• September 23, 1985
• Vol. 23
• No. 13

Lookout

For many, Manhattan's 42nd Street seems a shabby jumble of sex shops, drug dealers and grimy movie houses. But artist Brookie Maxwell, 28, sees in it one of the great streets of the world. As a paean to 42nd Street's hurly-burly mix of break dancers, bag ladies and tourists, the artist has created a nearly 50-foot-long, one-foot-high diorama. So intricately detailed are the doughy figures and brightly painted buildings that even the lettering on a shoeshine man's tiny tin of polish is visible. Says Maxwell of her bulletproof Plexiglas-en-cased sculpture: "The idea is to show how it feels to be a person walking down the street."

The daughter of artist Emily Maxwell and writer and retired New Yorker editor William Maxwell, Brookie grew up in cultured seclusion on Manhattan's Upper East Side. After graduating from the proper Riverdale Country School, she made her life "a lot earthier and funkier" by enrolling at the unconventional School of Visual Arts.

Brookie is known for her three-dimensional illustrations. Yet she prefers creating public works such as 42nd Street: A Walk Across, which was exhibited at Manhattan's CUNY Graduate Center in August. Brookie won't divulge the subject of her next project, saying only, "It will be a reminder for people as they walk down the street that their lives are special and that they are entitled to their dreams."

At a time when many of her law school classmates are driving Porsches and living in fancy condos, Elizabeth Bernstein gets around in an old pickup and resides in a tiny $120-a-month house on the Navajo Indian reservation in Fort Defiance, Ariz. But for Bernstein, 31, life with the Navajos has other rewards. Last February she convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that the Indians should have the right to tax Kerr-McGee Corp. and other companies that do business on their reservation. (Kerr-McGee, which extracts uranium from tribal land, had questioned the Navajos' taxing authority.) When the decision in their favor was announced on April 16, jubilant Navajos declared the day an annual holiday.

Bernstein, a Long Island native, became disenchanted with the idea of lawyering for the establishment while studying at Harvard Law School, where she graduated magna cum laude. In 1982 she went to work for the Navajo Nation's justice department. Three months later her husband, attorney John MacKinnon, also joined the department. Shortly thereafter Bernstein was assigned the tax case. She spent several months writing her Supreme Court brief and preparing her oral argument, which took 20 minutes to deliver and obviously impressed the Court. Its decision means tens of millions of dollars in revenue for Navajo schools, police and roads, says Liz. "I knew the Navajos were right."