Presenting visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces.

Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS / Artist Anecdote


DOLL CHAIN

Presented in association with GOH Productions, IGUANA Collaborative 2023
Performance Team: Sherry Erskine, Bonnie Sue Stein, John K Erskine, Vít Hořejš, Roberta Levine and Dan Crozier

photo: Deborah Beshaw-Farrell

Concept: Sherry Erskine + Bonnie Sue Stein
Tunic design & construction: Sherry Erskine
Production: Bonnie Sue Stein
Sonic Consultant: John K Erskine
Text Consultant: Roberta Levine
Photos: Deborah Beshaw-Farrell

Anecdotal note – Nov. 12, 2023

To investigate symbols of unity and to question performance art as a form of peaceful protest, IGUANA Collaborative performed DOLL CHAIN in Art in Odd Places: DRESS Festival wearing identical robes connected at the sleeves. We chose two fabrics named “safety orange” for the robe and “flame” for the pants to explore how high-visibility orange represents protection in contemporary society and elevates a sense of importance around ones’ body. In a process-based practice, the meaning of a work evolves weeks later in reflection. We found the actual experience of meandering through 14th Street on October 15 as one anonymous, calm, joyous unit, to be cathartic at a time of social unrest and war. Wearing identical orange robes allowed us to experience the world from other perspectives and tap into the flow of energy on the street. Besides the street sounds around us, John carried a subliminal drone generator and metronome to set a tone for our movements. Passersby stopped to inquire, asked to join, laughed and stared. On numerous occasions, DOLL CHAIN circled a willing bystander to honor their being and laugh with them. To start, we literally bumped into our giant orange cousin, Kaczmarek/Miranda’s Layer of Exuberance, which prompted our spontaneous action of surrounding and reverently bowing, performing our practiced deconstructed folk dance. The action continued, as DOLL CHAIN encountered pedestrians including a construction worker, a young woman from Brooklyn, a father from Pennsylvania celebrating his birthday, a group of Dutch-speaking cyclists, a park guard and a food truck vendor. In all engagements, the public found DOLL CHAIN to be gentle and humorous.

photo: Deborah Beshaw-Farrell

Digging deeper, psychology says that the color orange has the ability to increase energy and creativity, yet it is also associated with spiritual practices including meditation, compassion, transformation and higher states of illumination. For example, in chakra theory, orange is the color of Svadthisthana which translates to “one’s own dwelling.” While performing slow movements, we unconsciously discovered the “orange chakra” balanced our emotions and activated our power to innovate and find creative ways of interaction. Our intention with DOLL CHAIN was to demonstrate kindness, compassion, joy and calm – all qualities of human nature that help center us while serving to shrink darker emotions. These qualities arising out of our core human goodness, connect us to one another as well as strangers we pass on the street. Together, we can cultivate care through our art practices during times of strife and strive to end human suffering.

photo: Deborah Beshaw-Farrell

IGUANA Collaborative was founded in 1976 by artists from Detroit: Sherry and John K Erskine and Bonnie Sue Stein. IGUANA creates hybrid [analog/digital] interdisciplinary works utilizing lens-based media, performance, installation and sound. They are denizens of the new & unusual, itching to ‘make-a-mark’ across borders and social definitions.
sherryerskine.art
gohproductions.org

Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS / Artist Anecdote


Ravel

A Project for Art in Odd Places 2023: Dress, by Deirdre Macleod

photo: Jonathan Bumble

From the ground up

photo: Jonathan Bumble

Find a space to sit and weave.
At odds, out of place, but in plain sight.

“I’m from the Philippines… This is my mother.”
“That looks really difficult…is it really difficult?”
“…we use machines to weave there, to make very fine cloth.”

Out of the corner of my eye. Standing beside me, looking at his phone. He seems oblivious, amused by something he’s watching. I turn a bit. Try to catch his eye, and he moves.

“…only six days? You should stay here for longer.”
“My mother has eight looms. Can I take a picture for her?”

Smiles. With eyes. Looking down at me at where I’m sitting.

“No, I’m not artistic. I’m an accountant. I came from Kyoto. I worked at Citizensbank. Or, I used to. I’m retired now.”
“Keep going…keep going. You need peace to do that. Lots of peace.”

Watching, watching…walking away just as I look up to make eye contact.

“I’m Gloria. Will you say what you’re doing into my phone so that I can tell my friend? Wait…start now. Say, ‘Hi Brian’…
Yes, I’m local. I live on 9th, at Avenue A. I sell clothes. Here, this is for you. Take it, I won’t charge you. Try this…
Do you believe in God?”

Cool draught of air behind me and a metallic shudder. I’m sitting up against scaffolding outside the Y. Someone’s parked a bike right beside me, the tyre touches my back. I twist a bit to avoid track marks on my skin.

“Oh! You moved. You were so still! I just noticed you out of the corner of my eye when you moved.”

Try to catch his eye, and he moves.

photo: Christopher Kaczmarek

Rain drips and rattles off scaffolding. The loose line of people by the sidewalk edge tenses as the bus pulls in.

“Will you teaching me how to weave? How do you weave? Is it easy? I’m Paco, from Mexico originally. I’ve been here a while now. Oh, I’ve got to run. I swapped my shift with my colleague because it’s my son’s birthday tomorrow and I want to take him out, so I need to go…”

Finding a patch of tree bark to lean my frame against. Its texture is coarse and leathery. At its base, a square of gritty soil. One yellow leaf blown from the branches. Something small, shiny and circular, half-submerged in sand.

“How long does it take to make something like that? What are you making?
“Is it a scarf?
“When will you get it finished? Today…or maybe tomorrow?”

A woman asks me how to get to 15th Street. And I tell her to go right, rather than left at the end of the block. Which is broadly the right direction, I think. I’m surprised she’s chosen to ask me, weaving, shawl-wearing, sitting against a tree as I am. I don’t exactly look local. Perhaps it’s simply because I’m situated and I’m still.

“My friend told me that there was a woman weaving on the corner of 14th Street. I didn’t believe her, so I just had to come and see. I go to Mexico each year and about seven years ago I did a course on frame weaving and I’ve been weaving ever since. I just love it. I’ve been making headbands and selling them.”

photo: Jonathan Bumble

Somebody over my shoulder. Can’t see them, but I can feel them there…momentarily. Looking. And then they’re gone.

“I just love that you’re doing this. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I love that you’re doing it. Out on the street! Why not?”

Although the sun is bright on my face, my feet are cold. It’s mild, but the paving stones have a mid-October chill. I flex my toes to warm them and stretch my back.

“…I’m a Doctor, from Saudi Arabia. My Dad encouraged me to start weaving during lockdown and would send me pictures of things to try. I did my residencies in Aberdeen and Dundee. I loved being there…I was surprised that people could understand me…what’s the language that they speak around Aberdeen? Yeah, Doric! No…I don’t think I’d go back to work in the UK, but I’d like to go back to Saudi at some point and to learn more about the weaving that they do there.”

My weaving frame leans against the iron pole of an awning. I avoid the cracks and splits in the concrete sidewalk, trying to find a stable space. By the edge of the road, not far from traffic, I could feel exposed and vulnerable. But, as I find the weft with my fingers, I’m absorbed by the work of making this fabric. Close-up focus on the veil of warps. The elemental city fades for a moment.

“Would you like a square of chocolate? Go on, you need some chocolate. I’ve been handing it out to some of the other artists too.
Have you seen Ed?”

Weaving as observation

photo: Leenda Bonilla

Be somewhere. Be in the midst. Draw attention. Avoid attention. Make connections. I can sit and hide in plain sight. In plain site.
On the edges, at street level, from the ground up. To the slow spaces. My heartbeat slows down as I weave. As I catch the warps with my middle fingers and thread between the weft, I can see obliquely, through my fingers, through the warps. The ground, the frame, the yarn. What’s close, what’s distant. The light, the gutter and the air.
Tension, slackness. Weaving reflects my mood and moderates it. It’s something to do with my hands. Soothing…something to hold. To hold on to. To settle into. As I weave, I breathe. Holding both sides of the frame, I feel my feet on the ground, planted, knees below the horizontal of the wooden loom. The warps form whiskery bars. I’m behind them, peering through the frame as if it’s a bird hide, breaching its surface with vision.
I can listen. Appearing to be occupied, elsewhere, but I’m here in my mind, through my ears. Fragments of conversation pass close and drift on, becoming inaudible to me. I’m left with broken threads, a patchy, holey fabric of words and meaning. I can’t hold on to more than wisps. I’m in the midst, but not with.
Weaving on the street is a bit like drawing in the street. Street photography can threaten, because it seems to make a record, to capture souls. Drawing doesn’t threaten in the same way and weaving might seem even less able to imprint anything meaningful. Yet, weaving makes its own record; within the physical material of the textile as it catches the grit and the grain of the streets, but also in my mind, because it’s such a slow and deliberate way to spend time. The weaving absorbs my thoughts, my memories, what I sense as I sit and work. Time, process and journey. Perhaps, then, weaving in the street is a form of deep listening. Deep, embodied listening, because working with my hands makes me aware of how the city meets my skin.

photo: Jonathan Bumble

I took Olivia Laing’s book ‘The Lonely City’ to re-read while travelling. I suspected that it would be a good companion as I encountered New York City alone. When I wrote my project proposal, I’d described ‘Ravel’ as being an exploration of the way in which identity is mediated and altered through being in a city over time, but, as I walked and wove, I realised that it was also an exploration of the human need for connection.
I arrived here on my own, with one person that I could call upon if I needed. As I arrived at the Sutphin Boulevard airtrain interchange, I felt my aloneness, that singularity which isn’t isolation or loneliness, or isn’t yet those things. In her opening chapter, Olivia Laing considers when and how her aloneness in New York City became loneliness. She made me think about the role that having no-one to talk to can play in making someone feel lonely. I became aware of looking deeply into the eyes of those that I began to encounter, in grocery stores and coffee shops, partly to make a connection but, also, because at times I could not make myself understood. I sought a visual connection in place of a verbal one. But the verbal mattered too. I arrived in the city with a bad cold and in search of medication and was touched by the pharmacist who said that she hoped that I’d feel better soon. I doubt, though, that she’d remember me.
Weaving let me explore how connections are made. Weaving takes a single thing, a line of yarn, and meshes it into a surface through touch, time and process. Perhaps weaving on the street enables a drawing in of human wefts. An invitation to be curious and to become part of it for a moment.
People did stop and talk to me; I was surprised quite how many and how diverse our conversations were. Was the fact that I was sitting, quietly, appearing to do something almost everyday important too? My project wasn’t obviously performative, although it was, particularly as I walked between blocks with my weaving frame and trailing Harris Tweed. Sitting makes you vulnerable, prone, slow to move. It’s difficult to be a threat, when you are crouched down, encumbered, below eye level.

Futile acts: weaving and unravelling

photo: Jonathan Bumble

“What are you weaving?”
Well, I wasn’t really weaving anything.
I suppose I was weaving a surface – a textile – but I wasn’t planning on it being anything and I didn’t imagine that, whatever it was, it would ever be finished. When the man who’d stopped asked me this question, I’d started to unravel the weaving. Picking apart the warps with my middle fingers, feeling a loosening tension in the weft and pulling it through. Quietly and unnoticed, my actions were to unravel, reduce, retrace my woven steps.
“What you’re doing [weaving] is excellent. Your work is excellent.”
“How long does it take to make one of those?”
One of what, I’m not sure, but it must have seemed as if I was making something, even though we hadn’t reached that point in our conversation.
“Are you making a shawl?”
It makes sense, to try to make sense of an act that seems so out of place. I would do that myself. Sense-making tends towards the productive and the output. It’s not inclined itself towards process and journey. But this weaving isn’t meant to have an endpoint. Like traditions of weaving and histories of cities, this weaving will never be complete.
As I wove, I thought about what it means to be productive. Whether unravelling a weaving can be regarded as a productive act. I was careful about to whom I revealed that I was unravelling my weaving. Because it just doesn’t make sense, to be going backwards, to be unnecessarily undoing something that has taken time and effort to do. What does it mean to unravel? Physical and psychological unravelling is never good; it’s regarded as a vulnerable and shameful position. Why would you unravel? Because there is a mistake in the doing means that undoing is the only option.
But what if unravelling isn’t about undoing, about correcting, about weakening or falling apart? What if it’s done as a generative act, as productive in its own right? Can unravelling be about opening something up, making space for, reconsidering, re-shaping?
What happens when you re-trace your steps? Are you unravelling them or just adding to them? Is it possible to unravel your steps?
Even in the unravelling of a weaving, there is accretion. Loosened, dropped yarns pick up grit and the sweat and grease of my hands as I wind it up again. Thoughts, memories, bodily sensations, sounds. The rain on the corrugated scaffolding harder and softer; the buses swinging in to the bus stop swiftly, intermittently and leaving again. The bike parked up so close to my back that I could feel the tyre treads against my skin and then gone, before I noticed. The rhythms of ravelling and unravelling in the city happen all the time as a barely noticed tide.

© Deirdre Macleod 2023

photo: Jonathan Bumble

Deirdre Macleod‘s spatial practice combines movement with expanded forms of drawing. A human geographer and contemporary artist, she uses gesture-based performance to understand cities and tell their stories. She has exhibited and performed her work within the UK and Europe and is a Lecturer in Art at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS / Thinkers in Residence


A Runway Walk Through Fashion History

By Jonquil O’Reilly

As a fashion historian, I can’t help but view contemporary clothing through an historical lens and compare trends and sartorial choices to those from centuries past. With “fast fashion” so immediately available today, we’ve largely lost sight of the time, skilled craftsmanship and sheer expense that would have been required for the production of clothing before the modern era. Prior to the invention of the mechanical loom in 1785, and the sewing machine in 1830, fabrics were woven manually and clothing was sewn by hand by tailors sitting cross-legged on the floor. Clothing had to be durable and was expected to be reused.

Garbagia (Photo credit: Tianqi Liao)

Garbagia’s ensembles, brimming with CAUTION! tape ribbons, high-vis panels and traffic cones, were a stark reminder of how disconnected we have become with the processes of clothing production. In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, clothing for society’s most elite wearers was reused and repurposed again and again. Monarchs and high ranking members of the nobility would gift their worn gowns and suits to other courtiers or staff. As the clothing became stained or damaged by wear, they would be unpicked and reworked – velvet gowns might be patchworked into ecclesiastical vestments, or used to cover kneelers for church pews. They would eventually be cut up and sold on to the rag trade. Every inch of valuable fabric would be used up.

Ankon Mitra, Inhabiting a Fractal Pyramid (Photo credit: Josef Pinlac)

For those with means, dress was all about show – displays of wealth, of power and of social standing. In the 16th century, women wore stiff gowns with voluminous, conical skirts. Their vast circumference allowed them to display reams of sumptuous cloth, often heavily brocaded or weighed down with embroidery and applied decoration. The sheer size of Ankon Mitra and Piyusha Patwardhan’s Inhabiting a Fractal Pyramid reminded me of these gowns, taking up space on the road, the sidewalk or, indeed, on the stage at the festival’s Paper Dress Ball. It demanding to be looked at and admired. The cut-outs in the pyramid dress recalled the trend for “pinking” and “slashing” in the 16th and 17th centuries, in which fabrics were decorated with slits to reveal multiple layers of expensive textile beneath. The size and stiffness of these clothes altered the way women walked and moved. These large-scale skirts not only had an imposing presence but they acted almost like a guarded parameter that kept others at a physical distance. Certainly no one was getting close to the wearer of that pyramid dress.

Kaczmarek/Miranda, Layers of Exuberance (Photo credit: Josef Pinlac)

These structured garments obliterated the natural form of the wearer. Large skirts were supported underneath by farthingales, stiffened, hooped underskirts that were sort of precursors to the familiar 19th-century crinoline. Any hint of a leg or its movement would have been considered indecent so these underskirts kept the lower half of the body hidden. These farthingales jumped to mind immediately when I saw Layers of Exuberance by Kaczmarek/Miranda. Like those farthingales, this piece encased its wearer at the centre of its massive circumference, giving no sense of their natural shape and acting like a surrounding forcefield. The rise and sway of it as the model walked made me think of Spanish women wearing the guardainfante skirts, immortalised in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, who clung to the fashion long after the rest of Europe were wearing (relatively) slinkier skirts and whose hips would bob distinctively as they walked.

Alex Bard, Featherman on 14th (Photo credit: Jonathan Bumble)

For men, fashions were often inspired by armour and battle wear. Clothing was padded which cushioned the often crushing weight of chainmail and breastplates – something Alex Bard would know all about after many hours wearing his spectacular Featherman. While his birdlike silhouette seemed about to take flight, the steel feathers and chainmail weighed him down. Though it could be utilitarian, padding was more often used to sculpt the body of the wearer. 16th-century men wore padded doublets (a sort of button-up jacket top) with heavily padded fronts which pulled back the shoulders and thrust out the chest. These often mimicked the lines of armour, following the shape of the curved “peascod” belly down into a point, just like a breastplate. For anyone familiar with the codpiece, you’ll know these weren’t the only things 16th-century men were padding…

Vanessa Fairfax-Woods, The F Word (Photo credit: Jonathan Bumble)

Vanessa Fairfax-Woods took the premise of padding and sculpting flesh and turned it completely inside out with her incredible work, The F Word. In previous centuries, flesh didn’t need to be toned, it was manipulated and sculpted by the garments worn – smoothened, cinched, impossibly flattened, or hidden beneath farthingales, bumrolls, stomachers and stays. The F Word enhanced and distorted Fairfax-Woods’ body’s natural shape, with jutting pleated flourishes, cut-outs and flowing folds, reminiscent of toga-clad Greek and Roman sculptures. The contrast with her costume for the Paper Dress Ball – her body unadorned but for the gradually accumulating post-its applied during the course of the evening – might be the piece(s) that has stuck with me the most from this year’s Art in Odd Places. For a fashion historian writing about a festival of dress, to come away thinking more about the naked body might seem absurd. But Art in Odd Places made me reflect on my own body, on my self-esteem and then made me more determined than ever to take up space with my clothing. To all of you, I say: wear the wild outfits! And to Art in Odd Places’ inimitable and tireless curator, Gretchen Vitamvas, I say: congratulations. Here’s to pulling focus.

Vanessa Fairfax-Woods at the Art in Odd Places Paper Dress Ball (Photo credit: Tianqi Liao)

. . .

Fashion historian and old master paintings specialist at Christie’s New York Jonquil O’Reilly brings portraits from the English Renaissance to life, breaking down the ostentatious ensembles worn by members of the Tudor court, decoding the symbolism in their sartorial choices, and explaining the material and function of these elaborate garments and adornments. 
O’Reilly writes and lectures on historical fashion as a means of contextualizing old master paintings, making them more approachable for new audiences. As “The Costumist,” she contributed regularly to Harper’s Bazaar online and has given fashion lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Academy, Chatsworth House, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle.

Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS / Thinkers in Residence

Liberation on 14th Street

By Diana Boros

Photo Credit: Diana Boroa, AiOP Dress, collage mixed media, 2023

Herbert Marcuse commented in his subversive and radical text of the late 1960s- one that gained immediate popularity with the countercultural movements of the time- An Essay on Liberation, that, “The wild revolt of art has remained a short-lived shock…” (42). What he meant was that subversive and rebellious art- essential to both life and true freedom, he believed- is so easily commodified and subsumed by the market and as such, softened into acceptability for the status quo.

He feared that capitalist cultural forces could, and would, ever rapidly consume radical acts. He called for us to move against this, through our very being. He spoke of continuing to create rebellious art but also using language and even dress in rebellious ways- in order to not only disrupt the apparent order of our public spaces but to demonstrate revolutionary possibilities. He thought that if we could bring revolutionary acts into daily life, and into our public spaces- a lived example- that we could start to shift perceptions to what is possible, to show different ways of living and of thinking that serve as counterpoints to mainstream beliefs.

He writes that “today’s rebels against the established culture also rebel against the beautiful in this culture, against its all too sublimated, segregated, orderly, harmonizing forms.” (46) Marcuse also argued, as do I, for the all-encompassing importance of the bodily, the sensual, the emotional, the chaotic; that we need to continually work to shed light on, and bring attention to, this realm of human existence that is all too often denied or shunned in favor of the reasonable, the rational, the cerebral, the ordered.

