Interview: The Art In The Park Founders
Donna and Rona discuss this year's Art in the Park event.
This last June 12th 2026, the second annual Art in the Park was THE happening in the South Park of Tudor City. It was a resounding success and brought together anyone with an artistic bent that lives here (or close-by. They don’t judge). This event’s organic nature brought like-minded people together. And now, the artists of Tudor City are on each other’s radars in a way they weren’t before.
All due praise goes to the work of two of the three founders, Donna & Rona, along with three important folks on the coordinating committee: Dina de La Vega, Olga Jakim and Tigre McMullan. And, of course, all of the wonderful volunteers.
It felt important to me to be able to meet them both and talk to them. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and to remove the parts where the three of us went on tangents about what a phenomenal neighborhood Tudor City is. We all know it already and don’t need to wail on that horse any more.
Please enjoy! And definitely reach out to them if you want to get involved, their contact information is at the end of the interview.
-TCV
TCV: Let me start by saying congratulations on your second annual Art in the Park event. It was amazing. So who are you? And how long have you lived in Tudor City?
Rona: I’m Rona and I have lived in Essex House for eight years. Before that, for 15 years, my husband and I had a studio apartment in Woodstock Tower. And we just decided: Where do we want to retire? Like, why not New York City?
Donna: And I’m Donna and I am Rona’s next-door neighbor about five flights down, four flights down, in the Essex House. I moved in during the pandemic. And I met Rona when my old dog was really sick and I didn’t have a bag and.... she was very kind. We bonded over poop. It’s very beautiful. [laughter]
Rona: There were not many people out on the sidewalks and we walked everywhere a lot and were so lucky to get to know each other.
I love that. So how was Art in the Park this year?
Donna: Awesome. [laughter]
Rona: It was great. It was wonderful. It’s all about the community. It’s about getting artists out of their apartments and meeting each other and they’re wandering around and they sit down with somebody in a different section of the park and all of a sudden they’ve been there for 45 minutes talking to each other. And that’s really what we wanted.
Donna: Now, we were told by the Greens that artists could not sell their works, because the Tudor City Greens are non-profit.
Rona: And we make that very clear to all artists, and they came out anyway!
So it’s a special event… you’ve created a place of discovery.
Rona: Yes, exactly.
Donna: And oh boy, have we discovered a lot of really interesting art. Like one of my favorite most unusual artists is Michiko Kishi. And Kishi makes soft sculpture - soft sculptures out of Uniqlo socks and they’re exquisite. And then she also does stop-motion videos with the sculptures. For the 4th of July, she has an eagle that flies against a patriotic background. It’s unbelievable.
Rona: We do make certain decisions. We make up our own rules about who can participate because we are the ones who decided it was for Tudor City artists. There are a few people who live a few blocks from here and have come to us, maybe they’ve just been here for lunch in the park, and they see the sign because we had a sign up for three months announcing the event to get artists to come to participate and volunteers also.
We ended up being connected with this woman, Chanit Roston. She’s a Holocaust survivor who lives on 44th. And Donna got in touch with her and we went to visit her and explained what we were doing and we went back twice and her apartment’s like a museum.
Whoa.
Donna: She’s in her late 80s.
Rona: And she was a child during the Holocaust.
Rona: She survived in a potato cellar.
Donna: And her paintings are amazing and some of them, and one which I really love that she brought there was her self-portrait as a child and there is paint pouring out of a paintbrush like blood.
Donna: This incredible talent and story. I think she had done an illustrated book for children about Central Park. And she brought a copy and we raffled that off. I think she still has a lot of copies available to sell.
Rona: Yeah. If anybody wants to buy a baby gift, it’s a great baby gift. We are happy to put anyone who is interested in contact with her. Some of the artists, we helped get their art out of their apartments to come down to the park. You know, we have amazing volunteers who helped with that. It’s a lovely community event and the whole feeling is about people helping other people.
What was the genesis? How did you both come to create this event?
Donna: So, we have a neighbor who I used to walk my dog with all the time who’s lovely.
Rona: A lovely neighbor. Absolutely.
Donna: And he has a lovely dog. And he is very quiet - a youngish retiree. One day he showed me a drawing of the dogs from our building and it was unbelievable. It was really beautiful.
I love this so much.
Donna: I just thought: “Gosh, this IT guy upon retirement can make these beautiful images. And thought “Well, then what is hiding behind that door over there?” And then we basically knocked on that door! [laughter]
Rona: Yup! That retiree became an important co-founder of the Art Showcase, although he moved on to other projects this year.
Donna: And it feels like the tip of the iceberg of what we’ve found. One thing I will say is that Tudor City is, I think, not unique but specific in that the apartments are a little bit less expensive on the whole than other places and there’s a lot of smaller ones. So if you are an artist and you need to live somewhere and you’ve been here for a little while, you might be able to afford it.
And that’s why here, maybe, there’s an artist hiding behind each door. I think here some people are more dedicated artists because they can afford to live here, right?
Rona: It’s also, for such a small community space-wise, we’re just a few streets, there are so many studio apartments because of the nature of Tudor City.
This is very true. Friends have marveled at how I live in such a small space.
Donna: And so you have even more people living here than you would in a usual square block. There is this artist who is a wonderful artist, great paintings, but he told me he has 2,000 paintings in his studio apartment.
Rona: And they’re all amazing. Like, I would love someone to market him.
