Dear Providence Eye,
There are many ways to cover a story and I strenuously object to your approach to the opening of Grace Harbor Church [Factory on the Woonasquatucket Being Transformed into 500-Person Capacity Baptist Church]. I don’t object to removing buildings from the tax rolls as religious buildings are, since they often do things for the outside community such as having food banks or protecting immigrants, etc. But to have a hate filled church – one that freely admits to not welcome people of all genders -(Grace Harbor’s faith statement says “God makes all people male or female, and that marriage is between a biological male and a biological female”) plunked down in the middle of our community is about as un-community as you get. I would hope they at least wouldn’t participate in this form of hate. I am sure atheists like me are also despised. I was shocked to read that students from the universities attend! I was shocked to read that our Mayor visited them! The paper should have had a deeper examination of these issues rather than just presenting this “news” in such a positive light. There is nothing positive about divisiveness and hate.
Lee Kossin
East Side
As a “dog whistle” the mural [Watching Controversy from the Other Wall: Providence Mural Community Reflects on Role of Public Art] on the side of the Dark Lady has done it’s job, causing howls on left and right across the Internet, with politicians and a billionaire jumping in.
Perhaps the mural could be kept as it is – unfinished. Yes, it was funded by a manipulative cabal. Yes, the completion was quashed by outrage.
But the image itself is striking: a faceless white woman caught in an Escher box with a forest background…
The story behind the incompletion will continue to teach lessons (because all art these days must be both political and educational) about freedom of speech, the power of money, the power of resistance, and the appropriation of images to serve political purposes.
Probably it will be removed.
But for now, like it or not, this is “art”
Mark Binder
East Side
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