As was talked about in the first Art Prospect piece, Ed Woodham’s time in St. Petersburg was as much an opportunity to explore public art in the city, as it was “to do some subversive, gay expressionist sort of performance” he has referred to as “homopropaganda.” His performance, which eventually led him to a group of sketch artists who quickly became enthralled by his larger than life get up and personality, had a large impact on Ed. He noticed and became intrigued by “these concentric circles of modeling and observation” that were forming around him and the scene he was creating.
The inspiring and dedicated crew of artists from Pro Arte at the storefront space. Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham.
His experience with the sketchers was the impetus behind his “Strange Makings” workshop, which he presented to students from the Pro-Arte foundation, one of the few contemporary art foundations in St. Petersburg. Pro-Arte provided about ten students from the area for Ed’s program, all in their late-twenties to mid-thirties and working as established artists and teachers. When he first met these students, Ed wore a black and white stripped costume that was created for him by Gretchen Vitamvas for this particular occasion, which turned out to be the best choice of garment for their meeting as “serendipitously, [at] the location of Pro-Arte, which is the Peter and Paul Fortress, the guard stations were also this black and white diagonal pattern.”
Storefront window in festival created by ProArte crew. Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham.
During that meeting, Ed presented the idea of the concentric circles of modeling, himself serving as the model surrounded by “people who would be sketching and photographing me, and then there would be another circle of people sketching the sketchers sketching me, and so on.”
Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham.
Ed’s “Strange Makings” workshop was highly successful because the concept had developed organically from his experiences with the city itself, as well as the enthusiasm of the students from Pro-Arte. The success of Art Prospect as a whole helped to ensure the survival of the festival itself, as 2012 was the inaugural affair and set a positive precedent; it has been announced the festival will run again in the fall of 2013.
Crowd outside storefront window. Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham.
The second annual Art Prospect festival will take on the theme “The Artist as a gardener in the urban space,” and feature work that “will recover Liteiney Prospect and courtyards of flowers, plants, fruits and vegetables, as well as raise issues related to ensuring a more sustainable environmental development of the local environment.” The main foreign participants curating this year’s festival are Fiona de Bell and Roel Shenmeykersom, who are part of the Dutch cultural organization Cascoland. Cascoland itself seeks to promote “the idea of interdisciplinary “artistic interventions” in public spaces, giving impetus to the creative revitalization, promoting participation and networking through cultural exchange and cooperation.”
The amazing dedicated artists I worked with at ProArte Foundation were inspiring! Thanks to Yana Klichuk and all the crew! Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham.
George Spencer’s “Long Count” (Photo courtesy of Sarah Brozna).
Art in Odd Places previewed 11 projects from its upcoming October festival NUMBER as part of this year’s IDEAS CITY StreetFest. For those of you who missed the event, presented by the New Museum, here’s a peek at those projects in action. You can always catch them again on 14th Street this October!
Ariela Kader’s “Social Trash” (Photo courtesy of Sarah Brozna)
Toisha Tucker’s “Wish Clock” (Photo courtesy of Sarah Brozna)
Concerned New Yorkers’ “Your Call” (Photo courtesy of Sarah Brozna)
Jennifer Vincent, Hyo Jin Yoo, & Nupur Mathur’s “Hear Now”
Merav Ezer’s “Public Visit”
Tatlo’s (Sara Jimenez, Michael Watson, Jade Yumang) “The Dept of Accumulated Thoughts, Division Overtime” (Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham)
Samwell Freeman & Julia Vallera’s “Signs of Intelligence” (Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham)
Vicky Virgin & Joe Salvo’s “Take a Number” (Photo courtesy of Ed Woodham)
Art in Odd Places (AiOP), New York City’s annual public art and performance festival will preview eleven projects from its upcoming October festival NUMBER at the New Museum’s IDEA CITY festival StreetFest on Saturday, May 4 from 11am to 6pm.
AiOP 2013: NUMBER takes up the pressures and provocations of the numerologies of our time. Everyday, in countless ways, we are asked to account for, or held to account by, numbers, whether by the bank, the landlord, censuses, passwords, cell phones, and many other forms of calculation, measurement and collection. The artists in this edition play with the restrictions and buoyancies of numbers in our daily lives: they archive daily thoughts, give out lottery tickets in return for your desires, re-imagine the street through novel forms of wayfinding, and even give us a 411 on the upcoming mayoral election.
WHO: Eleven artists’ projects previewed from the upcoming AiOP October festival.
Art in Odd Places 2013 thematic concept of NUMBER is conceived by Radhika Subramaniam. In 2013, AiOP will explore NUMBER at The New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Festival, NYC; festivals in Warringah & Manly, Australia; the annual NYC Festival on 14th Street; and for the Southeastern College Art Conference in Greensboro, NC.
ARTISTS: Concerned New Yorkers; Ecoarttech (Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir); Merav Ezer; Samwell Freeman and Julia Vallera; Ariela Kader; Tatlo (Sara Jimenez, Michael Watson and Jade Yumang); Nupur Mathur and Jennifer Vincent; Vicky Virgin and Joe Salvo; Jody Servon; George Spencer; Toisha Tucker.
CURATOR: Radhika Subramaniam is Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at Parsons The New School for Design where she also teaches. She curated AiOP: SIGN in 2009 with Erin Donnelly.
AiOP Founder and Director: Ed Woodham Festival Producer: Sarah Brozna Curatorial Assistant: Claire Demere
WHAT: Eleven projects from the upcoming AiOP October festival NUMBER at the New Museum’s IDEA CITY festival.
PROJECTS:
Social Trash / Ariela Kader: A playful interpretation of trash bags as portraits of consumerism.
Your Call / Concerned New Yorkers: A 411 of the current mayoral candidates with polls and goodies
The Dept of Accumulated Thoughts, Division Overtime / Tatlo (Sara Jimenez, Michael Watson, Jade Yumang): A performative archiving by three characters with an office desk who will interact and survey the public through a rigorous method of absurdist but essential data collecting
Borders / Merav Ezer: Installation of an architectural blueprint of the artist’s apartment into which she will invite guests.
WISH/CLOCK / Toisha Tucker: A series of clock faces with all the numbers in the same or consecutive order granting the possibility of a wish come true.