I believe that we must not only work to enliven this primality in our public worlds but also convince others of its essential nature. Gaining more trust in our sensual and emotional selves aids us in gaining deeper self-awareness, which in turn aids us in accessing true liberation. Liberation in this sense means an ability to detach from the myriad of social norms and market forces that work together to separate us from our natural selves. Truly, to bring such sensual and spiritual experiences into the public realm is a gift to our communal existence. Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS brought such a full-throttle sensory world of artistic expression to 14th Street this year and could be viewed freely by any passerby. It created an invitation to see the different, the unusual, the reconceptualized, the rearranged- all on an afternoon stroll.

This brings to mind a favorite line by Albert Camus from The Myth of Sisyphus: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Art in Odd Places is exactly this- an expression of free action, of radical possibilities. It is an intervention in a public space, in everyday life, in the routine, in the expected course of action. It is also a weekend of beauty, of revelry, of surprise, and of laughter.

. . .

Diana Boros is Department Chair and Associate Professor of Political Theory at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a public liberal arts institution and the national public honors college. Previously, she worked for the United States Senate, as well as for several senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns, and was also teaching professor of political science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

She co-founded and advises the SMCM Public Art Collective, and is creator and host of the online video Youtube series “Hosting Art”, which is supported by a joint venture between the Guestbook project and the Psychological Humanities & Ethics Center at Boston College. She has published two books: Creative Rebellion for the Twenty-First Century: The Importance of Public and Interactive Art to Political Life in America, and Re-Imagining Public Space: The Frankfurt School in the 21st Century, and is currently at work on a third, tentatively titled Social Engagement in Art: Lessons of Collaboration for Political Life. She makes art whenever she can.

Website: guestbookproject.org
Instagram: @hosting.art

Art in Odd Places 2023: DRESS / Thinkers in Residence

All Dressed Up and Everywhere to Go

By Yasmeen Abdallah

The day began as a cold, rainy day in New York City, when the gloomy weather matched the tone of the heartbreaking tragedies unfolding in the Middle East. The cold that chilled to the bone and the grayness that blanketed the sky were befitting of the collective despair. It was a day that matched the mood of the world. Despite the feelings that loomed large, I arrived at the designated meeting place outside Parsons School of Design to take part in Miki Watanabe Spiller’s intervention, Banned Book Banditos. I was so very glad that I did. Micki’s project was created in response to the right-wing agenda of erasing history through the barring of literature it finds “woke” (with the agenda of suppressing the rights of BiPOC, trans, LGBTQ+ folx, womyn, drag performers, and basically anyone else critical of their oppressive actions). I firmly believe in Micki’s work, and recognize how important it is to stand up to this dangerous mode of historical redaction and total oppression. Adorned in embroidered felt and leather bandoliers and badges, we marched in boots and cowboy hats, carrying books such as Animal Farm, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse Five, The Color Purple, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and The Grapes of Wrath. Marching in the Banned Book Banditos action helped to healthily expel the frustration that has been building up in response to these awful and divisive tactics. To share space and talk to people during this event felt supportive and inclusive. Micki gifted many people that weekend with banned book patches and zines, packed densely with information. She led the book bandits in the quest to protect free thought and the written word through connectivity, wisdom, respect and kindness.

Some of the AiOP: DRESS performers were unfortunately unable to take part in the rain due to the delicate qualities of their costumes, but those that did brave the weather did so with grit, determination, and commitment to their projects unlike anything I had seen. I took the afternoon to imagine AiOP: DRESS as a symposium, with each presenter sharing their skill sets, their knowledge bases, their interpretations of a theme. I contemplated the utopia that is an art festival along one of the busiest streets in one of the busiest cities in the world. I observed, year after year, first as an AiOP: BODY volunteer; then as part of AiOP: NORMAL’s curatorial team from 2020-2021; later as a participating artist in AiOP: STORY, up to presently as a Thinker-in-Residence for AiOP: DRESS. Within each role, I have been consumed by the infinite mirror concept of people watching that occurs annually. Operating without permits, without a budget, it’s a festival of freedom and experimentation. Passersby watch performers, at times unsure if it’s art or just New York. As a participant in various capacities through the years, I’ve been hypnotized by the act of observing observers who are observing. This meta-morphosis is a spectacle unto itself that invokes a giddiness in the sheer pleasure of being aware, alive, and present in the moment; the moment being monumentalized through the sheer creative output paving the streets with unexpected treasures, often in the oddest of places, indeed.

The seemingly endless construction along the 14th Street route of the AiOP festival was brilliantly punctuated by clever artists that took refuge beneath the frequent building scaffolding, turning various plywood structures into public dressing rooms, dance studios, runways, textile centers, and ad hoc pop-up galleries. The clever inventiveness and resilience lent enough emotional strength that I was able to lose myself for a bit in the quest to experience as many artists as possible. The performing interventions

Micki Watanabe Spiller, Banned Books Banditos (Photo credit: Julie Lemberger Photography)
Micki Watanabe Spiller, Banned Books Banditos (Photo credit: Julie Lemberger Photography)
Micki Watanabe Spiller, Banned Books Banditos (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)

After Banned Books Banditos concluded, I began to make my way across 14th Street, searching for performers, interventions, and art that caught my eye. I encountered Margaret Chodos-Irvine’s SHELTER: No-See-Um installation, which was amazing. The concept of the No-See-Um caught me immediately. Large and yet unassuming, save for the orange weights to secure it, I was transfixed by the way it worked with the construction site in such a fitting way. It looked like it indeed belonged there, its specificity to the site aligned so concisely between form and content. The references to dress forms, boning, fashion, sculpture, and monuments under the guise of being unseen was profound. Only a story-teller could wear an experience as deftly as this. It turns out, in fact, that No-See-Um artist, Margaret Chodos-Irvine, was, in fact, a children’s illustrator before making garments and installations. Her daughter, Ella, is a graphic designer, and was on hand to generously speak with and share these insights with me. They have collaborated on work, and I was enamored with the closeness of their relationship. Additionally, Chodos-Irvine’s background is in both Art and Anthropology, like me, and it seems we both share an affinity for exploring the terrains between art and craft. It was a kindred spirit moment of consciousness that I was delighted to experience. It’s amazing what and who you will encounter on a walk down the street!

Margaret Chodos-Irvine, SHELTER: No-See-Um (Photo: Yasmeen Abdallah)
Margaret Chodos-Irvine, SHELTER: No-See-Um (Photo: Yasmeen Abdallah)

MiSWiP’s Amanda Wu and CY presented their project, Let’s Make an Outfit, and in another act of care, generously utilized some of their hand-embroidered garments from their project, to warm me up amidst the cold and drafty weather. Swaddled in the warmth of their kindness, I took in the performance with wonderment and enjoyment. They brilliantly incorporated the metal poles affixed to the plywood construction to create a mise en scene that depicted Wu dressing and undressing for the day, reading the text they lovingly embroidered by hand (which took an extensive amount of time to do, CY confirmed). With nothing but a thin layer of tarp between Wu’s socks and the sidewalk, I watched the commitment to the role. Undressing on the sidewalk on a cold rainy day down to a nude-colored bodysuit, and gradually adding layer after layer, learning the negative environmental impacts of each article of fast fashion was a moving performance to witness. The dedication to environmentalism, equity, and labor, MiSWiP’s Let’s Make an Outfit taught me a lot of important information that I had previously been unaware of, and as someone engaged in environmentalism, that says a lot. Their research was excellent, the presentation was engaging, and they presented solutions to our current climate crisis. It was a fantastic event that I’m so happy I was able to experience.

MiSWiP, Let’s Make an Outfit (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)
Kaczmarek/Miranda, Layers of Exuberance (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)

Stumbling upon Christopher Kaczmarek and Patricia Miranda’s collaboration, Layers of Exuberance was a treat. I admired the dialogue between their looming and surreal orange form that Kaczmarek was moving across the block in with the orange construction road blockades. This dynamic between what is supposed to be static, and what is bumbling around on public sidewalks was a quirky encounter to behold. The genteel elegance of the garment’s construction was a punctual play on the boxy, (dare I say macho) definition of the city barriers. This playful encounter offered some much needed brightness and welcoming irony and bliss on this rainy day. It further defied expectations when Vanessa Fairfax-Woods arrived, furthering the connections between form, function, and societal norms and defiances of said norms. Fairfax-Woods’ project reflected on the impossibility of living up to beauty expectations that project negative and harmful outcomes through body shaming. The artist created a couture body suit that addressed this issue, and the dynamic between the projects was a spiritual event I was grateful to witness. AiOP was in full force and representing the future that artists want to see.

Kaczmarek/Miranda, Layers of Exuberance (left); Vanessa Fairfax-Woods, The F Word (right) (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)

I walked further and approached the work of artist Kasia Ozga, whose textile installations, Wear Out: Manual Labor, are an ode to the working-class and gig workers around the globe. Ozga described the importance of acknowledging the labor that goes unnoticed, unappreciated, and undervalued. The initially beautiful swaths of blues reveal holes, tears, and imperfections caused by such labor, and to see these standard issue uniforms pastiched en masse in this way certainly made a profound impact. Ozga spoke of how the installation was composed of the garments of 300 workers in France as part of a public art project, and later was exhibited as part of a flag exchange in Portland, Oregon during Textile Month. What if these were the flags societies waved, acknowledging and paying homage to the very people that keep the world going? What if the majority of workers around the world did not have to fight for livable wages, access to quality healthcare, basic living standards, and to be treated with dignity? What if essential workers were honored everyday, and not just in times of crisis? What an uplifting world that would be…

Kasia Ozga, Wear Out: Manual Labor (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)

Next, I happened upon RETTOCAMME’s performance Statement Ties, with choreographer Emma Cotter moving along the sidewalk and construction scaffolding in an elegant and entrancing dance that bound the concrete and metal backdrop into a dreamy and theatrical set. Balancing a clear umbrella with a complex wearable artwork as a headpiece, I was spellbound by the grace and evocative ease in which Emma moved. Upon speaking with Emma, I learned that it’s actually difficult to see while wearing the necktie headdresses (which are created by collaborator Ryan Roth), and that the headdress actually would be different each day of the festival. Emma also shared that RETTOCAMME is a longtime member of the AiOP family, having performed twice with the festival earlier in Orlando.

RETTOCAMME, Statement Ties (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)
Deirdre Macleod, Ravel (Photos: Yasmeen Abdallah)

Deirdre Macleod described her project, Ravel, as “Weaving into the fiber of the city”. This poetic act of sitting on the sidewalk and weaving was a moving experience to witness. MacLeod explained that she was unraveling the weaving she had created “as a way of reweaving herself into it”. Macleod’s project reflects upon the act of taking the same fabric from place to place, acknowledging how, as she moves through space, the various people change the work, as does the location. Acknowledging the city grit, the project and the weaving began in Edinburgh, Scotland and traveled across the Atlantic to New York, paying tribute to the Harris Tweed Weavers of Scotland who emigrated here a century ago, donning Harris Tweed to honor the occasion. Macleod was lovely to speak with, and revealed that she is also an educator in Scotland. Her dedication, care and commitment was clear and as beautifully woven into the fibers of her being as the project itself.

After some hot soup and tea to warm back up, we ventured back onto 14th Street to see what else we could find. What we caught was the wind down of Garbagia’s intervention, as the group paraded through the street, onto the sidewalk, and down the stairs of the inglorious L train, a beautiful note to close the day’s events. The feverish energy soared like a contagion through the chipped green paint of the subway. To bear witness to garbage sparkling like radiant jewels was indeed special and a rare occurrence. As a fellow repurposer of the unwanted, I was particularly impressed with their adaptations into high fashion extravaganza-wear. I was previously familiar with Garbagia through our shared connections to the Lower East Side, and particularly its art and activism work in beautifying public space through imbuing care into the discarded, with a loving ode to local hero Rolando Politi. This procession of fabulosity uplifted the heavy skies and was a reminder that we are neither alone in times of despair, nor isolated when we have creative outlets like art and dedication to shared values. AiOP is a reminder that we are a community of like-minded people, uniting in good times and bad, and making the ongoing fight for justice more bearable through solidarity and kind intention.

Garbagia, Garbagia (Photo: Yasmeen Abdallah)

The following are two excerpts from interviews I conducted with Ed and Gretchen, who generously met with me just prior to this year’s festival, and had the following insights to share:

Yasmeen: Ed, as director and founder of the festival, you’ve kept the magic of AiOP alive and fresh for many years. How do you do it, and are you able to share some of your favorite and most memorable experiences over the years?

Ed: I do it because (like in the beginning), I thought it was important to create collective actions based on the ideology that public space is where we democratically communicate ideas for change. Taking art out of the institutions and commodified art market to a space offering art as an essential part of our everyday lives. AiOP is a model for making a substantial cultural impact without capital but instead with sincere generosity & curiosity.
The bundle of the continuing disappearance of civil liberties along with the unraveling of the fraud of the American Dream… and the more widespread knowledge that the United States is a policed state with organized police forces who act as mercenaries for corporate monopolies – I’d say
Art in Odd Places is more important than ever.

Some favorite moments:
Observing the dynamics of each of the works in public space. Watching, deep listening, the profound study of the patterns, the unpredictability, and the continuing shift in specific individual communal outdoor public areas.

In the environment of a theater, a gallery, a museum – INSIDE – the relationship of the artist/performer and the audience is strictly controlled. But in civic space, the set of social regulations opens up more broadly to “the moment with so many variables that makes it wonderfully impossible to control

· Jenny Lando / Jenny and her two daughters sent me a letter (back in the day) describing the joy in their scavenger hunt for Art in Odd Places art projects along 14th Street. Her daughters went home to Astoria, Queens, and created their own Art in Odd Places in a nearby park.

· Sideshow / A fundraiser carnival sideshow circus with freaks, music, outrageous installations, and games on five floors at the now-defunct Theater Lab on 14th Street.

· House of AiOPY / a joyous raucous mashup spectacle of intergenerational, culturally extravagant performance and installation projects presented as a continuously running radical runway ballroom fashion show.

Having been profoundly impacted by Gretchen’s project for AiOP 2021: NORMAL, I spoke with Gretchen, regarding the evolving ideation between artistic practice and curatorial vision:

Yasmeen: Your practice explores notions of clothing and wearable modes of expression as extensions of the self; through concepts including visibility/invisibility; concealing/revealing; presence/absence; private/public; and uniformity/individuality. You’ve also been involved with AiOP in various capacities for many years. I fondly and vividly recall your work, Modern Plague Doctor in AiOP: NORMAL in 2021. Can you tell us more about that powerful creation? It, along with so many of your pieces, speaks deeply to so many issues inextricably connected within our society. How did you come to this place in your work?

Gretchen: AiOP 2021: NORMAL found us re emerging from the COVID pandemic lockdown after more than a year of physical separation and social protest where everyone had to reevaluate their definition of ‘normal’. We were all wearing masks and protective clothing. It had me thinking of previous pandemics, the plague doctor costume associated with the Black Death, the herbs that would have been used at that time, treatments based on the body “humors”. Also societal plagues, the plague of racism.

I’ve often worked with surface patterns on clothing, but the barrier of the mask led me to want to work with text as a way to counteract the physical distance, to express visually what a covered face could not.

The text was a love letter to New York, tributes to protest and victims of police violence, poems and stories, jokes, and beautiful herbal monographs placed near the organs associated with the herb/ or body humor —all of this also printed on Rx cards: prescriptions for humor, health and connection. My inspiration for the garment was modern PPE, mixed with the 17th Century plague doctor costume and a 1970s jumpsuit (inspired by Norma Kamali, The Wiz)

Portraying the modern plague doctor and handing out prescription cards was a very healing experience; taking a figure associated with darkness and death and turning it into something hopeful and light.

Thank you, AiOP, for keeping our spirits high during difficult times, and for reminding us that art can and does make a difference.

With love,
Yasmeen

. . .

Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, independent curator, educator and community organizer.
You can learn more about her work here: yasmeenabdallah.com Instagram: @86cherrycherry

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

STORY: Sense of Loss

By LuLu LoLo

Coming out of the long period of loss and isolation from the Pandemic lockdown – it was with a sense of anticipation and adventure that I began walking along 14th Street wondering which AiOP artists I would encounter along the way.

At Seventh Avenue I spot an assortment of patterned neckties. Wes Holloway’s “Community Ties” are attached to a chain-link fence that immediately brings to mind my father, Pete Pascale who passed away in 1997, and his wonderful collection of ties, many of them selected and gifted to him by me.

(Photo by LuLu LoLo)

Most of the ties displayed came to Wes from women whose husbands had passed away. I shared with Wes that my dear friend the writer Joanna Claps Herman at the memorial celebration reception for her husband Bill Herman offered all the guests one of Bill’s neck ties in his memory.

My father would often ask my help in selecting a necktie and I would watch him as he tied his necktie, but he never taught me how to tie one. Maybe it was a skill he didn’t think I would need to know because I was a girl. Wes told me he wasn’t taught how to tie a necktie at the rehabilitation center after he suffered his spinal cord injury.  It was subtly inferred that he wouldn’t need to wear a tie because he wouldn’t be working at a job that would require wearing a tie. 

Wes asked me if I would like to learn how to tie a necktie.  I carefully selected a tie from the fence just like I did from my father’s tie rack looking at the back labels, reading the name brands, and noting if they were silk ties. Picking a blue and white striped one I draped it over Wes’ neck and step by step together we did it! I tied a necktie. I look forward to tying my father’s paisley necktie that I treasure around my neck. 

(Photo by Valborg Fletre Linn) 

Suddenly Heather Reed appeared and immediately demonstrated that Heather could indeed tie a necktie. 

(Photo by Valborg Fletre Linn)

On the corner of Sixth Avenue, a rack of clothing captures my attention.

(Photo by LuLu LoLo)

There is a flurry of excitement as participants select from Ana De Orbegoso’s sidewalk closet of “Power Vests (Feminist Projections)” that bring to mind Joan of Arc’s battle armor. “The Power Vests “are emblazed with powerful statements supporting women’s rights: “My Body My Right”, “Stop Violence Against Women”, “Yes She Persisted”. A sense of urgency prevails the atmosphere on 14th Street as everyone dunned a vest and struck a pose for their photo op. This act is more important than ever before as we all try to preserve the rights we fought for and deserve.

(Photo by Unknown) 

Walking along I arrive at a favorite address 218 West 14th Street a wave of nostalgia, sadness, and loss overcome me as I discover the new business that now occupies the former location of the unique vintage store Rags Au Go Go.

(Photo by LuLu LoLo)

Owned by the charismatic Joshua Suzanne longtime supporter of AiOP. Rags Au Go Go was the AiOP community gathering space and the site for the opening night receptions. 

(Photo by Paul Takeuchi)

(Opening of AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE. From left to right front row: Billy X Curmano, LuLu LoLo, Joshua Suzanne, Furusho von Puttkammer .Back row: Laura Droguol,  Ed Woodham, Ron Kolm, Barbara  Lubliner. Photo by Paul Takeuchi)

The Pandemic lockdown and its economic effect on small businesses in New York City caused Joshua Suzanne to pack up and move to Florida.  Before the festival I reached out to Joshua Suzanne, leaving a voice message inquiring if a return to New York City for AiOP was possible? Joshua Suzanne texted back: “Good morning 🌈 Got your VM Wish I was with you and all of the amazing AIOP artists 👩‍🎨 Have a great time and give 14th street and that crazy apple 🍎 a big hug and kiss 😘”

As I turned away from number 218, I encounter Christopher Kaczmarek with a seven-foot building strapped to his back.

(Photo by LuLu LoLo)

“Carry On: The Labor of Our Burdens” is about “the stories of our lives (our identities) contained in the places we inhabit and things we carry with us, in both literal and figurative ways.”  The Pandemic highlighted the accumulation of our lives and the attachment of our memories.  Many artists could no longer afford their studios and were faced with saving or discarding their artistic work and materials. Some of us became obsessive with tossing, recycling, and organizing via the Marie Kondo method. Many of us with older parents are now confronted with the task of distributing their memories —but where to? What of all the people who fled New York City when the Pandemic began pretty much with their houses on their backs. What did they leave behind?  What did they carry away?  For myself I am surrounded with my collections, my memories, my archives, my artwork, my reference material, and my numerous books. It is all “MY” stuff. Is it now a burden? I am also carrying around on my back

“What do we keep? What is the scale and weight of that which we carry with us? We fill the space we have, and then look to add a little more… We persevere through an ongoing balance of carrying and shedding.

