BIOLOGICAL WARFARE
Williamsburg residents sue city for right to not vaccinate
READY FOR BATTLE: Five Williamsburg residents are suing NYC Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot, right,
to block her emergency health declaration fi ning unvaccinated residents of the Orthodox Jewish enclave.
Photo by Paul Martinka
DEADLY: The measles virus is a highly infectious disease. Getty Images
INSIDE
About face Collection shows portraits of South Asian feminist activists
By Kevin Duggan She’s made a community collage!
A new exhibit will put a face on
New York’s community of South
Asian-American feminist activists. Artist
Jaishri Abichandani has produced more
than two dozen small-scale portraits of
her fellow rabble-rousers for her show
“Jasmine Blooms at Night,” opening at
Bric on April 24.
The show features 26 paintings and four
sculptures that celebrate her community’s
many different women and queer people
pushing for change, who are little-known
outside of activist circles, said the artist.
“They’re not going to be visible to people
outside of my community. We know
who they are, we know the work they’ve
done, we love them and appreciate them,”
said Abichandani.
The prominent display of activists
will also give South Asian Brooklynites
a chance to see their own modern history,
she said.
“The truth is, South Asians never get
to go and see paintings of people who are
living, breathing, making change amongst
them,” said the Clinton Hill artist.
Abichandani found her subjects from
friends she has encountered or been
inspired by during her decades-long career
of activism, which includes being a student
organizer during her college years
in Queens, rallying for pro-choice causes
in Washington, D.C., and founding arts
group the South Asian Women’s Creative
Collective in 1997.
Her Bric show highlights many Kings
County subjects, including immigrant
rights activists Thanu Yakupitiyage and
Rage Kidvai, and the Kensington founder
of the Bangladeshi Feminist Collective,
Shahana Hanif.
The project started a few years ago,
when she created little sculptures of activists
and friends she called “Angry Ladies.”
The elaborate, three-dimensional portraits
took a huge amount of time, so she switched
to painting portraits and decorating them
with jewelry and trinkets.
She has arranged the works according
to the different causes her subjects fight for
— right down to the shape of the pictures.
Her pictures of LGBTQ activists are on
triangular canvasses, referencing the pink
triangle logo of the AIDS advocacy group
Act Up.
The paintings themselves also hint at
the topic of their subject’s activism. For
instance, labor leader Bhairavi Desai is
portrayed against a yellow background,
referencing her work as a founding member
of the city’s cab driver’s union, while the
portrait of attorney Menaka Guruswamy,
who recently helped repeal the laws criminalizing
gay sex in India, features a small
Group shot: Jaishri
Abichandani creates
dozens of portraits and
sculptures of her fellow
South Asian-American
feminist activists to
highlight the rich diversity
of her underrepresented
community.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
set of weighing scales.
The queer activist scene of the 1990s
was an incubator for her own activism, and
for many of the subjects of Abichandani’s
paintings, she said.
“These organizations that were around
in the ’90s were crucial to my becoming an
activist. This is my way of acknowledging
who we are and the work that we’ve done to
shift social landscapes,” she said.
Abichandani’s is one of three exhibits
in the suite “The Portrait is Political” at
the Fulton Street art space, which also
includes photos from Brooklynite Texas
Isaiah, and a collection of portraits of
more than 35 queer Kings County artists,
curated by Liz Collins.
“The Portrait is Political” at Bric Gallery
647 Fulton St. at Rockwell Place in Fort
Greene, (718) 855–7882, www.bricartsmedia.
org. Opening reception April 24 at 7
p.m. On display through May 12. Free.
Your entertainment
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BY COLIN MIXSON
Five Williamsburg residents
are fi ghting for the right to
not vaccinate themselves and
their children amid a growing
measles outbreak in Brooklyn,
fi ling suit against the Department
of Health in an effort to
quash an emergency health
declaration that slaps unvaccinated
locals with stiff fi nes.
The plaintiffs, who fi led
a complaint in Brooklyn Supreme
Court on Monday, argued
that the roughly 300
known cases of the potentially
fatal illness do not justify the
city’s decision to override
their religious objections to
the MMR vaccine, according
to their lawyer.
“We don’t think the socalled
‘outbreak’ has reached
a level that requires the extreme
response of forcing vaccinations,”
said Robert Krakow,
a Manhattan attorney
specializing in vaccine injury
lawsuits.
Mayor Bill de Blasio and
city Health Commissioner Dr.
Oxiris Barbot announced on
April 9 that unvaccinated residents
of four Williamsburg zip
codes — where some 250 of the
total 285 measles cases had
been identifi ed — would be
subject to fi nes of up to $1,000
in response to the outbreak,
which has exclusively affected
members of the borough’s Orthodox
Jewish communities.
And while Krakow’s clients
represent a mix of Jewish
and Gentile Williamsburg residents,
they all object to vaccination
on religious grounds
and claim the city’s latest
move to stem the virus’ spread
constitutes a gross overreaction,
and that less drastic measures,
such as quarantining
infected individuals, should
have been explored fi rst.
“We don’t think the city
should be in the business of
forcing people to vaccinate,”
said Krakow. “Quarantine
can be imposed for the people
with active infections.”
The measles virus can be
contagious for weeks before
symptoms show, and the attorney
said he was not aware that
several Williamsburg yeshivas
had been cited by the city
for admitting unvaccinated
students amid an ongoing exclusion
order, including one
school where more than 20 students
were infected, according
to the Health Department.
The plaintiffs further allege
that measles can be actually
be contracted and spread
by the inoculation, and that
vaccinating “enhances the
risk of harm to the public”
through a process referred to
as viral shedding.
“That’s something that
happens, and we don’t know a
lot about it,” Krakow said.
Viral shedding refers to
the process by which viruses
spread, but is a term used by
members of the anti-vaccination
movement to propagate
the myth that vaccines cause
outbreaks, according to a Science
Based Medicine report.
Measles is a highly infectious,
air-born disease that
reaped an annual national
death toll of between 400 to
500 people before the MMR
vaccine program kicked off in
1963, according to the Center
for Disease Control .
Barbot did not exceed her authority
by issuing the city declaration
mandating vaccines,
which came after attempts to
educate the community and exclude
unvaccinated kids from
Kings County yeshivas failed
to stop the spread of the disease,
according to a spokesman for
the city’s Law Department.
“The city’s order is within
the Health Commissioner’s
authority to address the very
serious danger presented by
this measles outbreak,” said
Nick Paolucci. “The U.S. Supreme
Court has upheld the
right of states and localities to
mandate vaccines to stop outbreaks.”
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