Signs of Intelligence / Samwell Freeman and Julia Vallera: Hand crafted, temporarily installed street signs that re-imagine NYC’s historic “14th street”. The signs are designed to hide in plain sight, offering a surprising reward for the perceptive pedestrians.
Hear Now / Nupur Mathur and Jennifer Vincent: Pedaling a stationary bike activates and amplifies recordings, the intensity and clarity depending on the power of one.
Dreams for Free / Jody Servon: The artist purchases and distributes lottery tickets to people inviting them to share their desires in exchange for a chance at winning millions of dollars.
Long Count / George Spencer: A carnival barker meets a roulette wheel. Get ready for the long count and win prizes. (for IDEAS CITY festival)
Take a Number / Vicky Virgin and Joe Salvo: The Director of the Population Division at NYC’s City Planning office collaborates on an adventure to see how art and statistical literacy connect.
Indeterminate Hikes+ / Ecoarttech(Cary Peppermint and Leila Nadir): A collaborative performance-tour and mobile media app (for iphone/Android)
WHEN: Saturday, May 4, 2013, 11am-6pm
WHERE: The AiOP booth (#101) is located on the basketball court near the corner of Houston & Forsyth Streets. Please stop by when you arrive to get a map of the featured projects.
Nearby subways: F (Second Avenue), J (Bowery), 6 & F,B/D (Bleeker Street & Broadway/Lafayette)
WHY:Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is a thematic annual festival that presents visual and performance art in public spaces along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. Using 14th Street as a laboratory, this project continues AiOP’s work to locate cracks in public space policies, and to inspire the popular imagination for new possibilities and engagement with civic space. AiOP is a project of GOH Productions.
IDEAS CITY is a biennial Festival in New York City of conferences, workshops, an innovative StreetFest around the Bowery, and more than one hundred independent projects and public events that are forums for exchanging ideas, proposing solutions, and accelerating creativity. IDEAS CITY explores the future of cities around the globe with the belief that arts and culture are essential to the vitality of urban centers, making them better places to live, work, and play. Founded by the New Museum in 2011, IDEAS CITY is a major collaborative initiative between hundreds of arts, education, and community organizations. This year’s theme is Untapped Capital, with participants focused on resources that are under-recognized or underutilized in our cities.
The end of this week starts the Free City Public Art Festival: Reclaim | Transform in Flint, Michigan. Recently, Stephen Zacks, the executive director of the Flint Public Art Project, contacted Art in Odd Places with this to say about the upcoming event:
From May 3-5, Flint Public Art Project is installing more than 80 works from around the country and the region to transform the site into an active part of the city. Dozens of local and regional artists are joined by visiting artists from Ann Arbor, Baltimore, Berlin, Belfast, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Lansing, Lodz, Los Angeles, New York, and Pittsburgh to transform the former Chevrolet site into a spectacular landscape of light and sound.
This massive urban interventionist public art festival includes work by NY-based architecture office NAO (thenao.net), Boston-based architect Jae K. Kim (http://www.counter-design.com), an inflatable shelter by Ann Arbor-based artist Michael Flynn modeled after Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago, an installation by Ann Arbor-based architect Catie Newell of Alibi Studio, a piece by NY-based architects Matthias Neumann and Natalia Roumelioti, an installation by Flint-based architect Freeman Greer, along with a wide range of art and performance works.
The festival will include many artists from the Detroit alternative space scene, including Jon Brumit, curator of public engagement at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Hard Core Detroit, a Detroit break dance crew founded by Haleem Rasul specializing in a Detroit style of footwork known as the Jit; The Hinterlands, a Detroit-based company dedicated to exploring the art of performance through ecstatic play and explosive training; Spaceband Detroit, which uses a variety of homemade, toy, percussion, wind and electronic instruments; Maya Stovall, founder of Finite Studios, an art space/collective in Detroit’s McDougall Hunt neighborhood housed in a re-purposed bank; and Tzarinas of the Plane, a Detroit-based performance group specializing in dead operas, visual extravaganzas, dream walking, compulsive exaggerations and primal reenactments.
The project is one of dozens of programs Flint Public Art Project has produced in the past year with support from a 2012 ArtPlace grant.
Some more information about some of these projects is below and more images are available at freecityflint.org.
Trellis. Image courtesy of NAO.
NAO Trellis
New York-based architecture office NAO (thenao.net) constructs a temporary network of colored ropes that will reinterpret the site into a temporary and festive environment to use and play. The geometry of this network is made by connecting the top of the wire fence stretching along the river to the unused freight rail tracks in the field. This network will create a slanted, oblique and porous surface along the fence and the rail. Rather than masking both as oppressive remains of industrial era the network will tied them, and integrate them, into an extraordinary new festival space.
We Build Excitement, 2012, production still. Image courtesy of Jesse Sugarmann.
We Build Excitement
A temporary monument to GM’s discontinued Pontiac Motor Division, produced by artist Jesse Sugarmann. For the Free City Festival, the project takes the form of an ersatz Pontiac dealership at which sculptural and dance performances occur.
Cloud. Image courtesy of Jae Kim.
Cloud
Boston-based architect Jae Kim produces a floating installation that creates a complex geometric form using everyday materials, including nylon wire and hundreds of plastic straws.
Groundscape
This light installation by architect and artist Catie Newell and students from University of Michigan integrates bio-plastics and a cloth substrate that pulses and fades in response its environment. Groundscape traces the remnants of the railroad tracks, playfully responding to the myriad textures and embedded traces of previous activity throughout the site.
Postcard Futures. Image courtesy of Jet Lowe.
Postcard Futures
In 1968 photographer Jet Lowe shot “Delphi Flint West, 300 Chevrolet Avenue” in Flint, as part of his work to record significant, often threatened American industrial sites. Architects Natalia Roumelioti and Matthias Neumann invite the public to attempt to identify and reenact the photographer’s vantage point and to share their own photograph of that view to a dedicated Flickr account.
Recovering History
Photographer Farrah Karapetian reimagines abandoned billboards as a sculptural structure to house images made with students at the federal vocational training program Flint/Genesee Job Corps performing their trades. The work honors both the efforts these youth are making to improve their lives as well as the rebuilding of Flint.