We endure.”

(Photo by Julian Dorsey)

(Photo by Paul Takeuchi)

LuLu LoLo has been a visual/performance artist/playwright/actor and activist for over twenty-five years. LuLu has performed in six Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festivals in NYC in the guise of different personas calling attention to urgent topical issues. She was the curator of (AiOP) 2019: INVISIBLE, featuring eighty-two artists celebrating the indomitable spirit of artists who are sixty years of age or older. Her public actions in Where Are the Women? (2015) highlighting the lack of public monuments to women in NYC was featured in the New York Times.  Visit LuLu’s interactive installation Listening To The Birds in the exhibition YES, AND  at the Staten Island Museum until March 2023 or send a bird memory Listening To Birds.  

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

Street / Art, 14th Street: the good people of AiOP stories 2022

By Rich Garr

(Photo by Rich Garr)

“New Yorkers laugh at good people and mock their life” was an odd first message to see as I climbed out of the subway (can you see it above?). This is less than a mile from the chaos of the Twin Towers, where 21 years ago hundreds of cops and firemen ran towards the carnage of the Twin Towers to help fellow New Yorkers. Those brave New Yorkers never came back. And this town would never be the same. 

In the dark hours and days that followed, New Yorkers came together like never before. But dark elements bullied their way into The City. We don’t need one of my favorite NYC artists, Laurie Anderson, to tell us about the complexity and dark wonder of this attack and aftermath, but the vibe is captured beautifully in her piece “From the Air” (which I just rewatched in her big show The Weather at the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C.). The New York version of the Art in Odd Places festival in some ways grew out of the 9/11 disaster, when American leaders tag-teamed civil liberties and public space in a scramble to root out nebulous evil. If the friendly blue skies were a battleground, now the streets would be as well. 

Of course, the streets of Manhattan have always been contested. They’ve been filled with blood and tears for centuries, but on most days subtleties rule. And those subtleties were in full force during this last Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festival. Even more than usual there was a cornucopia of expression. 

Some messages were- and are- ridiculous. They’re meant to catch the eye: distract, remind, persuade… grab attention by all means possible. How do the AiOP artists stand out? Or do they blend in? Maybe that depends on what story you’re telling. Below I mention a few of these projects, and sprinkle in mentions of other art on the street… the stuff you find there every day.

Curator Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn and her crew- with guidance from rookie festival Director Furusho von Puttkammer- clearly didn’t want to tell one kind of story this year. They did a great job collecting a variety of Stories. There were over 40 artists from the Disabled, Incarcerated, Elder, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Allied communities. Projects took many forms. In some cases, artists used their platform to tell the story of other voices traditionally shunned. And not just the AiOP artists! Here on 14th Street- on AiOP weekend- fresh voices were apparent and noticeably appreciated. The best art was focused on blending a unique voice with the time-tested cacophony of Lower Manhattan. 

One of the clearest examples of this site-specific melding was Christopher Kaczmarek’s “Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens” piece. Like a handsome talking snail, Kaczmarek hauled a funky structure across the landscape. Not to compete with the beauty of a snail shell, his structure was a generic gray 4-story building. And unlike snails, communication was inviting and purposefully two-way. Instead of marking his path with silver snot, interactions were documented by chalk that was deftly attached to his walking stick. By late Sunday you could see remnants of positive interactions (hearts) and directional arrows on pavement spanning The City’s two great rivers. I had a nice chat with Kaczmarek and a seemingly homeless man on one street corner. We both appreciated his luggage, and agreed that it looked a bit like the Met Life Tower rising up behind our conversation.

(Photo by Rich Garr)

Unfortunately homelessness is an obvious issue that comes to mind along 14th Street even without an artist hauling a home on his back. An anonymous writer / artist assures that pedestrians cannot ignore this issue. Scrawled on one sidewalk spot: “Homelessness: Man’s Inhumanity to Man.” Another note a block away is pictured below. 

(Photo by Rich Garr)

Words are important, and so are numbers… especially statistics coming from credible sources like our city government’s own website. According to them, we have just broken the modern record for adults living in NYC shelters: 41,923. Just as street artists, graffiti writers, and fine artists vie for space on our streets; there is tension between new and old homeless New Yorkers. The recent influx of migrants from southern states presses this issue, and we can only hope city leaders respond. 

One thing that the street provides is real time, real life conversation. Most would agree that fine art plays an important role in civilized society.  But what about the ephemeral stuff out in the streets? This is certainly central in performance art, and one AiOP artist really underscored this with writing that literally evaporated from the sidewalk: Tamara Wyndham. Lines in a kind of poem about temperality we painted in water. Her statement said, “No trace of the performance is left once the words evaporate,” but I captured this (below) photo. And I read the words “All that we have created will decay” just before they disappeared. The medium is the message, and it’s gone. Perfect. 

(Photo by Rich Garr)

With the emphasis on the present, I soldiered on to see a few more artists. I’ll briefly note the ones who made strong impressions and still have me thinking:

  • Ana De Orbegoso, a Peruvian/American NYC-based artist with a rack of beautifully embroidered, eclectically designed vests, was hard to miss on the sidewalk. I happened upon another fellow AiOP “thinker” Harley Spiller, and we tried on Ana’s wares. Each one held significant weight, and reminded me of bulletproof vests. Powerful… to match the short potent messages. Photography and social media played a part here, too. It spreads the empowerment vibe to those not physically present. And documentation reminds people that everyone has a part to play in defending recent unprecedented attacks on women (both in the courts and home). I chose my vest upon her recommendation. I believe Harley chose his to match his shirt and bowtie, but they were all intensely relevant. They were also bilingual, and reminded me right away of the activist street work of artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh

(Photo by Rich Garr)

  • Vivek Sebnastian’s sidewalk “studio” (pictured below) cranked out a beautifully explained Indian / Tarot style lucky charm for me to hang in my new art studio. It was made out of an old NY lotto scratch-off, packaging tape, super glue, and specific customized traditional materials. This project (and the next I mention) are akin to SeeMeTellMe, or Billy Barnacles: 2 local street artists that leave small art gifts for “collectors” who are on their toes and attentive in the streets. Vivek and I  chatted about our shared interest in graffiti and street art, and experiences navigating Brooklyn studios. We look forward to keeping an eye on each other’s art, and I’m grateful for my new talisman, but also for accompanying tidbits on Hindu gods and tradition. I recently happened to have Hanuman- and the Hindu epic Ramayana in general- recommended to me by a friend. This tells me that Sebastian got me, and is a genuine listener. He seemed pleasantly comfortable sitting on that sidewalk, and his energy was contagious. 

(Photo by Rich Garr)

  • I witnessed Suzanne Joy Clark amidst a lively street dialogue. Similar to Vivek, she gave away a small gift. This one, a neatly wrapped question in a box. I spoke to her at the Intro to the Festival on Friday night, and appreciated her project’s emphasis on question rather than answer. I would have loved one, but didn’t have the time that day. In any case, it was apparent that her roving, warm line of questioning was a hit.
  • Nick Daniels is another artist I met at the Friday “What’s Your Story” intro event. He was in town from Pittsburgh, and coming off of an afternoon of “moving the High Line” on the western edge of 14th Street. I missed this performance, but gathered from his story Friday night that it was a Sisyphean, rugged performance. Like Kaczmarek’s, he carried a heavy burden- though Daniels’ seemed impossible. The performance I did witness on Saturday had him tangled in ropes on a fence near a few other artists in the thick of the Festival’s “Critical Mass” between Sixth and Eighth Avenues and 3 & 5pm (a handy new feature of this year’s festival). Nick writhed and wrestled the ropes. Passers-by slowed, and some stopped. A purposefully stuttered refrain of: “It all started as we were bought here as slaves from Africa!” bellowed above the clanging fence and car horns. Once he broke from the chant to urge someone to stay for more. I did, at least… and it became hypnotizing. For one empathetic moment in the middle of downtown Manhattan I saw centuries of burden. Many passed by and ignored it. A few folks tried to chat with Nick, but the actor kept in character. He sprinkled in the phrase, “the land of the free and the home of the brave” to hammer home the extent of the black struggle throughout American mythology. He was a Dancer Against Normal Action. Appropriately, the dance company he founded way back in 1991, D.A.N.A. Movement Ensemble takes that name.  

(Photo by Rich Garr)

(Photo by Rich Garr)

  • Juan Hernadez and other incarcerated artists showed work via postcard. Mai Tran and a friend worked a table to tell about the artists- all of whom are stuck in Illinois’s Dixon Correctional Center. Seven different artists had cards. I took one of each, and have already mailed and received an enthusiastic snail-mail response from Martin Barrientos– whose card reminded me of artist Mr. Cartoon. I hope to write some of the other postcards soon. As I expected, Martin described in his response letter, “no support makes time slow,” and the action of festival attendees writing a quick hello seems to go a LONG way. I see mass incarceration, housing, and [lack of] education as part of one neglected societal problem. So this project- and the real action it summons- is extremely powerful and appreciated, with tangible lasting effects. No art school BS here.

(Photo by Rich Garr)

(Martin Barrientos postcard, 1 of 7 chosen to mail from the project “Art Across Walls” by Juan Hernandez & Mai Tran. Photo by Rich Garr)

(Os Gemeos– Two legends of the street art world painted a tribute to a culture of the streets- Hip Hop- that grew up right here in these NYC streets. And this is only one of the walls. You should see the matching one across the vacant lot. Photo by Rich Garr)

(Very cool to have an old Kenny Scharf monster on your lobby wall, LGBTQIA+ Center! The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division is a bookstore on the 2nd floor of this 208 W 13th Street address. They graciously hosted Friday’s event. They also host high quality art exhibits, and are open to visitors Wednesdays-Sundays, 1-7pm. Photo by Rich Garr)

(Anonymous slaptag, West Side Highway & 14th Street. Photo by Rich Garr)

Legends of every kind know this street.  And regular people, too, whose stories may not be as good. But those regular folks may just be as important.  About 100,000 of them probably walk on 14th Street every day. As this year’s “Stories” emphasized, everybody has a voice, and it might not even be audible. Do you know John Cage’s famed piece “four thirty-three”? Look it up. It’s no surprise Cage lived right around here, and enjoyed watching and listening to his city streets. In fact, Laurie Anderson recalled once asking Cage where she should sit to enjoy the action on the street. Cage replied, “everywhere is the best seat.” Maybe especially on AiOP weekend, but everyday there’s good seats on this street. Stay curious, and keep an eye on the streets!

(As DJ / street artist Royce Bannon warns us in this 14th Street doorway: “Streets is Watching”. Can you see it? Are you watching yet? Photo by Rich Garr)

(Photo by unknown)

Rich Garr is an interdisciplinary collage artist highlighting history and community through traditional 2D collage, walking tours, and wheat pasted paper memorial plaques. His favorite “found materials” are people, so community engagement is both practice and product. The rhythm and dialogue of city streets is also a usual suspect in his art, often amidst the border of the built and natural environment. Unscripted, interactive tours are “Gotham SideWalks,” and occasionally feature his Street Art History Plaques. They consistently take the form of monthly public walks around Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, but have appeared all over NYC over the past dozen years.

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

A Weekend in the World 

by Maxwell Williams 

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY was an eclectic and exciting cast of talented artists from across the globe. Scattered across 14th Street there was so much to see throughout the weekend. For me the weekend kicked off when I first saw Yu-Ching Wang’s performance “Breathing in New York”. I was at the 14th Street Y and I was immediately stopped in my tracks by the angelic crispness of the artist’s all white outfit with nothing but a red key foods logo staring back at me. The public like myself found themselves stopping, looking, and turning around. From my interpretation Yu-Ching Wang’s work tackles identity in a world currently encouraging and discouraging a response to obscure that identity with that of a mask. The work evokes the paranoia and confusion surrounding the initial COVID-19 breakout and the subsequent plastic bag ban. I found my weekend scattered with appearances from her performance and it was always a breathtaking experience.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

Up next on my Art in Odd Places journey was a public work at the iconic Union Square Park. Artist Ana De Orbegoso was standing at the bottom of the steps with brightly colored “Power Vests” with striking embroidery of powerful feminist phrases. I approached Ana asking to try on a vest and proceeded to have a pleasant conversation with her about the message she was conveying. The vests had a comforting weight to them, however the heaviest weight was the messages embroidered in a bold sans font across the font. Issues such as domestic abuse, violence against women, and equality for women truly had a profound power. Wearing one was truly a transcendent experience.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

The second day I had the pleasure of encountering Christopher Kaczmarek drifting through pedestrian traffic. Kaczmarek’s project “Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens” was an “At Large” project which meant encountering one felt like a happy little surprise. A moment where everything else feels still and all you can see is a man carrying  the burden of a 7 foot hand fabricated replica of a house (kind of hard to miss such a sight). The public responded in such a delightful way to this project from giggles to looks of stunned confusion. I feel that Kaczmarek was intending to communicate the weight of existing in this world and this cut-throat city.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

Directly after this I was able to meet up with my mentor and the talented curator of AiOP 2022: STORY Jessica Blinkhorn. We strolled down the North side of 14th Street agreeing to see as many artists as we could during the Critical Mass portion of the event. We ran into Shana Robbins preforming  “Slowness is Velocity” work. Powerful and simple Robbins, dressed in all green would strike  a chime making a pleasant and centering ring. It was a much needed break from the chaos that is Manhattan. It was really interesting to see Robbins react to the spaces around her, from admiring the echo of a parking garage to appreciating the facade of an abandoned building.  She clearly has a knack for appreciating the subtleties of life.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

Next we came upon the outstanding performance art of Wes Holloway. Holloway’s work “Community Ties” was essentially a conversation about ableism. Holloway tied a tie around my neck which I was completely blown away by. It was interesting to see how he maneuvered his movements to get a half Windsor knot only asking my assistance for the pinching and pulling aspect of the final product. I felt Holloway’s work puts life in perspective illustrating the subtleties of being a disabled person that are rarely discussed. At the end of my participation he asked me to tie the tie to a fence and I obliged.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

The beauty of Critical Mass was that it was possible to see the STORY art happening in a few blocks radius. Following that impressive performance was Lone Aka Bryan Pettigrew’s “Blockhead: A Roamer’s Delight” in which a strange blockheaded figure was roaming around seeming lost and exploring the space around him. It seemed like I was watching TV with a remote control in my hand. His work references the digital world in which we currently live and potentially the direction where we are headed – the nature of technology to update and leave everything else obsolete.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

Last for the day was Nick Daniels DANA Movement Ensemble, and the project “American Safari”. Truly a powerful piece, I had missed the live event but was fortunate enough to catch up with Daniels after the performance and was given an exclusive recap via phone recording.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

In this piece Daniels was repeating a phrase illustrating how Africans were brought to the Americas via ship while contorting his body with ropes. Even from a humble phone screen the impact was heavy. It is important to understand how this fact still affects the world in which we live today. Though his dance was straightforward,  I was blown away.

Art in Odd Places was a spectacular event with so much to do and see throughout the weekend. It was incredible to see the variety of work in public space. I am hooked and will be attending future festivals. This is a pen and ink drawing I sketched shortly after seeing “Breathing in New York” in my composition notebook where I took all of my notes.

(photo by Maxwell Williams 2022)

Max Williams is a tattoo artist and illustrator based in Queens, New York. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, he is a self taught artist whose focus is observational drawing with a rounded cartoonish edge. Developing his unique style as a student of AiOP 2022: STORY curator Jessica Blinkhorn he says, “When I’m not drawing or tattooing you can find me cycling to the far edges of the city”.

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

Significant Moments

By Katya Grokhovsky

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) has always been about the unexpected for me, an encounter, a stumbling upon a fleeting gesture of ephemeral activation and thoughtful propositions for the contemporary urban environment. Ever since I moved to NYC in 2011, I have been aware of the festival and from volunteering as a performer to participating in it as an artist several times, to curating in 2018, I have come full circle to take up an observational role in the ongoing endeavor.

The ancient act of discovering without purpose, of aimless wonder has been somewhat stolen away from us by capitalism and the hamster wheel of hustle, in which our goals and struggles are measured by productivity and busyness. This year, a particularly poignant curatorial premise sets up a web of unexpected interwoven threads of the Personal Story becoming Universal within the public realm. 

(Christopher Kaczmarek, Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens, 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

As I take up my inquisitive stroll on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, I encounter a man carrying a large house-sculpture hoisted on his suited back, walking along 14th street. I am immediately propelled to instinctively hunch my back in solidarity and to ponder my own baggage within me. Christopher Kaczmarek’s Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens proposes an endurance test of keeping on whilst weighed down by the byproducts of our decisions, choices, histories, and traumas. 

(Christopher Kaczmarek, Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens and Ana De Orbegoso, Power Vests (Feminist Projections), 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

(Ana De Orbegoso, Power Vests (Feminist Projections), 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

Doomed to become fully engrossed in my own reflections, I am jolted back to a new plane of meaning, when Kaczmarek collides with another artist’s project. Activating one of Ana De Orbegoso ‘s wearables from her project Power Vests (Feminist Projections), the artists’ body marries the two works, proclaiming a particularly jarring statement about abuse within a domestic setting. A seamless union, the works symbiotically highlight the possible hidden histories and issues, whilst taking a powerful stance.

(Ana De Orbegoso, Power Vests (Feminist Projections), 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

(Ana De Orbegoso, Power Vests (Feminist Projections), 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

Orbegoso’s power vests engage the passerby though an invitation to make a proclamation, striking a pose for her camera, creating an instant portrait, a moment of unplanned provocation, frozen in time. Thrust into a historically feminist lineage of activism, I watch, as numerous members of the public desire to participate, staging statements of empowerment, constructing auras of resilience and ongoing struggle in support of women rights. I wish to wear one too, but am mesmerized by the action of others, who choose the vests from the available options on an open-air clothing rack, position themselves for the camera’s gaze and ultimately, act as a living reminder of the ongoing and necessary strive within our society. 

(Julia Justo, Healing Alter, Toba, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

(Julia Justo, Healing Alter, Toba, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

Next, I am invited to contribute to a participatory installation by Argentinian artist, Julia Justo, titled Healing Alter, Toba. She asks me to write down something which I consider a personal triumph or a win on a piece of small paper and place it in a box in front of a handmade form of an altar. A box of fixed thoughts, a deposit of a collective consciousness, merging, proposing a space of healing. I am somewhat struck by the question and the positivity of it and catch myself thinking how rare it is we are asked to take a moment to celebrate our successes, big or small. I scribble down a quick thought in one short sentence and am amazed at how a significant successful achievement, involving years of hard work and sacrifice, boils down to hurried three words. I am curious about the contents of the box and ponder the palpable absence of healing spaces around us.

(Jane Greiner, Now Hear this, 2022, photo Katya Grokhovsky)

It is with these thoughts, I smile, as I see an oversized sculpture of a microphone, positioned to amplify. Jane Greiner’s project, Now Hear This, intends to vocalize the stories of the street, upscaling communication from possible ignorance to active listening. I imagine lines of willing participants, desiring to profess into a larger-than-life device, exploring the treasured proposal of being heard, seen, and remembered. I am compelled to thinking about the many marginalized communities, whose voices get so often drowned by the prevailing noise of systematic patriarchal oppression and dominant supremacy. 
I talked to AiOP artists, thinking about the difficulties and perks of staging ephemeral artworks on the street, reminiscing of my own experiences, of endless possibilities of engagement with the public, of many learning opportunities and unexpected incidents. As my own hustle must resume and I depart to my next commitment, I carry the snippet of the overall tapestry of this year’s AiOP, the concepts, and stories, realizing how starved we are for a two-way communication. Let’s listen, pay attention, and hear each other, as we march on within the daily cacophony of our existence.

