For a month before they were shipped out to parks and other public spaces around the city, 60 pianos in Sing for Hope’s “Play Me I’m Yours” public arts project resided in the sprawling ground floor of the former AT&T Building at 32 Sixth Avenue. There they assumed their second identity as works of art.

Adorned with stuffed bears and wings, enigmatic faces and bold, flamboyant colors, their job would be to attract the public’s eyes as well as its ears.

“You’ve got to do a lot on a New York City street to gain visual attention and this is one way,” said Camille Zamora, an opera singer and co-founder with Monica Yunus of Sing for Hope.

For two weeks, ending July 5, the pianos would adorn outdoor spaces for anyone to play. (Click here for related story.)

The 7,000-square-foot space where their lives as artworks began became a cavernous communal studio for the volunteer artists who painstakingly applied their skills in new ways.

“It was like a candy store, which one do I want to work on?” said Julie Pitman, a Tribeca-based graphic artist and art director.

Pitman was layering shellac over a collage of magazine pages that covered her piano (hers was the one with wings attached) while on the other side of the room, Sophie Matisse applied black paint with a thin brush to the keys of one of four pianos in her stable of piano artworks. All of them were bound for the plaza at Lincoln Center.

“I hardly use any paint on my brush so that means many applications,” said Matisse, who happens to be the great-granddaughter of the artist. “But each time it’s so thin the paint doesn’t go anywhere—tiny applications because it’s a poisonous thing if they drip down.”

On the final day of their stay at 32 Sixth Avenue, the pianos were mostly completed and ready to go. Only a few artists were still at work, and just the sound of a single piano could be heard. It came from the hand of a man in a red apron, Fred Patella. He was not playing the piano but tuning it. Still, in this vast, otherwise quiet space, just the repeated notes of a piano rang with musical charm.

Patella is the piano technician responsible for tuning and, in some cases, completely restoring all 60 instruments. He also rounded them up. Patella retrieved the pianos, most deemed to have little resale value, from wholesalers; each needed an average of three or four hours of attention, he said.

“Then the painters come in and do their magnificent work,” the technician noted. “It’s got nothing to do with me but I’ve been glad to be witnessing it.”
Pitman said just hearing the pianos as they were tuned was a joy to her ears.

“Yesterday he stopped very suddenly and I was like, ‘That’s it? Fred, don’t stop. That was beautiful.’”

After their two weeks of al fresco fame, (Sing for Hope organizers estimated that the 60 pianos would be seen and heard by 2 million people around the city), the instruments still had important work ahead of them. Most would be donated to hospitals, and to schools with poorly funded arts programs.

“Here in New York City we’re the arts belly button of the world and yet there are still so many people who don’t have access,” said Zamora, one of 600 artists who volunteer for Sing for Hope, an organization that provides various volunteer opportunities for professional artists. “You have all these artists working away at Lincoln Center and right next door is Roosevelt Hospital. Bringing it together is what we’re all about.”

New York is just one of nine cities around the world where “Play Me I’m Yours,” the creation of British artist Luke Jerram, has brought art and music to the streets.

Yet it would be hard to imagine pianos anywhere that have been more imaginatively refinished than those that came together in Tribeca, by artists recruited and overseen by costume and set designer Lex Liang.

Among them was the one done up by Carlos DeMedeiros, who chose to provide his own audience of stuffed bears atop one of the pianos he painted. He intended the piece as a gift to his parents on the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary.

Pointing to the bears, he said: “This is my mother, my daddy, and my sister, my younger brother and my older brother.”

“I forgot to bring the little bear that goes there,” he added. “That’s my niece.”

Family celebrations aside, DeMedeiros said “Play Me I’m Yours” is what art should be about. “Every artist needs to be where the people are, not enclosed or encaged,” he said. “I want to show my work, and what better way than to take a ride on this amazing project.”