Chevy Plants
Flint-based architect Freeman Greer marks the site with reused tires arranged in the form of a Chevrolet logo, planted with switchgrass and sunflo
In Russia, September of 2012 was a very active period in regards to the arts. CEC Artslink not only organized the Art Prospect festival, which was St. Petersburg’s first-ever large-scale public art venue, but they also offered some of the American artists in the festival the opportunity to spearhead works in different parts of the country. Both Nicholas Fraser and Terry Hardy, who had discussed their experiences with Art Prospect in an earlier feature, also took part in the CEC led extra-regional projects. While Art Prospect was inspired by and loosely worked off of the theme of MODEL (also the theme of AiOP’s 2012 festival), the CEC projects were more open ended. For Nicholas, this project was an opportunity to explore the juxtaposition of two cultures, American and Russian, and see how the latter adapts to a game of the former. Terry, on the other hand, used his time to recreate and put his own spin on a work from Peru that had inspired and sat with him years earlier.
“Ground Rules”
Nicholas Fraser’s performance/installation project, “Ground Rules,” began with teaching a group of steel workers how to play the American game of softball. In the Russian city of Nizhny Tagil, where the population is largely unfamiliar with the sport, Nicholas brought equipment and held a series of practice sessions to teach the basics of the game. Teams were selected and outfitted in hats and jerseys with team names and logos designed with input from the players. A series of games were played in a prominent public park in the city center. In the white chalk lines defining the playing field, Nicholas embedded translations of the “unwritten rules” of the game. These rules are not essential to playing the game but are usually learned through direct experience. The chalk rules were gradually smeared away as players played the game.
“Ground Rules” Photos courtesy of artist.
Nicholas suggests the project functions as a metaphor for the adaptations required by the socioeconomic realities of recent Russian history, mainly how the country has been adapting since the fall of the Soviet Union and the increased westernization that came with transitioning to a free market economy:
“…when the Soviet Union collapsed, there was this system that they had become accustomed to, even if it was perhaps dysfunctional in many ways, and then suddenly they became free market, capitalist country. Few of these people knew how that system worked; they didn’t know the rules of that particular game.
“Ground Rules” Photos courtesy of artist.
Once Nicholas taught the workers the basics of softball, he noticed they unconsciously began changing and adapting the game to better fit in with the views and understandings of their own culture:
“They adapted it to their own particular culture. I gave them the basics and I would see them doing things that I hadn’t taught them to do…they reacted to a whole new set of rules, which is very much what they’ve been doing for the last 25 years, figuring out in fits and starts how to be a free market system…they adapted [softball] to their own understanding of what I had explained and their own culture.”
Also, the Metallurgists beat the Tagil Tanks in the final, rain-shortened game, 41-27.
In the town on Nizhniy Novgorod, which is several hours east of Moscow and was only opened to foreigners twenty years ago, Terry Hardy was able to install a project that had been on his mind for years. After viewing a work of the same name on the banks of the Pacific by the artist Victor Delfin in Lima, Peru, Terry decided in this Russian town he would create his own “Park of Love.”
“It has always been my idea to recreate my version of the “Park of Love” using banners, which is what I use often. Upon arriving [in Nizhniy Novgorod], the next day I was taken to the Arsenal, which is the National Contemporary Art Center, and basically just given the run of whatever I wanted. I had to produce most everything here in this country [USA] and transport it with me because I didn’t know what would be available once I got there. Even though they kind of discouraged doing that, it would not have happened otherwise as well as it did.”
“Park of Love” photo courtesy of artist.
Once stationed at the contemporary art center, Terry gave anyone who came by the chance to make their own banners to be installed in the “Park.” The National Center for Contemporary Art was very welcoming to Terry and he found the staff, especially his assistant Irina Aganina, to be extremely helpful in facilitating the success of his piece.
“…I took all of my banners, in the colors of love, and camped out at the national contemporary art center and anyone who wanted to come by I had all the art supplies there for each person to do a flag of their feelings of love, thoughts of love, quotes of love, whatever they wanted to do, and it became this really big community project.”
“Making banners at the Arsenal” photo courtesy of artist.
When the work was completed and installed, Terry found that not only was it well received by the general public but also coincided with the anniversary of the town; the festivities thus insured his installation was well attended:
“Ultimately, the last two days I was there I installed the project down on the grounds of the contemporary art center; it was during their 794th birthday, there were a lot of people everywhere, it was just really amazing [seeing] the support I got in that town. I’ve never been to Russia before and don’t speak the language and it was a little unnerving but it was truly amazing.”
The Motor City Window Cleaning Co. combines a tale of two cities with an artist’s own unwinding family history. Artist Laura Napier joins us to discuss the project and the family secret to washing windows (Video below).
Tell us about yourself. Where are you from and what’s your connection to Detroit?
My great-grandparents came to Detroit from Poland in the early 20th century, and both my parents grew up in the Detroit area, but migrated west with their families to Arizona and California in the sixties. I was born in California, but have lived in New York City for almost twenty years. That is a lot of migration over four generations! I have been in Poland, but have never gone to Detroit. So it is a mystery to me.
What inspired the Motor City Window Cleaning Co. project? Why bring your grandfather’s window washing company to Memphis?
Only recently have I seen a family tree. It reaches back to the Ferenc family farm in Poland. The Motor City Window Cleaning Co. is part of that story, and it has been fun to call up relatives and ask them what they recall about it. Everyone in the family still knows the secret to washing windows is to just use a lot of water, and to have good squeegees, shammies, and maybe a little ammonia. Now you know the secret, too.
I was invited to do a project for the exhibition Memphis Social, curated by Beautiful Fields in May, at many places across the city. On a scouting trip to Memphis I was struck by the names of businesses on signs, like Arnold Hearing Aid, or Easy-Way (a vegetable store). It seemed apt to add Motor City to that list as a kind of absurdity, and also, window washing is a great envelope for social activity.
One of many storefronts on South Main, one of the areas included in the Memphis Social exhibition
Have you discovered any interesting comparisons between Memphis and Detroit? Have you discovered anything interesting about your family’s history by exploring the history of these two cities?
There have been some interesting coincidences. While searching the Library of Congress for a photo in the public domain of the Memphis skyline, I found one circa 1900 – 1910 inscribed with “Detroit Publishing Co.”. And when I went to Memphis, I immediately met and spent some time with an artist originally from Detroit, Mary Jo Karimnia. Then there are the Memphis and Detroit Tigers.
