PIC OF THE LITTER
Upper West Siders turned trashed paintings into treasured items — and found the mystery artist, too
IT was an offer Lily Bilgrey couldn’t refuse. While scrolling through Instagram on Monday, the 20year-old graphic design student stopped at a snap of a stack of colorful artworks leaning against a fence — just blocks away from her Upper West Side apartment. The siren song came from @StoopingNYC, an account run by an anonymous Brooklyn duo that posts submitted photos of discarded furniture and other home decor — along with where to find them on the sidewalk. “When I saw there was something cool and artsy on the Upper West Side, I was very excited. Most of the artsy stuff is in Brooklyn,” says Bilgrey, who, along with nearly 40,000 other street scavengers, follows the feed religiously.
The items pictured — from pristine designer sofas to bizarre homemade lamps — are usually snatched up by budget-conscious New Yorkers within an hour.
The paintings were no different: Bilgrey and her neighbors flocked to 90th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues to score one of the colorful scribbles. But commenters on Instagram typed frantically: Who was the artist? Why were so many precious (and seemingly professional) works discarded so haphazardly?
Using clues from a postcard stuck between the two pieces she picked up and the signature “Artistikz” she deciphered, Bilgrey discovered their creator: Ralph Serrano. Then she messaged him.
His reply was bittersweet — and so was his story. A 48-year-old muralist,
Serrano decided to leave the city in May because he could no longer afford the rent on his Upper West Side three-bedroom apartment after commissions and projects dried up due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ahead of the move, Serrano, who relocated to New York in 1992, sold some of his works and shipped others to family in Puerto Rico, where he is heading next month.
He was gutted to leave most of the canvases in his studio behind — but ecstatic when Instagrammers started reaching out on Monday, asking if he was OK and if they could pay for the pieces they plucked from the sidewalk.
“As artist, you don’t want to leave your work behind. I felt like I left my kids behind. I was really heartbroken to have to do it,” Serrano tells The Post. “All the love from the post on Stooping has just lifted my spirits . . . even just simple messages of ‘stay strong’ and ‘keep moving forward,’ to people making donations, to photos of people saying “Look, here it is in my living room now!’ ”
Serrano, whose pieces are usually priced between $500 and $2,500, estimates he’s received about $800 from Stooping followers via the Cash App. Benefactors include Jack Houlton-Vinyl, who nabbed a painting of one of his favorite musicians, James Brown, from the stack. Worried that Serrano might feel “exploited,” he exchanged messages with the artist, sharing his plan to hang the black-and-white portrait alongside framed records. A native of the neighborhood, Houlton-Vinyl felt like the experience was ”such a New York moment.”
“I went to elementary school five blocks from where [Serrano] was making his works during those years. I am proud that I can display that history within my space,” says Houlton-Vinyl, a 28-year-old public school teacher. “I was just over the moon to have the picture and to be able to talk to him about it.”
Bilgrey, too, is proud to give Serrano’s works a new home. “People have a misconception about New Yorkers, that everyone is mean and rude, but it’s not like that. Everyone is neighborly,” says Bilgrey. “Even in the toughest of times, we’re all coming together.”