(Katya Grokhovsky 2022)

Born in Ukraine, Katya Grokhovsky is a New York-based artist and Founding Director of The Immigrant Artist Biennial. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts and a BA in Fashion from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Grokhovsky’s work has been supported through numerous residencies including EFA Studio Program, Sculpture Space, SVA MFA Art Practice AIR, Pratt Fine Arts AIR, MAD Museum Studio Program, BRICworkspace, Ox-BOW Residency, Wassaic AIR, Santa Fe Art Institute, Watermill Center, and more. She has been awarded the New American Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Grants, ArtSlant Prize among others. 

https://www.katyagrokhovsky.net

https://www.instagram.com/katyagrokhovsky/

https://www.theimmigrantartistbiennial.com

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

AiOP STORY  – New York City,  September 2022

By Roberta Degnore

As a writer I’ve always been a little jealous of my visual artist friends. To visit them in their studios, see the work right there, touch it (maybe), and talk about it because it was so present would drive our interactions. By contrast, try inviting a friend to “read my screenplay” and watch them head for the door.

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) was a feast for me. In the past I’ve focused on “static” art (for want of a better descriptor). I studied people’s behaviors to New York’s sculptures and murals: Did the work draw people to them, or not? What struck me, though, was how people I interviewed would first ask, “Are you the artist?” Indeed, where were the artists?

Art in Odd Places brings the artists to us. What a rarity to interact with the creators, not only their work! AiOP is a unique forum—anywhere. In New York City it was splayed across 14th Street whose roiling freedom from gallery or museum sterility is a unique setting. I, and everyone from the Hudson to Avenue A, could talk to the artists. It was a treat to have artists and audience alike who seemed so freed and comfortable. Maybe it was because of the bus fumes, taxi horns, and press of passersby who were either interested in the art, or not—involved instead in their own silence, songs, or existential screeds. It is New York after all. 

Talking with the artists was gold. Geraldo Zamproni’s “No Meio do Caminho” – Midway is an example of that gold. We had a precious communication about his work of stunning inflatable faux rocks. It was exquisite because neither of us spoke the other’s language. Still, it made an unforgettable interaction for me—as well as did his work.  

I needed to hear nothing of the words, nothing more than the ardor of his hand thrown to his chest to understand that the words he was saying meant: “this is everything to me.”  

(Geraldo Zamproni, No Meio do Caminho – Midway)

In another way of communicating, the gender transformation embodied so kinetically by AnimaeNoctis – Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli, was disseminated in their printed handout. But without their having read anything I heard an energetic passerby say approvingly to them (about their gender transformation and the grim reality of a bride and groom’s lives): “There’s nothing subtle about this!” It was said with an admiring smile and a wink.

People understood it; they got it; they appreciated it. So did I, with a minor language barrier. Being with these two artists and seeing their interaction with each other, I felt the gentleness in them despite their marriage-critical performative statement. Seamlessly, the audience and I understood the work because the feeling from each of these artists for each other came through as creators and equals. 

(AnimaeNoctis (Silvia Marcantoni Taddei & Massimo Sannelli)

AiOP is an arena for the courageous. Artists expose themselves in their work and they are present to take the weight of reactions—although I never observed a negative response. In fact, Poets Of Course : Armchair Salon was given a gift for their searing poetry. 

I had stopped to sit and hear a reading of their Collective riff on a Pablo Neruda poem, The Dictators. It was riveting, moving—especially in these times. A man in a well-tailored suit had stood and listened as well. At the end of the reading, he approached one of the group and he offered something small from his hand. 

I couldn’t see what it was as Collective’s members pinned something to a young woman’s jacket. It was a United Nations pin that the man had taken from his own lapel. . .  I found emotion hard to hold back. Even now.  

(Poets Of Course, Armchair Salon)

(Poets Of Course, Armchair Salon)

The understanding and gentle responsiveness of people was shown, too, to the women of 3rd House : Lights Upon the Shadow. Oh-Kyung Jang and Deena Spaner dress/undress and move sinuously and beautifully in a statement of “giving voice to an individual’s identity that has been silenced.” Their work stopped me, and I watched them. 

Then I watched the passersby watch them. People showed their curiosity, and their respect for the artists. It was evident in their actions, the paths they took walking past. They explicitly gave Jang and Spaner space by walking in an arc past them, not maintaining their straight-line paths in front of the performance. 

But as they passed, and for as long as they could—looking back—people never took their eyes from the work. They kept watching the artists although they did not engage them. It was a nonverbal but strong statement to an evocative piece. 

(3rd House (Oh-Kyung Jang and Deena Spaner), Lights Upon the Shadow)

 In a different way, Christopher Kaczmarek’s piece Carry On : The Labor of our Burdens piece drew people into talking with him. People were at ease, questioning what the work was, what the artist’s intent was. . .

And in turn the artist was open and responsive. He shared freely with people his thinking about the piece and why he had created it. A group collected around him repeatedly. They were always appreciative and ready to interact with the artist. 

(Christopher Kaczmarek,  Carry On: The Labor of our Burdens)

Vivak Sebastian’s Talisman in Situ also freed an audience to engage with him as an “urban soothsayer bestowing esoteric charms.” People were open to his work that gave people his lucky charms, and its hope of positive potential for them. 

This feeling was more than felt—it seemed even augmented—by the artist’s gentle and genuine interactions. People listened, as I did, to a kind of purity in the easygoing spirit of the symbolic generosity of his work. And him.  

(Vivak Sebastian,  Talisman in Situ)

Every artist on that sprawling stage shared their art and, of course, their souls and courage. Work displayed without the artists’ presence is different from this rare opportunity to talk to the creators, to spend time and share with them. 

The artist is the work, with their work, in Art in Odd Places. The settings are indeed unusual, but the concept and the curation of AiOP allows the artists to be their work. The artists are the work.

Art in Odd Places is something special to be experienced. In whatever odd place it crops up next.

There is not enough space here to honor all the artists I saw and appreciated. Please see my Instagram reels for a visual diary of my days at Art in Odd Places.  @r_degnore

And, I have a screenpl— Wait, don’t leave. . .  

Roberta Degnore is an author, filmmaker, psychologist, and comfortable lone traveler. She holds degrees from UCLA in screenwriting, and from the CUNY Graduate Center in environmental psychology. Always eclectic, she avoids stagnation in life or art. Her dissertation in environmental psychology focused on the experience of art in urban settings. In it, Degnore identified an evocative-provocative continuum to understand viewer’s physical interactions with, and emotional responses to, public art. She found this “behavioral mapping” is a rich explanatory tool because it goes beyond simplistic evaluations of like/dislike for any work of art. Degnore hopes to continue to provoke thoughtful havoc.

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

The 14th Street Path of Empathy

By Harley J. Spiller aka Inspector Collector

(photo by Harley J. Spiller)

It was exciting to be invited by Jessica Blinkhorn, curator and Ed Woodham, founder, to serve as a Thinker in Residence for this year’s Art in Odd Places festival. I started taking notes at 12:08 pm on Sunday September 25th, the closing day of the annual public art event, as the 4 express subway wound its way downtown. Performance artist and friend Chin Chih Yang had texted the night before to say he’d be in Union Square performing in memory of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year old woman who died in government custody after having been accused of not properly wearing a scarf. Turns out Chin Chih wasn’t part of this year’s AiOP, but when a large art project takes place in a huge public sphere, there’s no telling who what where when or why such things might coincide. 

I set out to walk the entire length of 14th Street as I’d done when participating as an artist in AiOP 2019: Invisible, and got to the Con Ed plant on Avenue C, and back to Avenue A before I encountered the first artist, a person performing as a boxy robot – they did not speak but were clearly happy to stop and field my reactions and inquiry – “can you communicate in other ways than nodding yes or no?” The robot took out a hand-held battery operated child’s football game and made it beep in response. That served as a perfect summation of the depth of communication often achieved in today’s screen-addicted world of interpersonal exchange. 

Delightful AiOP staffers womanning the table in front of the 14th Street Y (which kindly offered its bathrooms for participants) told me that as in years past, most of the art action takes place on the West side of the 2-mile 2-way road. By the time I got back to Union Square Park it was time for Chin Chih’s event so I handed out his flyers and encouraged passersby to take one of 22 black scarves he’d collected and wrap him in it. It’s never easy encouraging the unsuspecting public to take part in art, but in about half an hour Chin Chih was covered and began his actions to bring peace and sanity back to humanity. Two Taiwanese artists, Hsiao-Chu Hsia, and Chen-Yi Wu, stopped by to support the performance on route to their AiOP walk, which involved Shou-An Chiang, a third artist who would be participating in their hybrid piece from London, England. And then along came Animaenoctis.com, a man in a wedding dress and a woman with a pencil thin mustache, asking if Art Can Really Transform – when they learned I was an AiOP thinker, the uomo (perhaps) parted with the amusing words “have good thoughts” – later they were espied in performance, pushing each other on a rickety metal wheeled cart. He hit me with another corker: “lots to think about eh?” 

Further west I spotted a performer in all white, with a plastic Key Food supermarket bag tied around her head with just her eyes peeping out two tiny holes. Yu-Ching Wang had suffered discrimination in public and chose this method to share her emotions about identity – her experience was horrible and one hopes this piece will change things for the better, as much of the AiOP work this year seems aimed at achieving. And then there he was, AiOP’s founder himself, staffing an info table. I charged forward and had a lovely chat with Ed Woodham, who sat me on a collapsible stool (that didn’t collapse), plied me with a sticker that says “NOTHING,” and shared stories personal, political and world-beating. Most of all I loved our discussion about how serendipity plays a big role in AiOP*, and in life in general (at the flea markets on the sidewalk between Avenues A and B I couldn’t resist buying a used copy of The Sleeve Should Be Illegal: & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick. The vendor asked how much would I pay – and I said “how ‘bout a couple bucks?” She said “OK how about 3.” Wouldn’t you know it but 3 participants in AiOP asked to take a photo of the cover of the book – go figger the odds of that trinary.) 

The inimitable LuLu LoLo popped up next, brightening the grey-ish day in her bright red raincoat and brighter red heart. On I marched and next encountered Ana De Orbegoso and her Power Cart (Feminist Projections), a selection of beautifully crafted vests with sharp embroidered statements – walking with her and her helper Daphna I encountered another thinker, Rich Garr, who had years earlier been introduced by Cleveland artist and friend Jeff Chiplis – the whole world collides on 14th Street sometimes and we’re all the better for this crossroads of the world (especially in light of the un-New-York commercialization of The Deuce, the original crossroads of the world!). Next up we watched Tamara Wyndham, also in white, paint her message “All that we have created will decay” – in water – on the sidewalk – now that’s graffiti no one can get in trouble for! 

Time ran out. I didn’t make it all the way to the Hudson but did get one last art work under my belt, and a beaut it was. Vivek Sebastian spent half an hour or so asking me deep questions and crafting a custom Talisman in Situ to bring me power and strength with a personal issue I cogitated but did not reveal. Vivek nobly accepted my limits and asked “around” my topic, and made me a lotto-ticket amulet laden with special powders and spices and two x 3 safety pins, doubling down on the number of the day. Vivek proves that he cares deeply about people, has powerful ears, and is a humanitarian par excellence. 

In fact all the artists I encountered were humanitarians on a mission to make the world a better place. No small feat for individuals and couples but an essential goal. It is such empathy that stood out as the ultimate message of the festival. Thank you Jessica and Ed and Furusho and many others who made me once again proud to be a fellow artist and arts administrator.

*the American-Chinese restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s new location on University Place at 13th Street channels Christo and Jeanne Claude. Regardless that this “wrapped Tang horse” is not intended as art, art can be found anywhere one seeks.

Harley J. Spiller performed “Invisibilicious” at AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE.  Harley is the Ken Dewey Director of Franklin Furnace Archive, where he has supported the purportedly unsupportable since 1986.  He is psyched to work again alongside Jessica Blinkhorn, 2022 AiOP Curator, and is looking forward to experiencing the wild n wooly artists she is sure to have selected for NYC’s delectation. 

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

To Tell Their Story

By Eliza Luce

(Yu-Ching Wang, Breathing in New York, photo by Ed Woodham)

As a writer, I sometimes lack the ability to understand visual art. I like things spelled out for me. Red means anger, the penis represents the patriarchy, etc. Maybe it’s because I write fiction, romance to be exact, that it’s hard for me to see something too abstract and glean meaning from it. Poetry I understand, and that is only through a lot of BFA classes, but dance escapes me. I understand the surface level emotions but need a cheat sheet to tell me the intent so that I can view it through that lens. 

 So, after seeing so much fantastic work in the streets on Friday, I made my way to the “What’s Your STORY” panel at the Bureau of General Services: Queer Division.  Salmon walls lined with books and Disney drawings for their new collection. It was a cozy space to listen. Each artist shared a piece of themselves. And every one is rooted in identity and pain. A way of expressing emotions in a visual format.  A plastic Food Story bag over her head, a five-foot microphone that let passersby tell their story.

The through line for most, if not all, seemed to be trauma. Domestic partner abuse, loss of a child, returning home to see that America is not what he once thought it was, Asian racism because of rising COVID numbers. When you look at a person you cannot see any of that. They are like modern art pieces to my uneducated eye. Twisting metal or splashes of paint on a blank canvas. But their work allows them that voice, to make what is internal, external. To tell their story. And as a writer, that is something I truly understand.

Eliza Luce is a romance writer living in Bushwick. Eliza has a queer novella published on Amazon and is currently working on the sequel!  She also helps run a writers group in Bushwick (called the Bushwick Writers’ Group) and a ladies lead Dungeons and Dragons collective via MeetUp (called Sheildmaidens).  You can find her on Twitter or Instagram @lucewriter, or on her website,
lucewriter.com.

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

On 14th Street, A Weaving of Stories

By Matthew López-Jensen

(Photo pairing by Matthew López-Jensen)

I arrived at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division (BGSQD) bookstore just in time to get one of the last metal folding chairs on the ramp. It was my first time in the physical bookstore after discovering the website a few years ago. I didn’t realize how happy it would make me to step into a queer bookstore. For a flash I was 23 again and at The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in Greenwich Village or The Big Cup coffeehouse in Chelsea. I was reminded how necessary queer spaces are for the community. At BGSQD I was surrounded, quite literally, by stories; arms and faces and fingers of Disney characters melting into one amorphous constellation on fresh pink walls. The artwork of Catalina Schliebener Muñoz had recently been installed and it made the perfect stage for this year’s Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2022: STORY festival. The mustached men on the spines of Tom of Finland books watched me as I watched a selection of the artists in this year’s festival share their stories. 

I was slightly electrified and emotional by the simple act of sitting in a room with people and breathing air and not worrying (too much) about getting Covid. And I wasn’t exactly sure whether we would be experiencing works of performance or listening to stories or a combination of both.

Listening to stories.

Each of the artists who presented would be performing a work along 14th Street. Now we would gain some perspective on the work. And listen to stories. 

Nick M. Daniels, founder of the D.A.N.A Movement Ensemble in Pittsburg shared their powerful near-death experience with medicines and also explained how earlier that day they had spent hours tethered to the steel supports of the High Line, trying to pull the entire structure forward, even if only by an unmeasurable amount. They succeeded. The story and the action were unrelated. But not really.

Heather Sincavage, whose work underscores the trauma of intimate partner violence, read us a story, her story. It was moving. The details are best heard in person. But I can say that she can drive a stick shift now. And she will pick you up.

Vivek Sebastian, shared a story, perhaps unintentionally, about a relative in India who found themselves in hot water for developing their own version of a lottery. And he shared that his mother always asks him to buy her scratch-off lottery tickets but he never does. Throughout the festival he would be handing out good luck charms, objects made from the castoff misfortunes of others. 

It was hard to understand everything that incarcerated artist Juan Hernandez had to say. His voice, recorded earlier, came from a phone held near the microphone by artist Mai Tran as an extension of the social practice project Art Across Walls. Juan spoke about the struggles of making art and securing materials against so many odds. Along with his story we could hear sounds in the air: slamming of doors, distant voices, and the echoey din of hard spaces. The world around him became part of his story and it was heard by everyone in the bookstore.

Yu-Ching Wang’s performance Breathing in New York involved the artist walking around 14th Street wearing a now outlawed plastic Key Foods bag over her head. Tonight, she was not wearing the bag. Instead, she bravely shared a story about the overlapping circumstances (casual racism, the pandemic, a ban on plastic bags) that converged to inspire this performance.

Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, curator of this year’s festival, an artist whose work focuses on LGBTQ+, disabled, and aging communities, also shared a story during the Q & A. She didn’t need the microphone because, as she explained, she grew up in a big family in the South. A few years ago she performed a work where she asked strangers passing by on the sidewalk to help her eat. It is a tender and seemingly simple action that most of us take for granted. A man agreed to assist while his girlfriend watched on from a safe distance. Afterwards, however, he wouldn’t shake her hand. 

The stories shared were small glimpses into much larger chapters of the lives of the artists who would be performing on 14th Street. I was reminded of how wonderful it is to listen to words coming from the mouths of other people, words that move through physical space, bounce off walls and vibrate against the world, all before entering my ears. What comes out of our computers and headphones is not the human voice, it is something else, close enough for most situations, but not good enough stories. 

A few weeks before AiOP 2022: STORY kicked off, I started thinking about the festival’s theme of “STORY” and about 14th Street, where the festival unfolds and has since 2008. How would artists and their stories emerge along this busy corridor? Is 14th Street still an odd place? Should I also share a story? It only seems fair.

(Photo pairing by Matthew López-Jensen)

“They say that I have the best ass below 14th Street. Is it true?”

I was not a musical theater fan, but I signed up (and found the money) to take the five-hour bus ride to New York City to see Rent at the Nederlander Theater. My small circle of misfit friends were beside themselves for the opportunity to see (or see again) the musical that changed everything. The charter bus buzzed with snippets of songs erupting from the riders who had the soundtrack memorized. The vaguely-Catholic university which had sanctioned the trip must not have been aware of the script. But neither was I. 

I was going through things that year, specifically that month. It was the late 90s and I was only eighteen and hadn’t learned to see the future. I felt doomed. I was locked into a narrative I had no control over. I sat through the production clenching my teeth, unmoved by the heartache and struggles. Rent was playing out before me like a cautionary tale. I left the theater in a dark place. I pretended to sleep on the ride home. But I was really strategizing how to claw my way deeper into the closet. Avoiding New York City would be a good start.

But five years later I had nowhere else to go. Thankfully the darkness had receded. I was finally out and proud. My job in the Midwest had ended and everything I owned was in the back of my Chevy S-10 pick-up truck. I was on the outskirts of Newark at that point on the highway where Manhattan emerges like a mirage on the horizon. It was the closest thing to a “sign,” so I decided to move to New York from the slow lane of the I-78.

I spent the night in the living room of a high school friend who taught middle school in the suburbs. When I explained that I’d be moving to New York he offered to show me a few neighborhoods he’d visited. I told him, “take me to one of the old parts.” When I explained I had very little money and didn’t know anyone – not a single person – in all of New York City, he told me about a new website called Craigslist. 

It was my first time on the subway and we emerged at 14th Street Union Square. Something found me immediately, an impression that fastened that exact moment in my mind; a blast of sunlight, skateboarders clacking down wide stone steps, a public space that seemed wonderfully irreverent. Twenty four years later I still hear Mimi’s voice in my head at least once a week as I arrive for work on 14th Street.

(Photo pairing by Matthew López-Jensen)

As a stage for Art in Odd Places I wonder if 14th Street is still odd enough? There is certainly something odd about so many people excited to go to the Apple Store. And a three-day-old chicken Caesar wrap for sale at a CVS residing in a marble bank building designed like a Roman temple, is certainly odd. Unfathomable sums of money have transformed the western-most blocks. New condominiums creep further east every year, while anxious doormen lurk about plate glass thresholds. Sweeping away artists trying to perform on the sidewalk might certainly be in the job description.

As I walked on the north side of the street, I was excited to spot the occasional artist. During Saturday’s “critical mass” when most of the artists are positioned somewhere it is hard to know where to rest your attention. I listened to a poet with The Armchair Salon timidly read a poem. I listened to a quiet proclamation on the faintest megaphone I’ve ever heard. I saw Jauregui-Ortiz’s three beautiful paintings installed on fencing and Wes Holloway tying ties to the same fence. I saw Christopher Kaczmarek walking with a building on his back and laughed as a team of dusty contractors with neon hard hats lost their minds at the sight of the performance. I lingered, but not long enough, by Nick M. Daniels, while they performed a durational performance, a combination of movement and spoken word. I enjoyed watching the occasional person stop to puzzle, photograph, or talk with an artist. And I wished, in so many situations, that I could stop the traffic, set up some chairs, and invite everyone to learn more about each artist’s story. 