Sounds like the kind of Tudor City person I should be interviewing in a future post! [laughter] What I love about what you both have created, whether conscious or not, is that it is an event and a strong and organic reason to bring people of community together to showcase their creativity. What do you think makes Art in the Park unique to Tudor City?
Rona: We try to gather other information and we find out some really interesting things about people, and then we see them in the park during the event and the people who we think should be talking to each other…
Donna: And put them close to each other! [laughter]
That’s community, right? And people...
Rona: It is. We are creating a channel to see people in a new unique way when we’re all just used to kind of bouncing around each other. So for you to have a different visual, a different vibe, that would make sense to be like “these are people who can start to be connected because they might not be connected otherwise,” right? And we don’t—we don’t make a formal connection. They find…
Donna: …each other. It’s very interesting. But we only do this with a few artists. Most participants are placed/situated randomly and make connections on their own!
So I assume you are planning for 2027 right now, but what other ideas have come out of what you’ve done already?
Rona: We had a raffle last year, our first year, and Dina de La Vega, from the organizing committee and Chris Megele, an amazing volunteer, went around and got some gift cards. Essex Wines and Spirits donated wine and City Beer donated beer, and we raffle things off and we raise some money. We have very minimal expenses when we do this. And the [Tudor City] Greens really rely on donations. So anything that comes in we give to the Greens.
So, this year, we expanded the raffle. I got some fabric donated to me from Zuri, an African clothing store in the West Village.
I’m a scrap quilter and I thought “I’m going to make a pillow and it’s going to go in the raffle.” And then we got in touch with artists and said, “Anyone who’s interested, did you know we’re doing this raffling off art pieces? If you want to give a small piece of your art we would love it” And we raised a good amount of money from that! Thirteen or fourteen of the artists donated art that was raffled off.
Well done, congratulations!
Rona: Yeah, thanks. So next year we’re going to grow that.
I love that. Were there any works that really stood out to you in a surprising way? Maybe something that you had not been exposed to that elevated the event for you?
Donna: Michael Pilato was amazing this year. He was the artist-in-residence at the Church of the Covenant… is that what it’s called? Over on 42nd Street next to Woodstock Tower.
I think that’s what it is called. (Ed. Note: It is.)
Donna: So, he has been living there on and off painting a mural. It was the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub.
Rona: The Pulse nightclub massacre. He had this whole genesis of this Pulse nightclub, and then brought into other terrible tragedies.
Donna: There was a part that was Sandy Hook and many others…
Rona: … gun-related shooting things. He made many panels…
Donna: …and created this incredible mural that was, which I think was started elsewhere but he brought it to finish at the church.
Wow.
Rona: And he was leaving the church on the Friday before our event. And last year he participated a little bit because that’s how we learned about him, specifically from this other woman who works with us a lot, Dina De La Vega, who is a member of the church. And so I went in and was blown away.
You will be blown away by this work. This year, he happened to be just taking it down and moving it somewhere, on tour or something, and he was leaving the residency.
Donna: He took it down on the Friday at noon the day before the art showcase.
Rona: The day before, which was the 10th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub tragedy, and we helped him figure out actually how to put it on display with a member of [City Council Member] Kristen Gonzalez’s staff. They helped him finalize his plans about where and how to display it. He displayed it under the underpass of the Tudor City Bridge.
And then he said he was going to take a special kind of photo copy of the mural and put it in the Art in the Park Showcase the next day. We couldn’t display the whole thing inside the park. But on that day, because they closed the stairway on 42nd for soccer, he just reconstructed the original mural outside the park and the whole thing was there and he was just talking to people and telling them all about it. It’s like amazing.
Donna: Non-stop he just kept touring people through it and there’s so much information and it’s like, you gotta look, if you look at this person’s eye there’s a reflection of the bird that, you know, like there is so much detail in this massive mural.
His relationship with some of the mothers of people who were killed at the Pulse Club... and so he somehow he’s bringing this to them for something...
The way you describe it actually reminds me of the AIDS Quilt. Were there any other stories that came out of the event?
Rona: So this woman came up to me. She wanted to look at my quilt and she said, “I love your quilts and, like in my country, like I really love the textiles there.” And I said, “Where are you from?” and she said, “I’m from Turkey. and I do calligraphy. I would love to be part of this, but I don’t live in Tudor City.” I said, “Where do you live?” She said, “You know, I live in that building on the corner of Second Avenue and 41st Street.”
Rona: I said, “You’re in Tudor City. That counts. We count you.” So, I just emailed her yesterday and said, “I just want to make sure I have your email right. I’m putting you on the list for next year.”
I love that so much. I truly believe that Tudor City should be seen as a welcoming and friendly place, like a beacon.
Rona: It’s like she didn’t feel like she was part of this. She absolutely is.
Donna: One photographer, Jay Eckardt, who does some really interesting work using a Holgar camera, doesn’t really live in Manhattan even, but he’s got really good friends and hangs out in Tudor City. Hangs out in the park and he’s totally a part of it. I mean, he hangs out in Woodstock Tower, so that’s as good as living here. [laughter]
Before we conclude, what’s the best way for people to get a hold of you?
Rona: You can reach and Donna and I at berkowitzrona at gmail dot com or donna.nitzberg at gmail dot com. It was a pretty spectacular day and we’re really looking forward to the future.
Well, congratulations again on an incredible event and I’m looking forward to next year as well!