Both cities were high on industry at one time (cars, cotton) but now are in economic decline, as one friend put it recently, they are both “busted”. Both cities saw tragic events during the civil rights movement, with Detroit forever changed by the 1967 riot, and Memphis with Dr. King’s assassination during the Sanitation Strike in 1968.
As far as I know, my family does not have any history with Memphis. It turns out that my father did see the smoke rising from downtown during the riots in Detroit; he was interning at Ford at the time. I knew that my family’s migration west reflected greater patterns of white flight, but didn’t know that he was still in Detroit at that time.
What themes or ideas do you typically toy with in your work? Do you find certain ideas easier to express than others?
Lately I am very interested in social groups, especially ones organized inside sites of former communities — where people lived or worked together. Usually these projects begin with primary and secondary source research.
In 2011 I staged Channel, an encounter group following an hour-long script of associative texts related to former Synanon and Baladullah alternative communities at the original site in semi-ruin in the California Sierras, which is now an art space called The Hatchery.
In 2012, the social project Activity Committee, created in collaboration with Carmen Julia Hernandez, invited artists to resurrect historically documented social committees with existing communities of workers, students, seniors, exhibition goers, and neighbors in and around the Andrew Freedman Home, a formerly grand private retirement home in the South Bronx now owned by the Mid-Bronx Senior Citizens Council.
I am also traveling to Flint, Michigan in late April for an early project with the Flint Public Art Project’s Free City festival. Happy Valley will be a special performance of The Flint Male Chorus, directly descended from the company era Chevrolet-Flint Male Chorus of the Chevrolet Manufacturing Division, and the Flint City Wide Choir, an interdenominational group from more than 50 churches across Flint. Both are performing outdoors at the Flint-Chevy site where factories once stood.
Due to their nature, these projects are complex. I am slowly working through the book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop, Verso, 2012 right now, because it posits a rich history of and theoretical framework around this kind of work, from 1917 until today. While in graduate school, I was always struck by the nature of inclusion and exclusion, being in the know or not, in Ei Arakawa’s work staged in our small community during our studies. Being the organizer of my own projects, I am usually in the know, but this tension between knowing and unwitting participation is always present.
T-shirt prototypes in development for The Motor City Window Cleaning Co.
Many of your projects rely on participation. Why is participation an important element to incorporate in your work?
Recently I went on a walk to Houdini’s grave in Queens organized by Erin Sickler with a few other women artists, and the conversation at one point centered around what personal problems we were all trying to work out through our artwork. One person, who is a very good organizer of people, says she is super disorganized in her work space; another, a painter, will never be able to pin down what her paintings are supposed to do and be, so she is doomed to paint over and over again. It all sounded pretty productive to me. Living and working as an artist from day to day can be very lonely at times. It is a big reward to see the aha moment, when someone experiencing or embodying a project lights up with excitement; also, participants in my work usually know better than me what is going on, and have great ideas that I would never think of on my own.
Are you trying to evoke any particular emotions with this project or are you working through any particular emotions yourself with this project?
To be honest, the audience in Memphis, local residents of Memphis, gallery goers, passersby, and other artists who are part of the exhibition, when they encounter it may not know that The Motor City Window Cleaning Co. is an art project. Many of my projects rely on something unexpected, a surprise for the audience.
If anything, the research into this project so far has made me feel much more grounded as a person and as an artist, as I find out more about the personal and professional histories of my extended family. Understanding the themes and threads that have run through everyone in the family as a group has changed my thinking on my personal history as an individual.
Do you see a connection between the work you do as an artist and the work your grandfather did as a blue-collar window washer? What labor injustices do artists face today and how can they solve them?
There is definitely irony in raising funds through USA Projects to support what should be a for-profit business; art takes the profit right out. That said, every business needs startup capital, and art is no different.
Also, my opportunities personally as an artist are more blue collar, maybe because of where I came from. So it is funny to embrace that.
My grandfather’s clients were mostly furniture stores and the like along Michigan Avenue, and he never raised his prices after gaining a client, this is over years and years. When he sold his business circa 1964, the next guy was able to double prices overnight. My grandfather had been afraid to lose his clients if he raised his rates, and many artists are suffering from the same conundrum, afraid to lose their clients or opportunities. Often fee rates are handed to them from institutions and there is little leeway for negotiation. And those fees have remained frozen in time as the cost of living has shot up here in New York City. We should learn a lesson from the next guy.
Caritas Village is a community center in a former Masonic Temple; famous images of the Memphis Sanitation Strike by photographer Ernest C. Withers are on permanent display. Incidentally, Withers was a paid FBI informant.
Anything else you want to add?
My grandfather supported everyone through the Motor City Window Cleaning Co., although according to my aunt he could’ve worked his way up in the office at GM. Instead, he worked as a night watchman at Fisher Body while starting up the window washing business.
Being the oldest, he dropped out of school around sixteen to support his mother and his younger siblings, and before then as a schoolboy he helped his mother at her job, cleaning offices early in the morning before school started. His father before him also washed windows. About this, a relative who researched much of the family tree wrote tactfully, “Before he made it home, Walter [my great-grandfather] would often leave most of his hard earned paychecks at the local bar.”
My grandfather had an amazing retirement. I knew him as a very cheerful man in Arizona, who woke up early to feed the dog and wild birds and make breakfast, and who enjoyed playing cards, gardening, fishing, bowling, golf, and went on road trips in his giant Detroit built car to Reno, Nevada, where he and my grandmother played nickel slots.
He would insist on washing the windows in my mother’s house when he visited us in California. He painted my room a bright shade of orange when I was a child and it affected me for life.
In September of 2012, a handful of American artists were invited to St. Petersburg, Russia to participate in the first ever large-scale festival for public art in the city, Art Prospect. Although there have been other public art festivals in the city, Art Prospect differs from them in its size and location. This four-day international festival was organized by CEC Artslink and co-curated by Ed Woodham, the director of Art in Odd Places (AiOP) and featured the works of seventeen American and Russian artists and art groups who “…share the desire to present art in unusual spaces, to cover a wider and more diverse audience…”
The projects, which included installations, video, performances, ephemeral objects, and other examples of contemporary art, were meant to attract the attention of the passersby, while at the same time relating to the spaces of Liteiny Prospect: the street, courtyards, cafes, storefronts, and facades of buildings.