Matthew López-Jensen is usually outside. He is a Bronx-based, interdisciplinary environmental artist whose projects combine walking, collecting, gardening, mapping, photography, people, and research. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts for site-specific, landscape projects. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. He teaches at Fordham University and Parsons School of Design. He received his MFA from the University of Connecticut and BA from Rice University. www.Jensen-Projects.com  @mattlopezjensen

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence

“What’s Your Story?” at Bureau of General Service – Queer Division

By Martha Wilson

(BGSQD, photo by Ed Woodham)

Hosted by 2022 festival curator, Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, “What’s Your Story”, featured six artists who were also doing works on the street [for the STORY festival]. This  [public] program was their opportunity to tell stories which related to their work as artists:  Nick Daniels, Jana Greiner, Juan Hernandez with Mai Tran, Vivek Sebastian, Heather Sincavage, and Yu-Ching Wang.

Nick Daniels started the program by telling the story of his intention to hook himself to the Empire State Building to drag it to another location; but he settled on dragging the High Line instead.  At the end of the program, a viewer asked where he was going to drag it?  And he answered, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”  But his discussion also included the trauma of being a trans-gender artists who is allergic to one of the ingredients in the drugs administered to transition.

Juan Hernandez was not present because he is an incarcerated artist.  He is serving a life sentence and living his life in a prison, which has its own social rules and economy.  Work is paid very poorly, so strategies for getting along abound.  His testimony was played off a smartphone by Mai Tran.

Vivek Sebastian told the story of the role that lottery tickets play in his home country of India and here in New York City and Long Island.  Ironically, it’s the rich people who can afford to buy lottery tickets.  He makes magic tokens out of the cards that are discarded.

Heather Sincavage told the story of piecing together the story of having been abused by her partner.  As reported in The Body Keeps the Score, a book about the history of trauma treatment by the medical industry, victims of trauma often can’t remember the details of their experience, which nevertheless the body retains as anxiety, flashbacks, paralysis, and other debilitating symptoms.  Heather finally learns to drive the stick-shift car she bought and finally throws her partner out of her life.

Perhaps my favorite story of the evening was by Yu-Ching Wang, who joined three seemingly unrelated incidents:  The COVID mask mandate; the plastic bag ban; and being called “Chinese, mask” by two white men.  She felt weird because she is not Chinese, so she thought if she covered her head, people would not know her identity.  She used a Key Food plastic bag from a collection of them gathered when plastic bags were ubiquitous; and the image of her wearing it weirdly shows the Key Food logo taking the place of her mouth.

photo by Sara Kaplan

(photo by Sara Kaplan)

Martha Wilson is a pioneering feminist artist and gallery director, who over the past five decades created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae. She began making these videos and photo/text works in the early 1970s while in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and further developed her performative and video-based practice after moving in 1974 to New York City, embarking on a long career that would see her gain attention across the U.S. for her provocative appearances as political personae. In 1976 she founded, and as Founding Director Emerita, continues to help direct Franklin Furnace, an artist-run space that champions the exploration, promotion and preservation of artists’ books, installation art, video, online and performance art, further challenging institutional norms, the roles artists play within society, and expectations about what constitutes acceptable art mediums. marthawilson.com 

Art in Odd Places 2022: STORY / Thinkers in Residence 

Observations on the Festival and Its’ Environs

Introduction by Ed Woodham, AiOP Founder

(Photo of 14th Street, Ed Woodham)

Since 2015 for each iteration of the Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festival, the AiOP curatorial team has invited a select group of valued individuals to be one of our esteemed Thinkers in Residence. Their responses have taken many forms: essays, poetry, photo montages, video collages, aural recordings of on-the-spot conversations with the public, and combinations of aforementioned. 

This year Thinkers were invited to attend the festival Public Programs: a virtual evening of video and imagery on Thursday, September 22;  What’s Your Story? a selection of festival artists telling their respective stories at the Bureau of General Services: Queer Division at the LGBTQIA+ Center on Friday, September 23; and Critical Mass, a selection of artists’ projects in a concentrated area (between Sixth and Eighth Avenues)  to make the festival more accessible for festival artists and goers on Saturday, September 24.  

And of course our Thinkers strolled the festival over the weekend reflecting on 14th Street, the current times, patterns of movement, artists’ projects, memories, pedestrians, public space, serendipity, trauma, inclusivity, plus other notions and ideas.  Thanks to our thoughtful friends. Enjoy their observations in this insightful series of pondering investigations.

Alum Questions By Claire Demere, Lucia Warck-Meister, GOODW.Y.N. and Tasha Douge

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. Tasha Douge, who was a Curatorial Assistant of 2016:RACE, and artist in 2021:NORMAL and friend of AiOP Founder Ed Woodham, wanted to share this:

 

1) What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?

 I have a ton of memories and a few full circle moments. I first learned about AiOP by accident in 2014. I stumbled across festival info by way of the skint website. I remember getting compliments from a gumball machine, talking to a computer and tracking Nicky Enright down to have a “Globo Exchange.” I was hooked on AiOP after that. I applied to be a curator for 2018’s theme of RACE. I didn’t get selected. However, weeks later I met with Ed for a nice lunch conversation and left accepting an opportunity to be a Curatorial Assistant. That was my first time working on a festival of this caliber. I learned ample from being in that role. Ed also encouraged me to take advantage of our speakerbox/soapbox activation. That is when I debuted my remixed version of the Pledge of Allegiance. I have made some awesome friends over the years. Yet the best memory to date is of me performing in last year’s festival for the theme NORMAL. I look forward to making more memories with the AiOP family.

 

2) What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

 Ed may be transitioning out of his previous role, but his spirit and energy aint going nowhere.  Ed is a visionary and has created an amazing legacy. I have told Ed time and time again that the way he shows up has been affirming, encouraging and uplifting. Ed has been a consistent supporter and just an overwhelmingly awesome person to know.  

 

3)What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places?

 AiOP has left an everlasting impression on me. For me, Art in Odd Places is a festival that reflects the essence of NYC. Stick to the mission of reclaiming public space and the legacy will continue onward. 

 

4)Any advice for Furusho? 

 Welcome Furusho!  As you step into this new role, I say stay curious and keep your ears to the voices of artists. 

New Normal 2020

Speaker Box in 2018:BODY

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. GOODW.Y.N, who is both an artist alumni of AiOP2018: BODY, and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

 

  1.     What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?

 I think its a tie between having the cops called on me on 7th Avenue and having cold, chunky soup spilled on me on Union Square during two separate occasions.

  1.     What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

I’m going to miss you Ed. My performance career wouldn’t have been the same had I not met you. I will always dedicate time to “challenging myself.”

  1.     What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places

 AiOP is the spirit of New York’s art scene.

  1.     Any advice for Furusho? 

Never forget that the people are the mission at AiOP.

These are from 2017:SENSE from GOODW.Y.N.’s “Ain’t I A Woman”

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. Lucia Warck-Meister, who is a team member alumni as a Festival Producer, Art in Odd Places 2011: RITUAL, and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

1What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?

A very present memory is that all the work -and there was a lot to do!-was always so much fun. Ed was always a leader with great conviction of what he was proposing and doing and strongly believed in the importance of holding a festival in the public space, breaking with the notions of hierarchy and validation of the art that is within the four walls of an institution. The horizontal format of working was part of the success of the Art in Odd Places team.

Another memory, which I think of as our grain of sand (but no less important) was the choice in Art in Odd Places Ritual 2011 of the two curators Kalia Brooks and Trinidad Fombella who came from Black and Latinx communities. Which in these ten years have been positioning themselves with great force on the map of the arts.

 

  1.     What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

Ed! Organizations like the one you founded are so necessary for artists that want to create and show their work in spaces and formats that allow them to spread their wings. I am proud to have worked and learned from you on the Ritual chapter. As Art in Odd Places continues to grow, I’m sure you have more plans and I look forward to seeing them!

 

  1.     What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places

I think Furusho knows how to do things. That Ed has chosen her to continue directing the Festival is proof that 2022: Story is going to be a success.  

 

  1.     Any advice for Furusho? Keep doing what you’re doing! I’ll be in NYC to enjoy the Festival!
These are photographs of Argentinian artist Liana Strasberg that participated in 2011:RITUAL AiOP Festival.
ph credit: Daniel Talonia

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. Claire Demere, who is an artist and team member alumni as a Curatorial Assistant: 2012: MODEL, 2013: NUMBER; Curatorial Manager: 2014: FREE: Art in Odd Places; The Artifacts (Governors Island, 2014, Curator; Curatorial Manager & Assistant Director, 2015: RECALL; , and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

 

  1.     What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?  

My fondest memories of my four years with AiOP all involve my deeply collaborative relationship with Ed. Our weekly meetings at Good Stuff Diner (RIP!) fed my soul while also teaching me about problem-solving, communication, and compassionate leadership.

 

  1.     What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

You are a true gem who created something extraordinarily special! A total class act through and through, passing the baton with grace and care.

 

  1.     What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places?

It all comes down to the communal spirit of dedicated labor and cooperation. From volunteers to curators to artists, this entire festival only happens because every person involved WANTS it to. Fostering that environment of inclusivity and shared passion is crucial.

 

  1.     Any advice for Furusho?

Always push this festival to continue evolving and staying true to its innovative spirit.

 

Anything else you’d like to say? (about Art in Odd Places, you, your upcoming work or project) The skills I picked up at AiOP have formed the backbone of my entire professional career. Forever grateful!

Photo from 2015:RECALL

Photo from 2015:RECALL

Photo from 2015:RECALL

 

From 2015:RECALL, with Ed and that year’s Curatorial Assistant Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi

 

 

Ed and Claire

Terry Hardy Alum Questions

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. Terry Hardy, who is an artist alumni of Art in Odd Places 1996 (Atlanta) 2005; 2007; 2008: PEDESTRIAN; 2012: MODEL (St. Petersburg, Russia); 2013: NUMBER (Greensboro & Australia); 2015: RECALL; 2014: FREE (Indianapolis); 2015: TONE (Orlando); 2018: MATTER (Charlottesville) 2019: INVISIBLE, and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

1.There are many strong Art in Odd Places memories I recall but certainly the first AiOP in Manhattan in the East Village…2005? It was a much longer event that lasted 2 weeks and my project was “Draw Here” which involved placing posters on all the poles in the East Village. This involved daily walks of all the East Village to collect or reposter the poles. There was an encounter with Police within the first hour… things became even more interesting.

It was an amazing project which produced 280 drawings over the course of the 2 weeks. Many of these posters could not be considered historical documents as they were also postered with stickers/labels from various organizations and establishments that no longer exist. All representing a time and place in the ever changing East Village.

I will be donating these posters, as well as a map of collection sites, to AiOP later this year for the archives.

 

2.Ed has been doing this festival since 1996. Thousands have benefited from these festivals. Many of us have been given the opportunities to travel to different cities and produce projects that would have otherwise never been realized. It will be interesting to see how AiOP continues to evolve. I look forward to witnessing this evolution.

I do hope Ed will take advantage of a bit less stress and focus on his own personal work.

 

3.Furusho has been handed an art event/festival that has been decades in the making. An organization that has changed the lives of many and will change the lives of many more moving forward.

 

4.My advice for Furusho regarding AiOP would be to be flexible yet firm.

Artists are their own special breed…some will be overly organized and on time while others will work every nerve until the last minute. Do not be afraid to “power up” when necessary. Stick to the rules and protocol and expect others to do the same.

Lulu Lolo’s Questions for Alums

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. LuLu LoLo, who is both an artist alumni and Curator of AiOP2019: INVISIBLE, and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

 

  1. 1.     What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?

There are so many memories from over the past twelve years during which I performed in six AiOP festivals and also had the honor of curating AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE.

 

Thinking back, what is amazing is that in my first AiOP appearance as 14th Street NewsBoy in AiOP 2009: SIGN, the festival was four weekends in October! I was out there every weekend offering the public the newspaper: The 14th Street Tribune (four issues—a different one each week) that I researched and wrote about the history of 14th Street. I wore a vintage-inspired newsboy attire (this was before the play Newsies). As the weather turned colder Joshua Suzanne of Rags Au GoGo gifted me a tweed jacket to wear. I recall that I was working on each issue each week like a real reporter and was under pressure to get the issues to the printer. The public’s enthusiasm to collect each newspaper issue was amazing—they were even contacting AiOP for back issues. Years later when I did a short stint as NewsBoy for an AiOP event, a guy was excited to see me because he never received all four issues. Performing on the street one never knows the public’s response and getting people to take a newspaper can be tricky—one favorite interaction was with a man who was hesitant to take a newspaper—I could see him at the curb looking back at me—and trying to decide to take one or not, and I yelled to him “Oscar Wilde’s play was a flop!” and he smiled and said, “You got me.” And he took a newspaper.    Another memory of NewsBoy is my looking across the street and seeing Ed smiling at me while I was performing.

 

In all my memories over all these years, it is the excitement and interaction with the public that has been most rewarding: from people wanting me to acknowledge them with a tip of my hat as the Gentleman of 14th Street in AiOP 2011:RITUAL; accepting blessings from Mother Cabrini in AiOP 2017: SENSE; nominating a woman for a monument in Where are the Women? in AiOP 2015: RECALL; the heartwarming conversation a man had with his deceased father in Remembrance of Phone Numbers Past in AiOP 2013:NUMBER; and with a seat strapped to my back Offering a Seat to the Elderly: the Invisible Generation in AiOP 2018:BODY; and of course the  joyous moment when the brass band came promenading down 14th street for AiOP 2019:INVISIBLE.

 

  1.     What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

Ed, your vision and dedication to AiOP has made it the premier public art festival in New York City. I am extremely grateful to the freedom and the support you have given me and all the artists in the festival. Your spirit will always be a part of AiOP. Ed, as you pass the baton to Furusho, I know that you are confident that she has the ability and vision to continue creating a vibrant exciting AiOP.

 

  1.     What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places

AiOP is a juggling act of curators, artists, 14th Street, deadlines, and the bureaucracy of New York City. Furusho with her AiOP experience is aware of all of this and has navigated it successfully so far.

 

  1.     Any advice for Furusho? 

Furusho, always follow your instincts and have a supportive team that understands your vision.  I think you already have that in place. I will always remember the moment we met, and our friendship began. I am so proud of you, and I know you will be fantastic leading AiOP into the future.

 

 

Photos Included:

LuLu and Ed, meeting to discuss LuLu Curating AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE Photographer unknown

.

Group photo at the opening of AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE Photo: Paul Takeuchi

From Left to Right front row: Billy X Curmano, LuLu LoLo, Joshua Suzanne, Furusho von Puttkammer

From Left to Right Back row:  Laura Droguol,  Ed Woodham, Ron Kolm, Barbara  Lubliner (partly hidden)

Katya Grokhovsky Alum Questions

As we transition to our new Director Furusho von Puttkammer, we have asked our alums if they have any advice, memories, or thoughts they would like to share with AiOP. Katya Grokhovsky, who is both an artist alumni and Curator of AiOP2018: BODY, and friend of both AiOP Founder Ed Woodham and our new Executive Director Furusho von Puttkammer, wanted to share this:

 

  1. What’s a strong Art in Odd Places memory that you recall?

I have many fond memories of Art in Odd Places as an artist alum between 2014-2016 and as a curator in 2018, but I can pinpoint two that stand out in my mind the most. My first work in AiOP 2014, was Slow Dance, a participatory performance, which seems unimaginable now, in our pandemic world. I and several performers invited passersby from different parts of 14th street to slow dance with us to the sound of the city. It was the first time I performed a work like that on the street and will never forget the experience. Another memory is the opening of the group exhibition I curated as part of AiOP BODY in 2018, at Westbeth Gallery. It felt like a huge feminist celebration, I remember giving an impassioned speech and being enveloped and supported by a crowd of familiar faces. Curating AiOP was a highlight of my personal and professional journey at that time and became a springboard for my future projects.

 

  1.     What would you like to say to Ed as he leaves?

Ed has become a dear friend, a mentor, and will always be an inspiration to me. I admire his passion and tenacity to establish and keep an artist-run, interdisciplinary ephemeral media project running, regardless of many challenges.  I would like to thank him for supporting many of my ideas, experiments and vision as an artist and curator. I credit Art in Odd Places with giving me fortitude and experience to establish my own platform, The Immigrant Artist Biennial in 2019.

 

  1.     What should Furusho know about Art in Odd Places

I believe Furusho has already experienced many unique aspects of Art in Odd Places and understands its premise, place and legacy. I would add that the project has an incredible army of alums all over the city, the U.S and the world at large, whom I’d love to see participate in the project once again in some aspect.

 

  1.     Any advice for Furusho? 

I would just say to bravely march forth into the uncertain challenging future, with a bold, uncompromising vision!

 

Photo credit:

  1. Pei-Ling Ho, Absence of Three, AiOP Body, 2018, photo Katya Grokhovsky
  2. Questions Collective, Foundation, AiOP Body 2018, photo Walter Wlodarczyk

Thinker in Residence: LuLu LoLo

I have always found 14th Street to be a constantly evolving everchanging street experience in my life. As a lifelong New Yorker, I have observed its changing history.  When I was growing up, my mother took me to the bargain hunter’s paradise, opposite Union Square Park, Klein’s department store, with its frenzy of shoppers, slopping floors, and the pretzel seller at the door. To this day New Yorkers wistfully recount their purchases from Klein’s.  My father often brought home some household gadget he had purchased from a 14th street curbside vendor demonstrating its usefulness in sideshow style. I can’t recall if we ever really used these purchases.  Union Square Park and its demonstrations figured prominently in my life too with my radical Italian American father talking about demonstrating in the Union Square Park against the execution of the Rosenbergs.  

 

As someone who has performed in six Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festivals and curated AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE, I know every inch of 14th Street. In 2009, fascinated about the evolution of 14th Street, I researched and wrote a newspaper The Fourteenth Street Tribune distributing free copies as the 14th Street NewsBoy for AiOP 2009: SIGN, detailing its history and such facts that both Macy’s and the Metropolitan Museum began at locations on 14th Street.

 

For fourteen years, Art in Odd Places has inhabited 14th Street from river to river adding to the energy and tempo of the 14th Street landscape. In March of 2020, New Yorkers went into lockdown. For the first time AiOP didn’t take place in the month of October. Our lives became restrictive, and we all questioned when we would return to what we call NORMAL. Intimate artistic energy was missing from our lives—we could only dwell on Zoom.  Finally, AiOP brought this vital energy back in May with AiOP 2021: NORMAL, curated by artist Furusho von Puttkammer with 100 artists questioning and challenging the meaning of NORMAL.

 

Returning to 14th Street after my enforced lockdown wearing a mask—I viewed the new NORMAL of street life including the demise of many local businesses. One of these was the especially beloved Rags-Au-Go Go at 218 West 14th Street. Rags’ owner Joshua Suzanne closed up shop and took off for Florida.

Photo: LuLu LoLo

 

Rags-Au-Go Go had become the Command Center for AiOP, hosting our Friday night opening pizza parties and Joshua Suzanne was always there to support the AiOP artists. 

Photo: Paul Takeuchi

 

Walking in New York City one always notices the random quirkiness of the public actions on the street. AiOP always adds to that mosaic of the unpredictable and it becomes a NORMAL occurrence.

 

Making my way on 14th Street, I spotted chalk markings on the sidewalk—they are not proclamations of X loves Y or drawings of flowers, but careful deliberate patterns of labyrinths that continue along the street. 

Photo: LuLu LoLo

 

I venture upon a pilgrimage along a labyrinth path. Up ahead I see someone kneeling on the sidewalk, chalk in hand, and with a few strokes another labyrinth appears on the sidewalk. 

