Kea Tawana built an ark for New Jersey

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A commenter writes to note that there’s an ancestor to the ark built by L.A. artist Mark Bradford (seen under construction in Leimert Park at right) for Prospect .1 New Orleans. (The international biennial exhibition opens Saturday in the flood-ravaged Louisiana city.) It’s a work that generated a pitched battle 20 years ago between a self-taught artist and city bureaucrats.

Guess who won?

In 1987, Kea Tawana, a 52-year-old church caretaker in Newark, N.J., got fed up with the neglect of her city in the two decades since riots had devastated it and other American urban centers. So she began to gather up scrap lumber from abandoned buildings around town, and she built a huge grounded boat — three stories high and almost 90 feet long — in a parking lot at Humanity Baptist Church. It was a “new ark” for Newark.

City officials said it violated building codes. Defenders wanted to know why a sculpture had to conform to codes designed for buildings. Opponents called it a fire trap. Folklorists from the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress attested to its artistic significance, some comparing it to another boat-shaped monument by a self-taught artist -- Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

Eventually, the state Superior Court said the ark must be razed. Tawana cut it apart for firewood, turning the ostensible hazard into a definite source of warmth.

Camilo Jose Vergara, author of the celebrated 1997 book “The New American Ghetto” (and a 2002 MacArthur Fellow), photographed Tawana’s ark, which is included in the book. You can see an image here.

--Christopher Knight