The Soap Group’s “Dog” peeks into a window above Swoon’s piece “Miss Bennet.” Image courtesy of CEC ArtsLink.
Liteiny Prospect runs off of the main avenue of St. Petersburg, Nevsky Prospect, and the buildings of this avenue display an architectural feature that is particular to St. Petersburg: tunnel like passages that open into courtyards. These courtyards are public spaces belonging to the city and function as community spaces for the residents and businesses of the people who live and work in the area.
Getting permission to do these types of works was one of the biggest challenges faced by the festival organizers; in Russia, putting together any kind of festival requires permits and approval from a number of departments from the city administration. Since Art Prospect was the first ever large-scale public art festival attempted in the country, these governing bodies were wary about the kind of precedent an event like this would be setting. Before the festival was even firmly set, CEC was in discussion with the city administration for almost a year, only receiving final permission and a list of courtyards that could be used one week before the festival’s opening.
All of the artists involved in the festival were described by Susan Katz, the CEC organizer who was the driving force behind putting the festival together, as “generally wonderful to work with” and very flexible when it came to adapting their projects “given the difficulties of working in Russia and the need to make many last minute changes.” Over the last few months I corresponded with Susan, and talked with some of the participating American artists, including Ed Woodham, Nicholas Fraser, Terry S. Hardy, and Sheryl Oring, in order to gain insight into the overall experience of working in Russia and some of the public reactions to the pieces and performances that were presented.
Ed Woodham
Strange Makings, Ed Woodham with Pro Arte students. Photo by Evgeniy Luchinskiy.
For Ed, coming to St. Petersburg was not only an opportunity to share AiOP’s mission but also a chance “to create a subversive, gay expressionist performance as part of his Homopropoganda series.” Right before Ed came, Pussy Riot had just been imprisoned and the governor of the city declared being gay to be illegal. Having heard this news, Ed knew he had to do something “for his own well-being.” So he took on the role of Fancy “a flaneur of sorts who was ’out’ on the town,” donning an outrageous costume, a wig, flamboyant jewelry and, with the help of Terry Hardy, crafted a photomontage of his character walking the streets of St. Petersburg and posing throughout the city.
On his excursion, Ed came across a plaza where artists were selling kitsch paintings and sketching tourists, so he bargained with one of the artists, the only one who spoke English, to sketch him. The artist agreed, asking him, “are you a rockstar?” and “what’s going on?” and as Ed was explaining he suddenly found himself swarmed by the other artists, who began to sketch him as well. Ed became the epicenter of activity, as he was surrounded by all these artists who were sketching him, who were then followed by Terry photographing the scene and tons of Russian tourists gathering to see what was going on, creating “these concentric circles of modeling and observation.”
Sketch of Ed by Russian artist. Ed being sketched. Photo by Terry Hardy.
Ed translated what he learned from his excursion through the city into his performance for the festival, which touched on ideas of modeling and observation in a storefront window on Liteiny Prospect and involved the participation of students from the Pro-Arte Foundation in St. Petersburg. On the opening day, the courtyard near the storefront where Ed presented his piece became:
“…exactly what we wanted to create, people were surrounding us, photographers, videographers, because we were very visual and they were doing for us what we were going to do for them. They were surrounding, documenting us, photographing us; we were modeling from the very onset. We modeled and wherever we would stop people would surround and photograph us.”
At this event everyone had a different way of working, drawing the attention of bystanders, photographers, and reporters from the national news, each of them taking pictures and video recording the actions. In turn, these individuals were also being sketched and photographed by Ed and his students, “turning the play of who is looking at whom.” While a black and white striped outfit was the required attire (Ed’s garment was designed by veteran AiOP artist Gretchen Vitamvas), the students all took their own variations on the theme. “One artist,” Ed recalls, “had a black costume and balloons inside of her costume with paint and she had a knife and she would stab herself in certain points in the evening and the balloon would leak out white paint onto her black dress.”
The next day was the performance in the storefront window. The first impression Ed got from the observers was “a lot of stony, stoic faces” and as a result he made it his mission to “make them smile,” something he managed to accomplish successfully as the performance went into full force. The piece, which involved participants and observers viewing each other, became more slapstick and visually funny as people gathered outside of the window:
“It became comedic and it was great to see these stoic faces break down, everyone laughed, everyone smiled, and people gathered around us and we photographed, videoed, and sketched them looking at us. Also two artists from Amsterdam, who are curating this festival this year took hundreds of photos of people looking at us revealing the passersby’s expressions. People were looking; from busses, on the street, [even] to people in cars honking, [they were] gawking at the spectacle in the window.”
Nicholas Fraser
Photo courtesy of the artist.
Nicholas Fraser’s project, titled “Nevsky Prospect,” made use of text from a short story by Gogol, a classic Russian writer who is equivalent to Mark Twain for Americans.
As Liteiny Prospect runs off of Nevsky, Nicholas decided to use this story in a temporary chalk installation, breaking it down into 40 or 50 short separate bits of text that he and his assistants laid down on the streets and pathways of the thoroughfare and courtyards. One of the biggest challenges Nicholas faced when putting this piece together was the logistics; not being familiar with where to obtain materials and even interactions with material manufacturers provided a challenge to him before his work was to be installed:
“If you’re in a city that you’re not familiar with and you don’t speak the language you really become dependent upon the people who are assisting you and what they know. There were a couple of days of just running around like crazy looking for the things that I needed, but we got it all just fine and it worked out. Russia is a little different in terms of manufacturing services; I ordered these plastic letters for my piece and I had them cut in Russia, and I remember getting the order and I looked at the box and thought, ‘this looks great, but it doesn’t look like there is enough here.’ I did a count and I had exactly one of each character, and I had of course ordered multiples of them to make it easier and faster. Over the course of the next four or five days with an installation looming, they trickled in from this vendor.”
The reactions to his “Nevsky Prospect” piece were hard to gage as Nicholas doesn’t speak any Russian and had to rely on his assistants to translate, but he was able to get a sense of what the observers thought based on looking at them:
“…it was everything from mystification, ‘what are you doing and what is this and why is it here and this is art?’ all those kind of questions, to people who knew the story and recalled the story and were very thankful of me doing this piece. I had a lot of people thanking me wholeheartedly for this and for the larger project, because there were a lot of different works happening, a lot of different types of works, performances and things like that. “
Terry Hardy
Blue, Terry Hardy. Photo by Evgeniy Luchinskiy.