 

Photo: Josef Pinlac

 

Immediately I have visions of the great labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France, appearing in miniature on 14th Street. Not stopping with one labyrinth, Chris Kaczmarek, an artist who sees “the act of walking as a praxis for artistic production,” continues drawing one hundred labyrinths every one fifth of the mile along the two-mile length of 14th Street, moving quickly and with determined purpose. “Labor Lines: The Work of Contemplation” is a performance of “endurance and repetition”. It is comforting in this time of unpredicatableness to see this simple repetitive act of “resolute production.” It brings to mind the scrawls of the cave paintings—leaving a mark that we are here on this journey of discovery on 14th Street. 

 

Suddenly a striking vision appears coming towards me. Is this the new NORMAL required Pandemic attire? Should not this fabulous persona be on the cover of Vogue?  I encounter Gretchen Vitamvas, “Modern Plague Doctor”, images of beneficial herbs and phrases: “I’ll be fine” “Garlic 3-5 times” “How are you?” adorn her protective outfit.

Photo: Chloe Evan

Photo: Chloe Evans

The “Modern Plaque Doctor” offers me a prescription for Stinging Nettle Urticaria dioica. At the bottom of her pants legs (as if they are sticking to her) are images of the stinging nettles that you often find in the woods. I soon learn that this prickly plant will help restore my body’s overall energy and vitality, much needed after being in lockdown all these days. 

 

The clock on top of her hat highlights my own insomnia, hourly marking my own nightly rituals of insomnia:

 12: in bed reading, dozing off, put the book down, wide awake

   1: still awake

Photo:  Jonathan Bumble

 

The “Modern Plaque Doctor” instinctively knows all my Pandemic ailments and how to cure them, handing me a poem that captures my nocturnal musings: 

“New York, I miss you. 

   Since you’ve been sleeping 

I’ve been sleeping less.

Counting down the hours.

Sometimes almost to oblivion and then

Yanked back to consciousness like my

body is afraid to let go.

Night can bring dark thoughts.”

As I bid the “Modern Plaque Doctor” goodbye, I feel much healthier. 

 

At the corner of Seventh Avenue, Georgia Lale, attired in a hospital gown with non-slip hospital socks on her feet, creates an intense oasis of vulnerable isolation, determination, and strength that captures a transfixed sidewalk audience. As she methodically handwashes the hospital gowns she wore during her one-week home isolation during her treatment with radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer plus the gowns donated by health professionals and well-cured Covid-19 patients. 

Photo: LuLu LoLo

In this durational performance, she silently washes and wrings out each gown, holding them aloft above her head, and then cloaks herself in the garment—continually repeating the ritual.  Her handwashing in public evokes the ancient gathering of women washing clothes in villages worldwide.  

Photo: LuLu LoLo

 

This act of washing by hand affords Lale the opportunity to take control and cleanse her body of the toxins of radioactive iodine and cancer. As a cancer survivor myself I understand the need for this ritual. 

 

The words that appear on the gowns are mottos of the four states that were hit the hardest by the pandemic: In God We Trust (Florida), Eureka (California), State Sovereignty, National Union (Illinois), and Friendship (Texas).

Photo: LuLu LoLo

This “Public Cleansing” performance addresses our national healthcare crisis beyond the Covid-19 pandemic bringing attention to the lack of treatment available to people with financial difficulties or because of their immigration status. For Lale this work’s central element is “the vulnerability of the body and the individual against viruses, diseases, and chaotic, impersonal cities like New York City.” 

 

Chris Kaczmarek, Gretchen Vitamvas, and Georgia Lale have once again in the spirit of Art in Odd Places brought creativity, energy, and thought-provoking work to the public space of 14th Street—capturing this time in all our lives where we grapple with “NORMAL.”

The Alchemy of Tasha Dougé

How this cultural vigilante is creating models for controversial conversations we don’t normally have. 

 

Tasha Dougé is up with the sun. For so many who have lived this past year on our own schedules, catching a few extra z’s in the morning might seem like a luxury. But Dougé had already been up for a few hours when she answered the phone at 9am, and was opting out of any warm up questions, “give me what you got. I’m ready for the heavy hitters, just give it to me straight.” The Bronx based artist is no exception to the New York stereotype in that she shares a limited tolerance for nonsense. She needs no warm up or wake up call. 

She is the wake up call.

Photo by: Anthony Lewis @neatshinyowl

Her artist bio will tell you that Tasha has been featured in well known publications like The New York Times, Essence magazine and Sugarcane magazine. Her work has appeared nationally at the RISD museum, New York’s Apollo Theatre, the Rush gallery(Philadelphia), and internationally, at the Hygiene Museum in Germany. 

But what her social media presence, will tell you is that she isn’t just an artist but a fierce energy force tapped into a higher power available to all but only heard by a few who, like her, are really listening. 

“Because my artistry is so aligned in spiritual and ancestral work, there have been so many beautiful ah-ha moments or connections that have led me to be like, Je-sus, ancestors, just text me!”

When deciding to launched her “convHERsations” she didn’t see it as a risk but a calling. “When we speak about risk it always carries this daunting connotation. Instead as artists and humans we need to leave behind the scarcity model and shift into the practice of abundance. Regardless of the risk we take, whether it’s a “yes” or a “no,” we still find ourselves in a different place. We’ve grown. We may gain a connection with someone we didn’t have before, but most importantly we took action. We made an investment in ourselves and engaged our curiosity. If you do that you’re going to have more information on what you need to do next.”

When you look at her art and the underlying themes of her work, this makes sense. Her creative evolution is rooted in this exact mindset. Risk it all for a hint at what comes next. Pounding her tap shoes into the ground at a young age was foreshadowing of the organized chaos that she would soon love to create. Working in the prevention department at a non profit clinic in Harlem would move her to challenge reform models that women have suffered through for ages. Little did she know gazing upon “The Great Wall of Vagina” (Yes, a whole wall. Look it up!) at the vagina festival she attended in 2008 would ignite her artistic practice.

“Working at the clinic, I felt bound by red tape and bombarded by the deliverables being given, it just felt claustrophobic to me. I can hand out condoms all day but what I saw were deeper self esteem issues, suppressed voices and shame. And I just thought, there is a better way to do this. How can we bring information and behavioral change to women in an avant garde way? And, lightbulb…Art!”  

Inspired by her work at the clinic, Dougé launched her exhibition at Chelsea’s Rogue Space Gallery in 2015 and hasn’t stopped since. Her work, though rooted in women’s health evokes pride in the Black experience, speaking to the contributions and hardships experienced throughout history and as modern artists and professionals. “ConvHERsations,” redefines how women feel and see their bodies and has progressed to empower entrepreneurial women of color and their creative journeys.  

“Throughout my own artistic process, I’ve always kept the harm reduction model in mind from my time at the clinic. I’d worked places that institute an abstinence model but you can apply hard reduction to any facet of life.” 

Initially experienced in the drug use sector, Dougé shared that rather than quitting cold turkey, the harm reduction model allows people to commit to small goals instead of one large hurtle that at first seems unachievable. Dougé says “harm reduction prioritizes the persons agency and at the same time offers alternatives. What I love is theres still humanity attached to this method, you know?” 

She’s listening to what’s there and bringing to light what’s not.

When asked about this year’s AiOP’s festival theme: NORMAL, she taps back into the Tasha you might find on Youtube- meditative and introspective. “Normal is a term used to buy into other systems. Being your authentic self should be normalized, but being normal should not.” 

Her passions and ambitions have expanded from women’s health, but still remain with redefining what society has told them about who they’re supposed to be or look like with her convHERsation series Thou Art Pay U$. With her hand in so many bags, virtually cultivating her open dialogue series is one of many projects. She is currently an Associated Artist with Culture. But for those looking to get a peek at her work first hand you can find her on instagram @convhersations_ , by subscribing to her Youtube channel, Thou Art Pay U$,and of course along 14th Street in May with AiOP.

A Very Abnormal Visit to Art In Odd Places: NORMAL by Anna Harsanyi

Every year, during Art in Odd Places, I have transformative experiences that result from simply walking down 14th Street, looking at my fellow passersby and wondering, is this art or just daily life? Participating as an audience member in the festival always prompts me to look closer at each passing person, each object discarded on the ground, each poster taped on storefront. I love this act of searching for poetry in my surroundings. But on my festival walks up and down 14th street, whether I actually encounter an intentional performance or art installation becomes less important. The holistic understanding that we are all performing, and that our street lives in particular contain creative and transformative potential is a beautiful reminder of how art and daily life converge. During COVID-19, the streetscape has expanded into the everyday for almost all New Yorkers, serving as a home, a meeting space, a dining room, a place for intimacy, a salesroom, etc. The streets have stretched and shifted to fit our needs, and it’s this kind of creative extension that the artists in Art in Odd Places remind us is indeed possible.

 

This year’s festival questioned the idea of “normal,” a term which serves as an existential goalpost for our society to survive COVID, in order to somehow magically “return to normal.” The notion of going back to a previous state of normalcy implies that our world was previously one of safety, sanity, equity, or peace. How could we think that a future normal could ever emerge out of this painful present, this abnormal now? I welcomed the chance to grapple with these questions through my own experience of this year’s festival which was, by all accounts, not normal: I interacted with Art in Odd Places entirely online. Being out of the country, I was sad to miss the spontaneity of the festival and surprise performances. Usually, if I were not able to attend something in person, I would miss it. But in our days of Zooms and Instagram Lives, there are increased options for accessing art programs virtually. The festival did an excellent job of documenting projects in real time on Instagram and building a beautiful website with detailed information. I watched all of the documentations, but a few pieces stayed with me because they reminded me of the precarity of our current times and the way such uncertainty can produce both beauty and pain, comfort and constraint.

 

Intimate and embodied performances, like Latefy Dolley’s I Got You, yielded moments of intensity. Two nude Black men held each other for an extended period on The High Line, an embrace that was powerful in its vulnerability. In Assembling by Sari Nordman, female-identified performers dressed in red jumpsuits moved at a grueling slow pace, transitioning from reclining to crawling to balancing. Their bodies attempted to negotiate the asphalt and stone surfaces of the street, a potentially futile search for a space of comfort.

Then there were projects with discursive qualities, offering conversation as a way of connecting. I got a glimpse of The Modern Plague Doctor by Gretchen Vitamvas, who asked passersby how they were feeling and then handed out cards with herbal remedies related to their responses. It was a friendly way to connect and be honest about our fragile emotional and/or physical states. Robert Wallace’s The New Lefty was a conversation with himself while pouring drinks, telling a meandering story of travels, bumpy rides, and wandering thoughts. It made me think of the rambling conversations I had with myself in my head while in quarantine, imagining I’m sitting at a bar with a stranger exchanging long-winded personal tales. 

The Instagram videos even had a sense of the streetscape imbued in them – you could hear the noises of the sidewalk, the conversations of people walking by, the music blaring from cars. It was not perfect documentation, and the unpolished qualities were things that I relished In, especially from the isolated perspective of me and my screen.

 

In the digital and online viewing era of COVID experience, I wondered if watching things like this were the new normal? Is there something about the accessibility of online platforms that will become solidified into our daily reality, and into our art reality? I left my festival experience feeling that watching in-person happenings online could be another actually meaningful way to connect – perhaps another form of experience that is emerging.

Thinker in Residence: Michael Kilburn

On Evan Dawson’s, What is wealth if it cannot have violence?

I first encountered public mask wearing while living in Japan in the 1980s. I sat across from an elegant older woman in an elaborate kimono, hair perfectly coiffed and her mouth and nose covered by a paper surgical mask. The train was quiet, nearly silent, as Japanese trains tend to be, and the people crowded around us in the carriage didn’t pay her any notice: salarymen read their papers, teenagers in school uniforms intent on their manga; workers in toe boots staring out the windows or into space. If anything, my gaijin self was the more curious specimen.

But I found the scene a bit uncanny. Though superficially westernized, Japan has many unique cultural elements and practices – some framed, some subtle, others subconscious –  that can render normal, everyday experiences magical realist for the curious outsider.

Perhaps she suffered some facial deformity, I wondered, bad teeth or an unsightly cold sore. Maybe she was just painfully modest. Or was she a germaphobe, even in this tidy, scrupulously clean, persnickety country?

I asked a colleague about it at work the next day and he explained that the lady was probably not trying to protect herself from getting sick, but that she likely was sick herself and was trying to protect others. His simple explanation rattled my ethnocentric preconceptions like a Thelonius Monk composition, which sounds a bit askew, out of tune or time, on the first listen, but becomes self-evident by the third.

The concept of considering others before oneself hadn’t really registered to my bratty western brain and I felt a quick rush of ego-vertigo at this shift in perspective. I had learned in the abstract about “Asian values” of humility, deference, and respect for others, but this simple, self-evident gesture of social consideration made me second guess the assumptions and implications of the Hobbesian state of nature I had been raised in.

Photo: Amanda Wu

I recalled this incident while chatting with artist Evan Dawson in Union Square during the 2020/2021 Art in Odd Places festival, Normal. Dawson’s performative installation, What is wealth if it cannot have violence? involved the creation and display of a seemingly endless daisy chain of blue nitrile gloves, collected over 5 years work as an art handler in Philadelphia.

Of course, in the context of the Covid pandemic, the blue nitrile glove had already assumed another, more sinister, iconography as biohazardous medical waste. The brazen handling of these gloves, pulled from several overstuffed garbage bags at his feet, and their public display on a clothing rack alongside the usual hawkers of bracelets, souvenirs, incense and Jamaican herbs in Union Square was rattling, like seeing a monk rummaging through the trash and arranging used condoms on the sidewalk. The artist’s meditative practice assembling his endless nitrile rosary was also quietly disconcerting, a zen-like intervention in the hustle and cuss of the square.

Photo: Amanda Wu

It was, however, the upheaval of assumptions about care for the self and others in our society that resonated most deeply for me and made me recall that encounter on a Japanese train thirty years ago. The blue gloves are typically worn here for self-protection by mechanics to keep axle grease off their hands, postal workers wary of anthrax, proctologists, etc. Since the beginning of the pandemic, they began to appear more commonly outside these specializations, at shop entries and public transport for use by a general public fearful of contamination by any surface.

But Evan Dawson had worn these gloves at work not to protect himself from the filthy lucre of the art world, but to protect the art itself from his touch, a public service commemorated in this public performance. Yet, even in this public health emergency, basic civic courtesy and consideration for strangers and the public good seems a foreign cultural practice to many Americans. Initial CDC recommendations for mask-wearing for the sake of others mostly fell flat, and the practice only became widespread when the messaging shifted to personal protection.

Photo: Amanda Wu

Dawson’s quiet intervention in this odd place invoked the basic contradictions of liberal individualism and republican virtue that bind and divide our polity and put on display the tragic irony of our sociopathic virtue of selfishness.

Our Curator and Her Team

“We will not go back to normal. Normal never was…”

-Sonya Renee Taylor

 

This quote is the embodiment of 2020. Usually by this time of year Art in Odd Places would have wrapped up it’s annual festival. The team behind the festival would be enjoying a much-deserved break and would have probably held a dinner party to celebrate another successful festival. Due to COVID-19 though, the festival has been pushed back from October 2020 to May 2021, the team is still neck-deep in planning and preparing, and no dinner parties will be held for a very long time. Much like the art and locations AiOP showcases, this year has been odd. 

 

Our team is composed of Ed Woodham, the founder of Art in Odd Places, and a group of powerful young women. We have 2021 Curator Furusho von Puttkammer and our Curatorial Assistants Yasmeen Abdallah, Lorelle Pais, and Natalie Ortiz. Laurie Waxman is our designer/developer, while  Amanda Wu and Taylor Ryan make up our Social Media and Public Relations branch. The team is rounded out by Hannah Waskowitz, our Volunteer Coordinator, Clara Grusq, our Admin Assistant, Angela Liao, our Photo and Video manager and Eve Doudnique our InternOu. 

 

Behind any festival or show is the Curator. So for this blog post, we decided to have Furusho von Puttkammer give some insight into her connection to the festival. 

Photo includes: Furusho vo Puttkammer

What does AiOP mean to you?

 Art in Odd Places’ meaning is simply in the name for me. AiOP is about taking art outside of the galleries and museums, and bringing art out onto the streets of New York City. In the past couple of decades, art has become increasingly removed from everyday people. You walk into a gallery and you need an MFA + a dictionary in art speak just to understand what message the artist is trying to convey with their work. The art world has become increasingly elitist and inaccessible. AiOP rebels against that and acts as a tribute to the DIY Punk nature of old school NYC performance art. We’re accessible in multiple ways. Not only is the festival free to apply to and free to view and attend, the artists we work with align with our anti-elitist nature. We are here first and foremost to bring art to the masses. 

 

How did you hear about AiOP?

I had heard of AiOP since moving to NYC seven years ago, but I only first became involved with the festival in 2018. I was at an art opening and was introduced to Katie Hector, who was on the 2018 Curatorial Team for AiOP. After discussing the festival, she mentioned AiOP’s need for volunteers and I quickly jumped on the opportunity. In 2018 I was a volunteer and in 2019 Curator LuLu LoLo asked me to return as the Volunteer Coordinator. About halfway through the pre-production planning of 2019, I was asked to also take on the role of Curatorial Assistant. In 2020, I was asked to come back as Curator. 

Photo includes: Furusho von Puttkammer and artist Henrietta Mantooth

Because you have been a part of AiOP for a few years what is your favorite memory associated with the festival?

 

I’ve had so many positive memories associated with AiOP, but I think the #1 memory is when one of our artists needed a volunteer performer for his performance. His piece was about the voicelessness of those incarcerated in the US prison system and he needed a volunteer to act as a performer who would ask him a series of questions that he, as the prisoner, could not respond to. I volunteered to be the reporter and made my AiOP performance debut with Susan Fettuccine, your ditzy local neighborhood reporter. I slapped on a blond Party City wig and some blush and asked the questions in the most nasally, annoying voice I could think of. I loved every bit of it, and it was fun to inject a little humor in an extremely heavy piece. 

 

Close second would have to be on the last day of the festival last year in October 2019. The AiOP curatorial team all ended up meeting at Coppelia’s on 14th and 7th ave. It was a cold, rainy day and Coppelia’s was a haven from the weather. We didn’t plan to all meet there, we just all showed up around the same time in small groups. We combined our tables and spent hours drinking and eating and discussing the festival. All the stress from the last few months was gone and we could finally relax. It was such a fun time. 

 

How does your performance practice relate to AiOP’s performance practice? 

 

My personal performance practice is very closely related to AiOP’s message. I take on the role of my performance character Anchovy, a cartoonish mime, and put the character in increasingly frustrating situations. Anchovy trying to open a door painted onto a wall, trying to push a button that’s -just- out of reach, trying to fall asleep while wracked with insomnia, etc. At the core, my performances highlight the absurdity of our frustrations. How we tend to set ourselves up for failure, or how we get worked up over situations that are out of our control. I think the absurdity and playful nature of my performances is very much inline with the spirit for Art in Odd Places.

 

Any last comments? 

We love you NYC. Stay safe, wear a mask, and practice social distancing. We’ll be doing our part to ensure that all our viewers and performers stay safe this year as well. 

 

We are beyond excited for the festival. With this year’s pool of incredible artists, we hope to show how NORMAL never was. 

 

If you would like a more in depth conversation with the earlier stages of our team, you can check out our interview with BUST magazine:

Photo includes: Ed Woodham, LuLu LoLo, Barbra Lubliner, Billy X. Curmano, Furusho von Puttkammer, Laure Droguol and Joshua Suzanne from Rags a Go Go

Thinker in Residence: Deshon Chan

The past five years of my life have been every and anything but the word ‘normal’. I moved to New York City in 2016, arriving at what I can only describe as my happy place. New York City has been all I ever wanted to experience since visiting at the age of twelve. So naturally, when I was invited to write about Art in Odd Places 2021: NORMAL festival taking place on 14th Street, I was in total anticipation – looking forward to the event. I woke up on Thursday ready to see the art that awaited me on 14th Street and specifically in one of my favorite areas of the city – Union Square. I even invited a friend.  The energy was vibrant in the city that day. Waves of people swarming in the park, sitting, singing, dancing, people shopping from store to store, the streets were filled. It made me once again realize why I moved to New York, and notice how much has changed since I’ve been here. And how much I have changed.

