmakers who worked up upstairs. When his parents died in Israel, his brother sold their apartment, and the proceeds enabled Willy to move to Williamsburg. “I became a Brooklynite in 1980. I had a dream: I have to become an artist before I die.”
The cabinetmaking shop and art studio did well for more than 25 years, while Willy and Lola raised two sons, both of whom went into arts-related careers. They began visiting artist friends with weekend homes in the Catskills. In 2003 Lola bought a house in Woodstock, and “I became active artwise in the village,” Willy says. His public art projects caught locals’ attention as he transitioned to a life upstate, beginning with a hayfield covered with a thousand tiny colored flags affixed to three-inch dowels on a Saugerties farm. “I wanted to paint a field,” he says. “That lasted nine months.”
Double Take
Willy created a 16-foot-long sculpture of the word “Saugerties” and installed it like the Hollywood sign atop a popular sledding hill. He has maquettes ready to put up similar sculptures for any Ulster County town that wants one, but it’s Saugerties that ultimately won his heart. He gave up the Brooklyn shop and moved there in 2007, splitting amicably with Lola and setting up his new business headquarters in a former garage on Livingston Street. “It was a raggedy place, but I was pleased with it,” Willy says. “They don’t need another one of me in Woodstock. I don’t want to be an artist in an artists’ colony; I want to be an artist in a working-class community.”
That studio, called Double Take, provided ample space to sculpt on a larger scale. Bob Malkin, whose Think Big! gallery in SoHo had been all the rage in the 1980s and who now runs the Tiny House Resort in South Cairo, commissioned Willy to make giant Gumby and Pokey figurines for his yard. They’ve been included in the Saugerties First Friday art parade, along with an oversized Mr. Peanut. “I love that because it’s playful,” says the artist, who also once persuaded Village of Saugerties mayor Robert Yerick to ride in an eight-foot wooden shoe in a Fourth of July parade. For the town’s bicentennial, he created an eight-foot sign with the number 200.
One project that garnered plenty of attention, both pro and con, was 15 Minutes of Frame, an enormous picture frame that he installed in a variety of settings, from a view of the Brooklyn Bridge to the Zena Cornfield, Kingston Point and finally the beach in Saugerties, where it was destroyed by vandals. Other large-scale sculptures have included renderings of a baseball cap and an invasive water chestnut.
Of all his works, however, the Love Knot benches have garnered the most public enthusiasm. Immediately embraced by visitors, they are popular settings for selfies, featured on tourism maps and even appear as Pokéstops in the handheld computer game Pokémon Go. “I love to see kids running towards it, climbing on it, sitting on it. People have made marriage vows next to it. I know at least three people who have tattoos of it,” says Willy of the Saugerties Love Knot. The partially rotted artwork currently languishes in a foundry in Nebraska, awaiting a down payment to begin the process of making a mold and casting two new fiberglass sculptures to replace the existing ones.
Spreading positivity
Steel or aluminum versions would hold up the longest, but the pricetag is prohibitive, in the range of $80,000 to $90,000, Willy says. To reproduce the Love Knots in fiberglass will cost $19,000, of which only $5,200 have been raised so far. “It mostly came from Saugerties, which makes me a little ashamed of Woodstock.” It’s only a matter of time before the Woodstock Love Knot needs to be dismantled as well, he warns, and that one actually draws more visitors than its sister in downtown Saugerties. The fiberglass versions are predicted to last for at least 20 years.
The parking lot where the Saugerties Love Knot normally resides still has a painted square marked off, currently occupied by a picnic table. “One of my favorite things is to see aimless people sitting there. I call them lost souls,” says the artist. “People who pass by keep asking me, ‘So Willy, where’s your sculpture?’…The idea of it not being there is not acceptable to me.”
Meanwhile, he keeps busy organizing art and performance events at the site on weekends to call attention to the fundraising campaign. He’s also lobbying other towns, along with the Ulster County Tourism office, to host Love Knots all over the county. One mold can be used for 20 to 30 castings, according to the foundry.
As for creating new art, Willy is dealing with the significant setback of having given up his Double Take studio following major surgery and a three-month hospitalization in 2016. He now lives in a small apartment in the senior housing complex The Mill, which means that he has no room to work on his signature oversize pieces. He has gone back to creating smaller two-dimensional works depicting images suggesting movement and impermanence, and has been exhibiting some of it.
But he still dreams of installing massive public art pieces, including a series of installations raising awareness of “Disputed Places” in the world, including Hong Kong, Kurdistan, the Black Hills, Kashmir, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. The current crisis in Gaza is much on his mind, and he has little patience for expansionist thinking motivated by religious beliefs or historical claims on either side of the conflict. “We have to rethink the idea of Israel,” he says, expressing regret that no one back in 1948 fully anticipated the problems inherent in creating a new nation in an already populated land. “We’re nomads, after all.”
Here at home in Saugerties, Ze’ev Willy Neumann remains committed to spreading positivity – even if there lurks a teardrop wherever love can be found. To contribute to the fund to replace the Saugerties and Woodstock Love Knot sculptures, write a check to the Town of Saugerties with “Love Knot” in the memo space and mail it to Town of Saugerties Supervisor’s Office, 4 High Street, Saugerties NY 12477. For more information on Willy’s upcoming exhibitions and work-in-progress, e-mail zwilly10024@yahoo.com.
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