Terry Hardy’s installation, titled “Blue,” took advantage of an old courtyard off of Liteiny Prospect. The idea behind this installation was loss and it involved blue flags/banners that were set up fencing an area of the courtyard. These flags were embroidered with about twenty words from an Alexander Pushkin poem that Terry had found the most striking. Although not the first time he had produced a project of this kind, every time Terry does a fence/banner project he finds the whole experience to be very emotional, and his use of Pushkin’s words in this particular case had a very directed effect on the emotional involvement of the public observers:
“The words were very somber, it was not a happy, uplifting wonderful piece; one of the older residents came down and asked my why did I pick such sad colors for such a beautiful time of the year, and once my assistant explained that to her and the words were very sad, and once she understood the Pushkin connection she was fine with it, as well that it was only temporary and wasn’t going to be there forever. Everybody else was very optimistic, some of the people have lived there their entire lives; it was very amazing.”
By the end of the installation, Terry had found that the piece had an even more profound effect on the community than he had originally thought, even getting pleas from the woman responsible for managing the area and several residents to leave it up for a longer period of time.
Sheryl Oring
Role Model , Sheryl Oring. Photo by Evgeniy Luchinskiy.
“Role Model” was the title of Sheryl Oring’s piece, which involved two Russian typists sitting at little tables along Liteiny Prospect and within the courtyards as they asked and recorded people’s responses to the question, “what can Russia teach the world?” Part public performance piece, part sociological survey, Sheryl “found a really willing audience and a very broad based audience” during the run of her work, encompassing participants from a variety of backgrounds, including “some art folks who knew about the festival, but also grandmas that lived in the apartment complex next door.”
The most difficult part of this piece for Sheryl were the logistics, as she was unfamiliar with St. Petersburg and only met the typists she would be working with when she arrived in the city:
“I had never met the typists before I went to Russia, I’d never seen pictures of them and I had to try and figure out what they would wear ahead of time and I had no idea what size outfit I would bring to them. When I got there it turned out I brought a couple things and nothing really worked, so on the spot I needed to figure out where to look for the things, I don’t speak the language, how to get from here to there, all those really practical difficulties, but fun in a way as well. One of the biggest challenges was not knowing the landscape and having to figure out quickly what the possibilities were and how to work.”
Photo courtesy of CEC ArtsLink.
Despite the logistical setbacks in the beginning, the project was executed successfully and the answers Sheryl received not only helped her get a sense of the socio-cultural atmosphere of Russia (at least from the perspective of the citizens of St. Petersburg), but also gained some unexpected insight into the resilience of the Russian people:
“The answer I will never forget from this question was ‘Russia can teach the world how to be sad;’ it was so deep and profound and in a way it was touching to see the dignity people lived with, through a lot of war and a lot of difficulty and violence in their own country and how people live today still with that history is quite amazing.”
The success of Sheryl’s project in Russia has influenced her to continue with this idea, examining the reactions to the same question in different cultural contexts:
“I just did the second performance of this in Brazil, in a very different context. The work in Russia spawned a series of new performances that are taking place in different parts of the world.”
Future Prospects
Overall, the festival was well received and the responses to it helped solidify the success of the experience. “Most of the public reactions were positive,” remarked Susan, “there were a few cranky residents who were not happy to have artists milling around their courtyards, but most people seemed to enjoy the objects and performances.” Ed and several artists also participated in a panel titled “Art in Urban Spaces: New forms of cooperation with society,” held at the independent art space, Etazhi. The panel focused on presenting art in the public sphere; during the panel, Ed discussed AiOP, its mission and its festival, while the other participating artists talked about their works and how they relate to the topic.
Paul Notzold’s “TXTual Healing” allows viewers to text phrases to be inserted into the dialogue boxes projected on the building wall. Photo courtesy of CEC ArtsLink.
As for the future of the Art Prospect festival in Russia, everyone generally agrees that the success of this festival has helped to set a positive precedent that will help break down barriers and reduce restrictions that might arise when organizing the next one. “In the future I know it will be so much easier for them,” Terry remarked, “and of all the Russian artists that were involved, we realized they were pretty important locally. Now that it’s all said and done and we’ve done our research, we realize there were some pretty amazing people there that put a really wonderful show together.”
More images of the festival can be found on the CEC ArtsLink Facebook page and the AiOP Flickr.
“Facebook banner for ‘The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in Los Angeles Jails’” Graphic Design by: Street Inc Media
By Matthew Morowitz
On March 9, 2013, “Freedom Harvest Presents: #RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” premiered at the Pieter Performance Space. Spearheaded by Patrisse Cullors and her coalition, The Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in Los Angeles Jails, this piece was created in response to the excessive force and brutality by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department (LASD). The Coalition, on the other hand, is:
“…a grassroots multiracial organization bringing together community organizations, health providers, clergy, attorneys, community residents, friends and families and survivors of the brutality inside L.A. jails to fight for real accountability. We are proposing a People’s Civilian Review Board comprised wholly of citizens that has subpoena power, where citizen complaints are reviewed and investigated, and recommendations for disciplinary or policy action are made by the board.”
Patrisse’s Story
”Patrisse Cullors at iMAP Visiting Artist Lecture Series,” spring 2013. Video courtesy of Veronica Paredes.
Patrisse founded the Coalition as a result of her family’s firsthand experience with violence at the hands of the LASD. Thirteen years ago, when Patrisse was sixteen years old, he brother was incarcerated by the LASD and brutally assaulted by sheriff’s deputies. During his incarceration, Patrisse’s brother was:
“…beaten so badly that he blacked out and when he awoke he was in a pool of his own blood. He was then handcuffed to a bedpost by deputies, he was denied a cot to sleep on, he was denied a blanket, he was stripped naked, they had sent him to the hospital because he had a concussion, [but] the sheriffs told him to tell [the hospital] that he did not want to stay so he did not get proper medical treatment.”
When Patrisse’s mother attempted to visit her brother, she was consistently denied access and had no idea what was happening to him. By the time she was able to make contact, he was “completely emaciated and they had dressed him up on psychotropic drugs because my brother had basically lost it, [as] he was up for 5 days.”