Photo: Angela Liao
Made In Power

The first artist I met was Xiao Yang, whose work was a response to  the human rights violations in her mother country, China and the equally distressing treatment of African Americans in the US.  Xaio had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -made by the United Nations- be shredded through  a matrix dot printer. A metaphor on how we have spoken volumes about human rights and social justice, Xiao stated “it is like we keep talking and talking, but all the voices go into the social structure shredder, everybody has the right to live, it doesn’t matter the color of your skin.” Thank you for sharing your art with the world, Xaio, and for taking a stand on what you believe in. You remind me light shines in all and all are wanting the same, a life of love, a life of peace, a life humans have the right to.
Photo: Noah Herman

Photo: Noah Herman
Leaf Memorial 

Next my journey took me to Kato Stewart. 21 years ago, her younger brother passed away. Her family decided to spread his ashes in the backyard under a Japanese Maple tree. Time had passed and her family never really talked about the death. It was about a year ago when they had to sell the house, overcome with the sadness of leaving the ashes of her younger brother, Kato felt she had to do something to memorialize him. She began making leaves out of paper and painting them to symbolize the tree where the ashes of her brother were laid. It wasn’t long before she realized how healing and therapeutic making these leaves had become. After sharing her leaves with her community and support groups, they started sending in their own leaves, having online gatherings and workshops. Even before this event, people sent in leaves to be hung on this stand-like figure with the others. A collective memorial of leaves for our lost ones. I was touched by Kato’s artwork because I immediately thought of a close friend I lost seven years ago, I quickly told her I would join and wrote down his name on the leaf. Walking away from her made me feel like my friend was with me in New York that day. I had written his name on that leaf, in Union Square, a place he had never been to, but somehow it felt like he was right there with me at that moment. Thank you for sharing your art with the world, thank you for showing us how to keep our loved ones that have passed, in our mind and spirit. On that day, you showed me that my friend is right by my side and for that I will forever be thankful. Rest in peace to all those we lost. Rest in peace Andrew.

Photo: Bob Krasner

Photo: Brian Schutza

Photo: Angela Liao

Happy hour with the man keeping East Village Social

If I asked you to close your eyes and describe a New York dive bar, what would it look like? Who’s bellied up to the bar next to you? What daily special is scribbled on the wall? Is it classic rock or top 20 tunes setting the mood from the boxy speakers in the corner? Do I even want to ask what it smells like? 

Of course, in the age of Covid, all these answers might be different but for anyone craving a bit of that 2019 normalcy, there’s really only one place to go and that’s East Village Social on St. Marks. 

This year will mark the 14th annual festival for Art in Odd Places. And for obvious reasons, our curator, Furusho von Puttkamer has chosen the theme: NORMAL. After the marathon of a year that was anything but normal, it seems appropriate to strangle old ideas and redefine the word in a way that allows creative control. “Throughout the pandemic, I kept hearing people wanting a return to normalcy,” shares Puttkamer. Normal, though, only ever applied to a very narrow group of people in this country: wealthy and white. If you weren’t both of these things, the rules of America apply differently to you. You can be rich, but if you’re not white you still face discrimination. You can be white, but if you’re poor you’ll be facing an uphill battle most of your life. This year’s focus is meant to highlight how restrictive and destructive NORMAL actually is for most people in this country.” 

For most of the year we agonized over postponing our festival and watched our mother-borough lose a little bit of the energy that’s always made the Lower East Side vibrational. However, one thing has held constant and kept our team virtually trudging through 2020: our community and the local establishments that surround our long held festival route. Lucky for us that includes a neighbor with reasonably priced drinks. 

Only how do you write about a historical artifact like East Village Social or a legend already known by so many? A quick google search told me what I already knew. The only information worth reading would have to come straight from the source. So AiOP sat down with the one person who knows the monument best, Gerard McNamee. 

The long time owner of EVS looks exactly how you’d want him to,but Gerard is the kind of guy who might appear different to each person he meets. To his friends at Webster Hall, where he spent a past life as the Director of Operations, he is an expensively suited door lord. To the Authorities, an occasional downtown nuisance. To his family, a die-hard comrad. But to me, emerging from the bar’s ancient basement onto St. Marks, his mask pulled just low enough for his cig to hang out the side of his mouth, he was Rock n’ Roll personified. 

He calls out to Jim, from Holyland Market one door down before wandering over to his Harley, Iyana, when I decide to make my move. We find a table over the cellar doors. I order a drink and the conversation quickly moves from the Brazilian women he names his bikes after, to city zip codes, and then eventually, to the topic of the year- Coronavirus.  

And it’s then that I understand why Furusho chose East Village Social as our neighbor to highlight. Just like Art in Odd Places, they’re a grassroots gang. Looking around at the sticker covered fort, out front, patrons meet on wobbly bar stools for “Tattoo Tuesday.” On Tuesday’s the deal states that if you have a tattoo, you get a free drink. Just be prepared to show proof, wherever it might be inked. Art enthusiast or not, it’s easy to see the operation is performance art itself. “We’re adapting every day. Everyone is, but it’s sink or swim…so you know,” McNamee pauses for a drag of his smoke and shrugs, “figure it out.” 

I find it refreshing to hear New Orleans jazz play in the background while he lists off seven different department agencies that have come to visit the bar since COVID first threw the city into quarantine. I took a chance and guessed they hadn’t come for the drink specials or the ambiance. “We couldn’t play music indoors, so guess what, fuck it, we’ll play music outdoors.” With new limitations in place, McNamee picked up the phone and called “the guys,” who I soon learned to be otherwise known as the East Village All Stars, an alternating music gang led by Smidge Malone.

I take a warm gulp of the hot toddy and feel it move down to my toes. McNamee goes on to describe Smidge as a scrappy gentleman who drinks, stays up for days on end, and screams into his trumpet every chance he gets. At this point, I’m unsurprised to hear the two go way back and oddly jealous that I might not be described as coolly by my friends. 

“So check it out,” McNamee jumps to a day in June, following the death of George Floyd. To him, New York, the city where he was raised and reinvented, seemed heavier than ever before. Manhattan had survived the peak of the virus, the looting, the protests, and the politics. “And then it was a nice day, and it was a Friday afternoon,” the pace of his words speeding up, “and the fucking sun came out at 80 degrees, and seven businesses on the block opened up for the first time in a long time, and the band was here that day. It was like a collective sigh of relief. I could get emotional just thinking about it.” 

 

The bar’s Instagram will give you a small glimpse of that day. Tenants hung off their fire escape to listen to Smidge blow his horn, while passers threw money on the curb. Unfortunately, not everyone shares the same appreciation for street jazz. News of the All Stars at EVS had blown it’s way uptown to the Mayor’s office and eventually on to the Governor’s office, who responded directly.

McNamee leans forward with a new cigarette between his fingers and a grin, “We got Five n’ a half million hits, on Twitter.” Up until now there had been a few modest name drops, but this time he was owning it. 

At East Village Social the servers are properly masked, taking orders from behind a plexiglass window, and providing food with each drink. McNamee respects the rules even if he bends a few every now and then. Him and his staff, like all the small businesses in the Lower East side, haven’t had it easy this past year, but he is genuine when giving credit to the city for allowing street seating.

As with most performance art, EVS is learning to finesse their limitations in real time.Their outdoor seating has managed to keep the bar open and it’s employees scheduled throughout quarantine, but the motivation to help the creative community has been an ambition McNamee’s advocated since his days at Webster, where he pioneered the Quarterly Arts Soiree. 

Listening to Gerard describe the Q.A.S., I could’ve sworn he was reciting the founding pillars of Art in Odd Places. Our mission, our own beliefs, they pretty much matched word for word. The freedom to create outside of public space regulations has been the propelling force of our organization for 14 years. With this past year being one huge regulation. It’s given our team and our selected artists even more reason to get art on the streets. 

Museums, though rich in history and curation, also tend to exhibit a sense of intimidation and privilege that keeps a lot of people from visiting. It keeps a lot of people from learning, from questioning, and from interacting in a space that’s real, messy, and genuine. Because of this, the price of admission for AiOP’s festival has always cost nothing more than sidewalk curiosity. 

“This kid that we had up on the walls a while ago was going to throw away his collection of photorealistic paintings of the 27 Club. So I threw them up in the bar and a few weeks later a piece sold for $500. He couldn’t believe it.” Not a bad come up for what would’ve been garbage. “I’m willing to give a platform to anyone who believes they’re the next Basquiat or a rock star. This is all art, art is for everyone.” 

I catch myself nodding like I’m at a rock show. I believe wholeheartedly in his words, but I’m also pretty sure I was starting to feel the effects of the third toddy I’d ordered. East Village Social is the last punk bar on the block and perhaps the one with the most heart. It’s a haven for those looking for a place to play their music, hang their art, and shoot the shit with someone at the next table. At a time when we’re all thirsty for a little engagement it’s places like EVS and public art festivals like AiOP where we can catch a glimpse of the old New York. Real, messy, and genuine. For the length of our interview it really is 2019. There’s no coronavirus, no protests, no politics and I don’t want to leave. 

I take my last sip while McNamee puts out another cigarette. “Sure, I could be doing other things, landscaping, construction, driving, but this is my life…throwing parties. That’s what we do here every day. We protest sadness and we throw parties.” 

I sway on my wobbly stool and silently decide that’s the best way I’ve heard anyone describe a New York dive bar.

 

Written by: Taylor Ryan

AIOP 2019 Thinker in Residence: Clarinda Mac Low

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Clarinda Mac Low:

AIOP Thinker in Residence: Sean Mooney

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Sean Mooney:

2019.10.22

Sean Mooney

Notes on Art in Odd Places

 

Lucio Pozzi performance, “Beating the Odds”

Saturday, October 18 and Sunday, October 19, 12:00 – 12:32 pm

Lucio Approaching; Sean Mooney

I had the pleasure to reunite with Lucio Pozzi, after not seeing him for perhaps 25 years. In many ways, his participation in this year’s Art in Odd Places festival, my long hiatus since seeing him and other artists taking part, and the poignancy of the many changes that have happened along 14th Street during the intervening years, are merged in my mind into a fused symbolic experience, reflective of the central theme of this year’s festival. The fact that this year’s curator, the artist LuLu LoLo, has chosen to include artists over the age of 60 as her central organizing principle, lent a contemplative quality to the event. Acutely felt were the full lifetimes of labor, thought and experience embodied in this group of artists. There was an uncanny attention to temporal issues: to life’s passage, to the changes one accepts (begrudgingly or otherwise) over time, to transitions of body and environment; and to the deeper contemplation of anxieties and meanings which we, as aging individuals in this very particular location, cannot help but feel and to push back against. Lucio’s performance, in this context, suggested these and may other unstated realities, while doing so in restrained gestures.

 

The performance itself can be described in simplistic terms as such: the artist drew with several colors of chalk on the sidewalk a series of overlapping shapes that suggested the outlines of human bodies, not unlike the sort of cartoons once considered typical at the scene of a crime. The multi-colored shapes were drawn in a fragmentary fashion: some are clearly human bodies, others are disembodied limbs and heads, or altogether ambiguous. In all, they suggested a flattened-out pile of disorderly figures, as if shadows or ghosts remaining in a battlefield. 

 

Next, the artist put on a white face mask, a Venetian carnival mask which is formed with a long bird’s beak, a skull-like face, and prominent outlines of eyeglasses painted in black. He was otherwise dressed in a dark costume and shoes, and carried a small wooden baseball bat. At the strike of a small brass gong, the artist – now transformed into a shamanic being – began an unstructured dance, in which he incanted an unintelligible, guttural song while occasionally striking towards the drawn figures in a threatening manner with the baseball bat. The shaman pantomimed a violent event, but did so gently, symbolically, his magic bat never hitting the ground, his movements never overt or quick. It was not quite the slow-motion movements of Japanese Noh theater, but close to that tradition in spirit, one in which the silent passages and stillness between gestures and words form the heart of the dance narrative.

 

Lucio describes this performance as an exercise in ambiguity (this is my paraphrase, not a quotation from Lucio). However, several distinct meanings are suggested throughout this dance: the shaman-dancer is playing a role acted out in many traditional cultures since prehistoric times; a mediator with the spirit world, the mask transforms him both physically and emotionally. I am reminded of the annual Qasgiq dances of the Central Yup’ik people of Alaska; and of the many shamanistic ceremonial dances of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of British Columbia. By contrast, there are the reports of improvised dances at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich by the early Dada artists, wearing masks by Marcel Janko. In the case of these Dada performances, which happened during the most brutal days of the Great War being enacted just across the Swiss border, participants responded to the breakdown of European society into chaotic disorder and unprecedented violence, and (what the artists considered) the failures of their hierarchical social traditions. For them, the wearing of masks, the dances with drums and loud instruments, the recitation of nonsensical, invented languages that communicated nothing but grunts and howls, mimicked the frustration with sense and order, and mocked its meaning. They attempted to combat literacy and logic with their own invented chaos and bacchanalian ceremonies, an emotional query that ultimately led them, and their offspring the Surrealists, to explore the spheres of anthropology and the art of indigenous societies.

Kotsuis and Hohhung, ‘Nak’waxda’xw (Noaktok) masked dancers, ca. 1914, British Columbia; photo Edward Curtis

Quite the opposite is true among traditional societies, however. For most indigenous peoples, masked dancing represents the highest social orders, reflected and enacted in ceremony. It suggests communion between the spirit world and the village, between what is known and unknown, between past and future, between life and death. It is the ultimate recognition of ancestral lineage, a distillation of tradition and harmony. Masked dancing is, in the case of the Yup’ik people, Agayuliyararput (“our way of making prayer”).

Yup’ik masked dancers performing in the Qasgi house, Qissunaq, Alaska, 1946; photo Alfred Millotte.

Having these thoughts in mind lent meaning to the responses of the unsuspecting passers-by who witnessed Lucio’s masked dance on 14th Street. Most everyone looked confused but seriously at the masked dancer: Was the yielding of the baseball bat threatening? Was the unintelligible song a crazed rant? Some smiled as they passed, or slowed down to watch, stopped to take a photo. Others pretended to ignore it, some gave it a wide berth. The presence of a circle of watchful attendees signaled that this was an organized event, and that the artist was not merely a raving lunatic, but rather an eccentric actor in some sort of play. While Lucio purposely made the staged boundaries of his chalk drawing small enough to allow those passing through to have a clear pathway around him, all who wished to pass respected not only Lucio’s personal space, but also the space occupied by the drawing. Pedestrians stepped into the street rather than cross on top of the drawing. This was significant since it suggests a deep taboo against stepping upon a work of art, which, especially when the images represent human figures, in itself is suggestive of violence. Lucio’s masked shaman, waving a bat at the drawings, as if beating them, reinforced this association. Naturally, most people avoided entering what could understandably be interpreted as a battlefield, a space of repression, albeit one in which no obvious harm was being done to any living being.

 

While Lucio’s dance suggested violence (including sexual violence, as he interspersed the danced beatings with phallic gestures with the bat), it also suggested the ritual destruction of this place we consider home. Home is always sacred ground. Native Americans almost universally ascribe their lands to be imbued with power and spirit. To name but one example of many, the Central Yup’ik of Alaska use the term Ella to describe this: it is simultaneously the word for the weather, for consciousness, and for all the known and unknown spiritual and physical entities of the universe. Ella is like the Catholic Holy Spirit, all that is seen and unseen, ever present and pervasive. Another Yup’ik term is Yua, which is the personalized human spirit (the soul, to use a Christian analog). But in the Yup’ik concept, Yua is both personal and interchangeable; it may inhabit any living creature, animal, plant, rock or cloud. All entities in the world have the capacity to be embodied with Yua, the “personal human.” Therefore, the Yup’ik relationship to homeland is highly sacred, in that everything around is teeming with ancestors, spirits, continuity and life. And because all animals are possessed with Yua, a human spirit, the hunter approaches prey with respect, since he does not know whether he may encounter the spirit of his own grandfather.

 

Watching Lucio’s performance I felt this very keenly, and personally. As someone who has lived in New York since being born here in 1967, the immediate vicinity of 14th Street is rife with associations. For me, this place is full of ghosts, sacred and profane. I recall the numerous friends and acquaintances whom I’ve walked with on these sidewalks, many of them now gone. I note how each decade in New York has brought with it strange physical changes, new residents, tourists ( when did they arrive?! and why? ), the destruction and reconstruction of buildings, the ebb and flow of traffic patterns and changing pedestrian habits (why is everyone so slow these days?). Most poignantly, there are those ineffable “feelings” of the street, qualities one cannot describe precisely, but sense, like a brisk wind in a changing season. We always understood which blocks were dangerous, which were safe, where to find solace and where to avoid. It wasn’t that long ago (or was it?) when Union Square Park was boarded up, inaccessible, during an attempt to keep out vagrants and druggies and troublemakers and whatever other misfits the city authorities may have thought deserved a categorization with rats. I sometimes peeked inside that fence late at night to get a glimpse of the trees.

 

West 14th Street was, up until recently, a “midtown” version of the loosely post-industrial “downtown” of SoHo and Canal Street, where artists traditionally kept studios (in the years I consider “my days” of inhabiting that scene). Marcel Duchamp kept a studio at 210 West 14th Street, from 1942 until 1966, where he made his famous final sculpture, Étant Donnés (Lucio’s performance was enacted directly across the street; a coincidence?). But 14th wasn’t considered the center of the action. It was an off-center, not-quite-there street, as far as the official “art world” was concerned. Even Duchamp was considered “lost” at this “lost” location; at the time, everyone had assumed he had stopped making objects altogether. West 14th Street was a scattering of weird shops and ethnic restaurants. There was the YMCA, an assembly of transients. Nearby was the center for the blind and a string of other residences for recovering people of various ailments. There was usually a scattered parade of homeless passing through. There were a jumble of night clubs which did not advertise their presence and were mostly sub-basement joints, devoid of light or bathrooms or cabaret licenses. I once danced the night away at such a place on 14th Street, alone, with a small handful of strangers and a live band. I don’t believe this club had a name, it was just a place one wandered into and back out of, not quite real, flickering, like life itself, a dream half-remembered. 

Lucio Attacking; Lorenza Sannai

Lucio, in his trance, bearing a strange white mask and beating against fragmented drawings of human figures on the sidewalk, was acting out a sacred ritual of dispersion, ritually scattering all our ghosts, perhaps also his own. (This white mask is suggestive of an inverted white Raven figure, one of the most divine of all beings in Alaskan tribal mythology: there is a legend in which the Milky Way is defined as “the tracks of White Raven,” made by a spirit who was originally the color of white ivory before being covered in coal dust to teach him humility). Spirits of an unrecorded New York were concentrated below him, overlapping. Our own lives and our own city flew out into immutable space, into ether, into dust, into nonsense, into poetry. 

 

Much of the 14th Street I remember from my youth no longer exists, and many things in this familiar place are strange. Just days before the festival, in fact, cars were permanently banned from driving along 14th Street, to make way for busses, and on this first weekend of this new experiment in urban planning there was an eerie quiet, sucking out an element of the vitality of this once-chaotic street. Not exactly silence, but another layer of oddity in this oddly banal location.

 

At the end of 32 minutes, the gong was rung again, for 32 beats, and the shaman froze, the performance ended. 

 

Illustrations:

 

Lucio Pozzi, performing Beating the Odds, October 20, 2019

 

Yup’ik masked dancers performing in the Qasgi house, Qissunaq, Alaska, 1946; photo Alfred Millotte.

 

Kotsuis and Hohhung, ‘Nak’waxda’xw (Noaktok) masked dancers, ca. 1914, British Columbia; photo Edward Curtis

 

 

Thinkers in Residence: Davidson Garrett, Day 3

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Davidson Garrett, Day 3.

Walking In Circles: Listening To The Invisible with Riva Weinstein

 by Davidson Garrett

With so many artists, performances, and installations to choose from—in the Art In Odd Places Festival, I was struck by the title of this presentation: “Walking In Circles: Listening To The Invisible,” with Riva Weinstein. Like most people, at times it seems we all walk in circles, and we find ourselves ending at the same place where we started. Being a daily walker myself, I was curious what this event would be like. I decided to check out this happening at Avenue C and 14th Street on a beautiful Saturday morning. 