This incident changed Patrisse’s entire family’s life, and to this day her brother is still dealing with the effects of his abuse:
“My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia because of this incident. We can’t completely prove that it’s from the abuse in the county jail, [even though] he did receive a major head injury, but there is a lot of evidence that TBI, traumatic brain injury, often results in mood disorders and psychosis.”
“Stained”
“STAINED(performance art piece)- Patrisse Cullors” Video courtesy of Maxwell Addae Johnson.
In January of 2012, the LASD was under investigation both by the Citizen’s Commission on Jail Violence and the ACLU, the latter formally pressing charges on the department for excessive force. Utilizing the ACLU complaint from this investigation, which consisted of inmate and civilian eyewitnesses recounting what they had either gone through or witnessed, Patrisse decided to stage an art piece.
The piece, titled “Stained: An Intimate Portrayal of State Violence,” was directed and produced by Patrisse, and co-produced by Noni Limar; the performance involved Patrisse and four other performers and the 86 page complaint that was evidence in the investigation, as well as the documentation of her brother’s own account of abuse at the hands of the LASD:
“…basically, I blow up the 86 page document and I have four performers and they’re repasting the document on boards, on blackboards, and the performers are blocked off by caution tape and there is an audio overlay while they’re repasting, which is me. My mother documented everything my brother went through and so I am reading all the documents, with no emotion, cold, reading all the numbers she ever called, all the people she ever tried to get ahold of, and so you’re hearing the audio overlay and reading the actual complaint while the performers are repasting. Every 5-6 pages, each performer comes out and they do some sort of physical activity until fail; one performer is doing burpees until fail, another performer is jumping until fail, another performer is laughing until they’re crying, crying until they’re laughing and another performer is pacing back and forth. This goes on over and over again until the repasting is done.”
“Stained” Image courtesy of Channing Martinez.
This piece toured from January 2012 and all of last year until December, and was described by Patrisse as having “birthed everything.” Around June, many of Patrisse’s colleagues were asking her, “what are we gonna do next?” As this was, and still is, an issue happening in L.A., Patrisse wanted to do something more with it, but outside of just launching a new piece that would draw public anger towards it. Having worked as a community organizer in L.A. for the past 11 years, receiving her training from the Labor Community Strategy Center, Patrisse decided to start the Coalition as no other organization is specifically working on this issue of violence inside the county jails.
The Coalition creates dialogues
“Coalition Members Representing!” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails Facebook page.
The Coalition was started very quickly but also quickly gained a lot of support from county board supervisors, being officially endorsed by one of the county board of defenders, and was involved in multiple press conferences, multiple protests, and gained a lot of news coverage. However, despite the coverage that the Coalition was receiving, Patrisse wanted to reframe the conversation around the scope of violence that was happening in and around the county jails:
“The history of violence has been reoccurring with the county sheriffs, and I really wanted to develop art that looked at the issue of violence and incarceration, not just any violence, state violence, violence that is perpetuated by the state, and also [explore] what’s the breath of fresh air, what’s the hope in this?”
“Leader Patrisse Cullors speaking at press conference.” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails Facebook page.
Patrisse’s brother’s story, although horrifying is not unique. Stories such as his have regularly surfaced in and around L.A. county since the 60s and 70s, many recounting other horrifying treatments, such as sheriffs carving into inmates, as well sheriffs running their own gangs of deputies inside the jails and around the county. As the LASD is in charge of security in all of L.A. County, it is unnerving to many of the inhabitants to know that the same individuals who oversee and protect public institutions, such as museums and parks and recreations, could also become potential abusers if they find themselves in the wrong situation. On top of that, the areas around the jails are lonely and intimidating, offering no kinds of support or outreach to the families of the incarcerated, especially when they go there to visit their loved ones.
Racial justice has also been another big part of Patrisse’s efforts, as many of the civil and human rights violations that happen in L.A. County jails has a large impact on marginalized communities who are mostly black and brown and reinforces negative perceptions and sentiments of them; these perceptions are only further reinforced when related to the issue of incarceration. Currently, out of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the U.S. jails and prisons now, about 1 million are Black and 500,000 are Latino. The unfortunate reality of the situation for everyone, the incarcerated, families, and the inhabitants themselves, only furthered Patrisse’s resolve to create something that not only drew light to the issue but set out alternatives to help change the system for the people who are effected by it:
Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails facebook page.
“We had a lot of pain around this issue and there was never really any sort of hope or light at the end of the tunnel; sometimes that will come from the powers that be, sometimes the community itself. Going down to the county jails is depressing; there is nobody outside the jails except bail-bonds people and the people going to visit their loved ones, and often times people going to visit their loved ones were distraught, it’s a pain to go through it alone. We started going outside of the jails organizing, we’d go outside of the jails twice a month and we’d pass out fliers to passing people. I was like ‘maybe we should start doing art? Do some sort of workshop outside the jails? No one’s doing anything.’”
We Rise
”#endsheriffviolence” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails facebook page.
Alongside being an experienced community organizer, Patrisse has received formal training in dance and theater, having been mentored by Augusto Boal, the late founder of the Theater of the Oppressed. Keeping in mind her own background, Patrisse gathered together a crew of local artists who she also knew had community-organizing experience within L.A. County in order to brainstorm a piece:
“I really wanted a group of people who are also in the community, thinking about the community, and our relationships to the community and are part of the community. I brought together a team and I said, ‘I want an artist group that is talking about state violence and mass incarceration, and really focusing on those issues, and I want us to have a symbol that is about hope.’”
Along with Patrisse, this group also included Gonji Lee, Shruti Purkayastha, Jasmine Wade, and Jermond Davis. During their first meeting, the group was doing some theater of the oppressed around the questions “what do you want to see? What do you think of when you think of people incarcerated?” that Patrisse had put forth, when one of the members, Gonji Lee:
“We are more than just a booking number. life and breath always wins.” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails Facebook page.
“…kind of whisked their hair, everything was silent, and blew out in their hand and all of us kind of took a deep breath and we sat down and we said ‘what was that?’ and she said ‘it was the image of a dandelion’ and almost immediately the group just kind of like screamed ‘that’s our image!’”