Avenue C and 14th Street felt like the end of the earth by the time I arrived, shortly before 11:30 am. Most of the festival took place near Union Square and the westside of 14th Street. This corner near Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, was about as unartistic as one could imagine. However, there were some trees planted in sidewalk planters, and there were residents strolling around on their weekend errands. Luckily, I saw a lone woman standing by herself, and I remembered meeting Riva Weinstein the night before at the opening reception for Art In Odd Places. She was happy to see me on this forlorn part of 14th Street. A delightful artist, who projects a radiant aura, I was very comfortable speaking with her before the other participants gathered. To give me a clue about what was about to take place, she handed me a small slip of paper with the following words written on it.

“An invitation to slow down, focus our attention on our feet and breath, and experience walking as a way of listening to the unseen earth beneath our feet by walking in circles, spirals and figure 8s for 18 minutes in contemplation and celebration of life”

I was intrigued by these spare words, and soon four other people appeared who must have been as interested as I had been. We also were joined by two photographers who would document our movements. Riva began by having everyone introduce ourselves, and give a little information about what prompted us to come this morning. She then gave out the same slip of paper given to me, and she read aloud the printed words. There was a sense of the spiritual immediately, since several people said they walked a great deal for relaxation and contemplation. 

Riva informed us we would be walking for eighteen minutes. The number eighteen is a special number in the Judaic tradition, and that is why she chose this amount of time for the introspective exercise. She went on to explain that walking in circles was suggested as one of Five Gestures by the performance artist, Ernesto Pujol. He was a mentor and inspiration to Riva in her own artistic growth.

Before we began our walk, Riva explained that part of walking in circles was to be aware of new surroundings, and to really look closely at the environment we were in. She said to erase whatever thoughts were running in our heads this morning, and to let the walk take us out of the noise of life, and notice the wonder of the ordinary things we encounter on our own individual routes. We were instructed to stay in the vicinity where we were, but that we could walk in circles or figure 8s, or wherever we wanted to walk within the near confines of 14th Street and Avenue C. Riva advised us to find new ways of examining the commonplace sights of the neighborhood. 

When it was time to begin, our leader started walking in a circle around an empty guard’s house a few feet away, as everyone else embarked on our own mental journeys. In the beginning, it was challenging to let go and get into the rhythm of a reflective walk. I kept looking at the others to see what they were doing. Some were walking back and forth on the sidewalk, a couple edged out in looping spirals on the service road next to Avenue C.  After a few minutes, I was able to feel my body and feet enjoying the patting of my steps, as I tried to observe even cracks in the sidewalk. There was a large tree growing out of the pavement—surrounded by a flower bed squared with cobble stones. The bark on the tree looked ancient, and if I had not been surveying closely, I never would have noticed. I started to gravitate toward circles myself, which gave a meditative quality to my physical actions. Taking deep breaths, going around and around and around, there was a quietness within me while appreciating the sunshine bathing my head. Even the traffic from the nearby FDR Drive didn’t interrupt my dreamlike thoughts. 

 Having the other walkers involved in their own form of meditation, I certainly felt we were a little community of wayfarers pacing back and forth, trying to dwell deep within ourselves. There seemed to be a kinship with us all, even though we were strangers before we met this morning.           

When eighteen minutes had passed, Riva called us back to the area where we first assembled. We shared our feelings about the walk. Everyone had different things to say, but we all agreed it was a peaceful adventure. I said after coming from the subway and maneuvering through the crowds on 14th Street, it was a real blessing for this opportunity to have some tranquil moments. I found it spiritually refreshing—walking in circles on Avenue C in the middle of the day.  

On departing, I had a touch of melancholy saying goodbye to these fellow seekers of truth. For a short while, we bonded collectively in our quest to discover meaning in the world around us. Riva Weinstein gave me a big hug and told me our walking paths would cross again.

AIOP Thinker in Residence: Joshua Suzanne

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Joshua Suzanne:

Photo credits: Paul Takeuchi

So my thoughts about this years festival AIOP 2019 NYC “INVISIBLE:

I loved the title because seniors are overlooked in many ways …especially as artist unless  they are REALLY well known…then, due to their absolute success , they are worthy of our eyes and ears …if not, then “invisible”
 
The investment world of art looks to the “young and beautiful” (remember beauty being in the eye of the beholder of money) 
 
I also really appreciated the seasoned sense of seriousness and humor with many of the projects presented. For example “Queen Pecks” (Ms Muscle Barbara Lubliner “Roar with Ms. Muscle”)  with boobs for biceps….or the gentleman in the cage with interpreters (Billy X Curmano “Visibility Unseen (Portrait of the Artist as Political Prisoner”) 
 
I believe we all have something, special or not, to share with the world. I also know as I get older that perspectives change. Perhaps, like ancient times and tribes, elders will be looked upon as wise from experience rather than old and out of touch in modern day society  
 
Thanks for all the fun 👍
 
-Joshua Suzanne-
For more of Joshua Suzanne visit: http://www.rags-a-gogo.com

AIOP 2019 Thinker in Residence: Alicia Grullon

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Alicia Grullon:

No Longer Invisible by Alicia Grullon

On Sunday night, I texted Ed Woodham, founding director of Art in Odd Places (AIOP),
to ask him about the performance schedule of artists lined up for this year’s festival. INVISIBLE
curated by New York City based performer and artist, Lulu Lolo, focuses on the work of artists
over the age of 60. As an annual public and free performance festival taking place on 14th
Street, AIOP has unleashed some of the quirkiest, most dynamic, poignant, and some of the
oddest performances in New York CIty for some time. At the heart of its mission is the practice
and call for people to take back the commons with imagination and art. Being one of this year’s
Thinkers in Residence, I was tasked with writing a short essay reflecting on the performances
and theme for this year’s AIOP website. Since its start in New York in 2005, AIOP has run on
next to or zero funds. While receiving great reviews in Hyperallergic, Time Out, and New York
Times one would think that monetary resources would just flood in due to publicity and the
caliber of artists and curators participating each year. Moments like these unmask the harsh
reality of arts funding and the survival of grassroots art projects by artists in New York City. Not
only is funding limited for a people’s run art projects, but often stigmatized by not falling into the
non-profit category. In the case of AIOP, it is a choice according to Woodham for AIOP to
remain liberated.
Me: ‘Hi!!!’
‘I have to go see an aiop event and this weekend has been packed.’
Ed: ‘But my <3. This weekend is over. AIOP has concluded.’
Me: ‘What?!’
‘I thought it lasted a week and it started this weekend.’
‘Omg.’
‘I need to do a think piece.’
‘Omg. This is terrible. I am so sorry.’
I was mortified.
Having participated in AIOP in the past, I was accustomed to a week long, even month
long festival that invaded 14th Street’s corporate take over and class warfare by local
government, real estate, private universities, and the affluent populations the latter two attract
like flies to honey. That it only lasted one weekend is yet another testament on how restrictive
art funding affects the ability for the people’s art to fully develop. Moreso, I have held a special
place for AIOP in addition to its mission and spirit. As a participant in the 2008 festival
PEDESTRIAN, I received my very first review by Hrag Vartanian who then was with Brooklyn
Rail. I did a durational performance on displacement and gentrification titled Revealing New
York: the Disappearance of Other where on four Sundays, I sat between Avenue A and First
Avenue in front of the post office (which is no longer there) masking my face with real estate
articles until I no longer could. Having just had my first child only a few months earlier and with a
broken arm after a failed skateboarding lesson, this was my first art project since becoming a
parent. It was a source of intellectual stability for me. Often women artists get shaken up if not

shattered for becoming parents. Not only do they/we face the need to cope through a change in
life, schedule and body, but they/we have to deal with obnoxious attitudes from within the art
world on having children. From the most famous (see Tracey Emin) to just your regular Joe
artist/art admin/curator/etc. the often unsolicited advice is, “Say nothing about being parent.
Hide the child and oh, your career will and has ended.” Having the support of AIOP staff, family
(because the child that most definitely exists needed childcare) and the art review was quite
frankly the best care I needed as a human being undergoing a life altering change. To have
missed the opportunity to write an essay and give back was tragic.
Ed: ‘Talk about ur weekend and why you couldn’t make it. That’s totally legit and
gives this time we’re in- context. Don’t fret. We do what we do and we’re
connected. Right?’
‘Honesty and vulnerability=’

Below is my breakdown on why I could not attend any of the performances.
Friday October 18th. I picked up my children after teaching at Queens College from a dear
friend who is currently out of work and was doing me the favor as my Dad was out of town. We
went to the protest at the Museum of Modern Art organized by New Sanctuary Coalition and
Code Pink to force MOMA and its board member Larry Fink to divest from private prisons.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, “The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3
million people in 1,719 state prisons, 109 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities,
3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention
facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S.
territories.” How are people like Fink making money off of private prisons? Public prisons act as
non-profits. They are run by the government via taxpayer funds. Private prisons are run by
corporations and like any other corporation their goal is to make a profit. They charge the US
government per day for each person held in private prisons and since they are charging the
government, the government is paying for it with our tax dollars. More so, people like Fink make
even more money due to jail churn where “every year, over 600,000 people enter prison gates,
but people go to jail 10.6 million times each year. Jail churn is particularly high because most
people in jails have not been convicted.” For example, a private prison may charge the
government $200 a day for each prisoner. If a prison holds 1,500 people that equals $300,000 a
day. That is a tremendous amount of money in one year. My children (because now I have two)
were not overly excited to attend. It was cold and they were aware of the possibility that we
might stay a long time like we had done on Monday when we attended the beautiful and brilliant
Indigenous People’s Day Tour organized by Decolonize This Place, No New Jails and more
than 10 other Indigenous and anti-displacement groups in the city. We were at the MOMA from
6:30 to 7:30pm and saw many people both behind and across the picket line. It was not clear to
me whether many of the guests that were invited to attend the reception for the museum’s grand
opening saw or heard the protesters. I noticed many staring, but was not sure if they were just
looking through the protests.

Saturday October 20th My friends Sheryll Durrant from the Kelly Street Gardens a
community garden that distributes more than a ton of organic vegetables for free to residents in
the South Bronx, Ron Kavannaugh Executive Director of the Mosaic Literary Magazine and
Literary Freedom Project devoted to leveraging power in communities through the literature of
black writers and Stephanie Alvarado, Literary Freedom Project instructor, artist and archivist
came over for dinner. We had planned this for over a month after a litany of back and forths. It
was an evening of care. I made them a home cooked meal as we listened to WBLS 80’s all
night mix. We leaned in as we each talked about our dreams in the midst of one of the most
urgent moments in our lifetimes. We discussed climate change and the need for a complete
economic and political change to break the systemic oppression of the poor and working class
by the very wealthy. We stressed the importance of community garden resistance in New York
City and Indegnious land rights as the answers to our survival. We imagined a time when the
Black Panthers and Octavia Butler are the focus of education in all our city schools among other
topics dealing with activism and black futurism. We laughed at the disaster of the current
administration both locally and federally while held a brief moment of unplanned silence for the
uncertainty the next year holds with upcoming elections. We promised to see each other again
soon because it felt good to be each other’s company.
Sunday October 20th I had to be at Performance Space by noon. I was one of 42
readers for the marathon reading of Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria
Anzaldúa organized by Sarah Schulman. When I arrived, I noticed the writer Cherrie Moraga in
the elevator with me. Seeing Moraga was like seeing a saint. There are very few times I get star
struck and as I stood there immobilized by being in the same elevator with Moraga, I planned a
strategy. We both got out and went to the sign-in table where Sarah was handing out copies of
the pieces we would be reading. After greeting Sarah and getting my piece, I muscled up the
courage and took my friend and artist Shellyne Rodriguez over to her to say something to one of
the writers whose work had gotten me through graduate school. In particular was This Bridge
Called My Back which when speaking to other Latinx woman who have attended institutes of
higher education in the US found solace within the essays by some of the most prominent
Black, Asian, Indigenous, and Latinx women in the history of social movement and literature to
date. The solace came from being seen as holding a multiplicity of identities, each complicated
and long as well as rendered invisible by colonial and patriarchal discourse for more than 500
years. Reading it was like reading a history book which I could relate to because it mirrored my
community’s experiences and I needed that within my art making process. As I got my selfie
with her, I was able to thank her and she was graceful with my fumbled nervous mixup of her
work and Anzaldúa’s. The rest of the day was like going to church in its most colloquial sense
for spiritual healing. Listening to Borderlands/La Frontera being read out loud was
experiencing myth making, spiritual practice, oral history, and recorded documentation in one
sitting. Had it been written 2000 years ago, it would have held the equivalence today of being a
holy scripture- which it quiet frankly is in my opinion. When it was my turn to read, I decided to
start chapter four La Herencia de Coatlicue/ The Coatlicue State with a water offering as I
kneeled in all four directions. On the handout Sarah had given me, was a reminder to,
“introduce yourself” and I did in the spirit of Anzaldúa: ‘Soy Alicia Grullon taina y negra desde
Quisqueya./ My name is Alicia Grullon. I am a New Yorker from the Bronx.’ From that moment

on, was being inside her words which felt like mine and everyone else’s in the room. We were
speaking out loud our most hidden secrets.
Her soft belly exposed to the sharp eyes of everyone; they see, they see. Their
eyes penetrate her; they slit her from head to belly. Rajada. She is at their mercy,
she can do nothing to defend herself. And she is ashamed that they see her so
exposed, so vulnerable. She has to learn to push their eyes away. She has to still
her eyes from looking at their feelings- feelings that can catch her in their gaze,
bind her to them (Anzaldúa, 1987, pp. 65).

 

For more of Alicia Grullon’s work visit: https://aliciagrullon.com/home.html

AIOP Thinker in Residence Destinee Forbes: The Invisibility of Gestures of Care

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Destinee Forbes.

As I made my way downtown the Saturday of the festival, I was looking forward to seeing how each artist chose to interpret the theme of invisibility at this year’s Art in Odd Places festival. The performances I saw that day each broached on the topic of invisibility in subtle ways, however I was most interested in the performances that attempted to make visible gestures of compassion and care. 

The first performance I saw was Anna Marie Shogren’s choreographed dance piece Falls. An ensemble of six or so dancers occupied the corner of 14th and 8th Avenue. They swayed uniformly and invited people to participate in their performance. As I arrived, I spoke with Anna briefly about the piece, and she said it was an interactive performance of intergenerational caregiving and wellness. Participants were guided through the piece by dancers. The dancers held the participants hands leading and guiding them through a series of motions. 

Each move subtle, with soft caresses leading the individual in and out of seated and standing positions. A dancer’s hand gently guided the participant at all times never leaving contact. The invisibility in the performance rests in the idea of the work of caregiving being an unseen and unnoticed act. In the act of choreographing a didactic performance about the gesture of giving care, Shogren’s performance sheds light on the amount of effort, patience and work that is involved in the process of caring for another, and also, how it can be both an individual and collective task. 

Next to Shogren’s performance was Donna Maria de Creeft’s visual and interactive installation Useful Invisibility/ Diatom Prayer. Before I had the chance to introduce myself, de Creeft handed me her phone and asked if I could help her document her performance. I quickly obliged without even knowing what was going to happen. A string of small flags of fractal shapes hung beside her connected to a construction walkway overpass. 

As she stood next to these flags, she began giving out small cards for people to take as they walked by her. As she extended these small gifts to the passersby, people quickly ignored her, very rarely accepting what she had to offer. After several minutes of passing out the cards, she paused and I asked her what she was handing out. She handed me a small card that shared the same fractal imagery as the hanging flags. The design was on one side of the card, and on the other the word ‘diatom’ with the sentence, “Diatoms have precise ecological requirements and are used to monitor environmental conditions.” I asked her about the meaning of the sentence and she began explaining that a diatom is a microscopic single-celled alga that is vital to our living but no one really knows about them. She was inspired by not only their beauty, but their purpose and how their work goes unnoticed. They are cells that are literally invisible to the naked eye, and also cells that are overlooked in terms of their function and purpose. As I looked carefully at the card in my hand, she remarked with a laugh, “[and] what could me more invisible than someone handing something out on the street in New York.” I smiled acknowledging and agreeing to her remark. She resumed her position near her flags and began handing out cards one by one. Some would accept and most looked the other way. de Creeft was not asking for anything, but simply sharing knowledge. In extending her hand, she was attempting to connect with others so that they might be able to share that information with someone else. 

The task of making visible gestures of kindness, care and compassion requires work in that the participant or viewer must acknowledge and understand the labor and effort of the other. It is an act of not only compassion but empathy as well. It requires the other person to fully understand the emotional effort of the other, and realize that they are giving part of themselves without asking for anything in return. It is an act of acknowledging another’s vulnerability and accepting it without question or judgement.

AiOP Thinker in Residence Matthew Morowitz: Brief But Meaningful Engagement

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Matthew Morowitz.

For this year’s AiOP festival I wasn’t fully present and able to take part in every day that it ran (one of the pitfalls of being a grad student in my thesis year).  However, I did engage with a few of the projects that were out and about on Saturday and had an unexpectedly meaningful time doing so. This year was the first time I could truly engage with the festival not as part of the staff and not with any knowledge of the projects and artists beforehand.

I began my day on 14th and C, where I walked in circles for 18 minutes contemplating the action and the life beneath my feet.  It was a reminder of how even a seemingly straightforward activity in such a defined space can have so much variation.

From there I went West and colored a postcard that will be distributed at a senior living facility.  It made me think of my grandpa. I also encountered a man with artifacts of the street and it was interesting to hear his take on the history and life of the corridor. 

At one point, I ran into the curator LuLu as she was engaged with the artist running a project out of an old phone booth.  LuLu was there to drop off a letter as part of this artist’s project. I also passed by a man in a cage, his project definitely felt very timely to a particular problem our current society is treating as “invisible.”

On my way back east, I was pulled into conversation by two people sitting on chairs on the north side of 14th.  I was sat in another chair they had present, given a rock to hold, and asked a series of personal questions about my life.  It was a very reflective experience. After, the non-interrogator presented me with a piece of cloth that they had cross-stitched my conversation onto.  

I ended my day out in front to the 14th Street Y where I saw a music and dance performance taking place.  It seemed to draw a very large crowd of people and I even found myself too captivated by the performance to even think about leaving before it ended.

Overall, I think INVISIBLE made me reflect on some of my own invisible thoughts and feelings the more I engaged with each piece on a personal basis. 

Thinker in Residence: Nicole Goodwin

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Nicole Goodwin.

Deformed (The Stress of Being Imprisoned By Silence)

                                    -For All the Immigrant Children

All my life I’ve been silently

Sleepwalking.

Clear as day, I see the vision in my mind

A destiny that I am supposed to have but in reality

Is lost to me.

Someone else is living my dreams.

I holler—mouth-wide open.

Out comes no sound; nothing resonates.

Ayuadame is scratched into my eyes.

I cry the word out!                                                                              Rat-tat, rat-tat

Through crystal tears.

My cries go unheeded.

My pain goes on,                                                                                Unnoticed. 

 

Thinker in Residence: Paul Takeuchi

Thinkers in Residence spend time on 14th Street over the festival weekend reflecting on 14th Street, patterns of movement, artists, pedestrians, publics, personal reflections, and participation. Their responses take the form of writing, walking, image-making, poetry, or on-the-spot conversations with the public.

And now the observations of Paul Takeuchi.

What a fun festival! AIOP 2019: INVISIBLE  was the first in its 15-year history dedicated to the unique voices of older artists, and last week’s 4-day extravaganza was an incredible display, despite the nasty weather, of the beauty and passion of these experienced artists. From the windy beginning Thursday, through the pizza party opening Friday night, to the rainy conclusion of fiery poets reading on the POEMobile on Sunday afternoon, more than 80 artists and collaborators shared their work with a curious and enthusiastic public. LuLu and Ed’s amazing production should be a template for future festivals dedicated to these artists who have so much to teach us through their inspiring gifts and legacy of social and community engagement.

While I documented a couple afternoons of the festival’s performers. I managed to photograph a bit around the edges in my particular style, which, like the festival, aims to aestheticize the invisibility of the visible. Without my preferred directionality of sun and shadow, I was able to capture a few of my triangular tensions of line, color, and depth shown here.