After the decision had been made, the group began researching the dandelion, and the more they learned about it, the stronger their commitment to using it as an image became:
“Our first meeting and we looked up the dandelion, did all this kind of research on the dandelion, and we started to find out about the dandelion and we all know it’s a weed and many of us who grew up in the hood, in ghetto neighborhoods, the dandelion grows in all of our neighborhoods, it’s the one flower that we have, it’s the one image we have. The dandelion is kind of seen as abused, people will kick it up in their yard when they see it grow in their garden, but the few things that happen with the dandelion, you try to uproot it and it gets stronger, so it grows deeper. That’s one and we thought that was a powerful image for us, even if you try and beat us and uproot us, we will get stronger, we will survive. The other part is that it’s medicinal, the leaves are really powerful, the leaves are really powerful medicine, there’s a lot of research on its ability to act as a preventative aid towards cancer, around it ending cancer, it has a lot of healing properties.”
“We are more than just a booking number. life and breath always wins.” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails Facebook page.
After reaching out this new symbol to their fans and supporters over the End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails Facebook page, by their second meeting the group amassed a collection of images, blurbs, and poems about the dandelion and what it meant to all of these individuals; from there they came up with the name “Freedom Harvest Presents: #RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” for this new piece. With the title decided on and a plethora of reference material, Patrisse had no trouble figuring out what direction she wanted the piece to take:
“We understood that we wanted to see ourselves like a crew that’s planting the seeds of freedom, and the dandelion is our symbol for that, and we decided that we wanted to do a big show. We wanted to have a show be two art installations: one that focused on family and the impacts of incarceration on family, and another installation that focused on our ancestors, where we come from.”
“we are all motivated to see our communities heal. #riseofthedandelion #endsheriffviolence” Image courtesy of End Sheriff Violence in L.A. County jails Facebook page.
This focus on ancestors, especially earlier relatives who would have been subjected to this type of state violence, was not only a way to further highlight the history of abuse and racial profiling surrounding the LASD, but also a way to identify with those earlier family members and individuals who were part of the Civil Rights movement. By doing so, the collective is hoping to look back on history in order to help find strategies and solutions to combat this present issue:
“Right now in history, a lot of us all we see is kind of the trauma and effects of state violence and incarceration, but there’s this time before this, what did our ancestors do? How did they deal with these issues of state violence, and how did they deal with all the issues they had to face during the civil rights movement? What did they do?”
“#freedomportals” Image courtesy of L. Renée Bever.
“Freedom Harvest”
Patrisse and her group began curating the work and collaborating with a bunch of artists across L.A., including videographer Anthony Brown with “Gabriel’s Eye Photography,” who came all the way from Atlanta, Georgia to record and create a video of the event. On March 9th, 2013 “Freedom Harvest Presents: #RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” premiered at the Pieter Performance Space, exhibiting live installation and visual and performance art using the image of the dandelion as a symbol for helping to create communities to fight for the freedom of the abused in the L.A. County jails, as well as to fight the culture of violence that exists within these jails and the LASD. The artists/performers/installers for #RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS includes Darryl King, Ana Ruth Castillo, Mark-Anthony Johnson, Damon Turner (aka Real8), Andres Rivera, Haewon Asfaw, Almas Fatima, Rey Fukuda, Diana Flores, Melo Lemus, Eden Jeffries, Kelly Archbold, Three Olivas Breazell, and Christine Wang.
“#RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS poster” Image courtesy of Kitzia Esteva.
Two goals came out of this event: the first is that at some point this piece will be installed in front of of the L.A. County jail itself. The second goal, which is much more long term, is that “#RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” will not only be performed all across L.A. County, but that video of it and a blurb about it will be sent out nationally. The hope is that the piece will be linked up with artists across the country, who in turn will build their own “#RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” teams and install works related to this theme inside local gallery spaces and, eventually, outside of their own county jails.
For Patrisse, “Freedom Harvest” is also as much against the violence in L.A County jails as well as a commentary on this country’s relationship to slavery, prisons, and racism towards Black Americans that still exists:
“I believe that the issues around mass incarceration come from a history of racism inside this country, specifically racism that responds to blackness with hatred and violence. So, the Freedom Harvest crew although not ALL black is a black centered movement. Believing that if we as a country deal with anti-black sentiment we will be dealing with a whole lot of other issues. Freedom Harvest is a commentary on this countries relationship to slavery, prisons, and cages.”
“Stop Abuse in LA County Jails!” Video courtesy of Brave New Foundation.
The Coalition has thirteen community partners all across L.A. County, as well as many other supporters. Both the Coalition and “#RISEOFTHEDANDELIONS” are deeply collaborative and the latter has been working with Damon Turner, founder of the group, “G.R.E.E.D.Y. City,” which stands for “Generation Righteously Enduring to Eradicate Dying Young” and explores mass incarceration and state violence through the mediums of hip hop and spoken word. They have also been collaborating with the group “Beats, Frames, and Life,” which is led by Giovanni Solis and Ashley Blakeney. For more information on the Coalition to End Sheriff Violence in L.A. Jails, be sure to check out their website and Facebook page, as well as follow their activities on their WordPress, or send them an email at endsheriffviolence@gmail.com. Follow them on Twitter as well, @PowerDignity and #endsheriffviolence, and to join the conversation with “Freedom Harvest” use #riseofthedandelions and #freedomportals.
It’s International Women’s Day, and it’s been an exciting few days in Washington D.C. Yesterday President Obama signed an expanded Violence Against Women Act that offers protections for gays, lesbians, Native Americans, and immigrants. This morning, former president Bill Clinton penned an op-ed for The Washington Post deeming the Defense of Marriage Act, which will come before the Supreme Court on March 27, unconstitutional.
And here at AiOP, we’re bringing you a brand new podcast featuring Washington D.C.-based artist Linda Hesh.
Linda Hesh explores the relationship between the personal and political, identity and marginalization. She is very conscious of speaking to an audience, declaring private musings publicly to play with taboos or challenge social norms. She’s been known to throw her hat into the political arena with political artworks focusing on gender disparity, gay marriage, and race.
Today Hesh and I discuss the lack of political art in Washington D.C., as well as her latest project delving into the suppression of lesbianism in Old Hollywood. Be sure to check out some of her work below.
George Spencer’s “Long Count” (Photo courtesy of Sarah Brozna).
