Nobutaka Aozaki is a multi-media artist inspired by his experience of immigrating to New York City from Japan. He works directly with the millions of exchanges city dwellers focus on everyday, and uses the city to collect traces of this contact as evidence of himself in space with others.  In Aozaki's participatory art project and drawing performance, Smiley Bag Project, he set up a portable stand similar to the street portrait artists located around Times Square and other tourist locations and invited pedestrians to model as he drew their portrait on the ubiquitous plastic take out bags with smiley faces. In From Here to There, he is continually producing a map of Manhattan using small drawings he acquires by asking pedestrians for directions, and then aggregating the drawings. Names on Starbucks Cups is a similar collection of brief interactions. He collects Starbucks cups signed, often incorrectly, with the artist’s name by baristas at various Starbucks locations. The work questions authorship and collaboration by using Starbucks' system of asking customer names as the method of creating the artwork, turning the barista into an unwitting collaborator. Aozaki relies on making the artist invisible, so that the people he encounters are unaware of their participation in an art project. This omission raises ethical questions by challenging the rules of conduct between artist and audience, consumer and maker, and tourist and local. He navigates this ethical dilemma with humility, so that he can get beyond the ego of the artist as a unique genius. By diminishing his role as author of his own works, he is able to give and receive as an ordinary person - turning the item of exchange into a momento of human contact.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Nobutaka

Images:

From Smiley Bag Project, 2011-ongoing

From From Here to There, 2012-ongoing

From Names on Starbucks Cups, 2011-ongoing

Daniel Bejar does the work of an unmalicious vandal. He generally uses public maps like the MTA's subway maps and Google Earth to talk about colonialism. He intervenes in spaces that people travel through to explore unresolved histories, pose critical questions, and affect social change. Projects like Get Lost restore the MTA’s subway maps, signs and place holders with the colonial and pre-colonial names of New York City's geography. This work is very fleeting and often times removed by MTA workers within minutes of its display. In Neither Here Nor There, Bejar uses Google Earth to map the halfway point between the United States and Puerto Rico. The work is an image of the Atlantic Ocean, and so actually no place at all, symbolizing the current political status of Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory of the United States. It also speaks to the experience of many people who have identities informed by colonial histories. In Déjà Visité he uses online auction sites to acquire vintage postcards. He travels to return the postcards to their original postmark locations into local postcard racks. The postcard is an icon of the tourist, part of the travel experience, and acts as a visual archive into the evolution of a site – the buildings, people, dress, and technology that are now obsolete. He generously recovers and returns sites of memory, identity, and history to the public domain, where the audience is encouraged to question what is familiar.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Daniel

Images:

Get Lost! site specific intervention, archival inkjet print, offset prints, 2009-ongoing

Get Lost! Breuckelen, site specific intervention, custom decals, photographic documentation, 2009-ongoing

22 11.517 N, 73 34.328 W (Neither Here Nor There), 2011, Google Earth Intervention, digital C-print

Neither Here Nor There, 2011, screen grab of halfway point in Google Earth application

Déjà Visité (New York, NY), site specific intervention, post cards, 2009-ongoing

Déjà Visité (Los Angeles, CA), site specific intervention, post cards, 2009-ongoing

Tracy Candido uses food to generate conversations about challenging topics in visual culture. For Sweet Tooth of the Tiger Candido made baked goods in her Brooklyn kitchen and sold them at inflated prices from a bake sale table at art galleries during the economic recession. This participatory event examined how the ideas of value and commodity shift within the context of the New York art gallery.  Candido invited her audience to eat the desserts in order to draw a parallel between the eating of sweet food and the buying of contemporary art as a decadent, indulgent consumption, and affirmed the gallery's capacity to transform the bake sale into a commodity. In conjunction with the Open Engagement Conference in Portland Oregon, Candido collaborated with two other artists to produce The Pub Discussion Series. The Series was designed to act as a bridge between the intellectual environment of the conference and the informal culture of the pub. Candido and her collaborators recognized the need to have smaller debriefing sessions outside of the formal setting of the conference to discuss the positions and questions they were forming in relation to their own practices. To fill this need, the artists created unofficial sessions in which attendees could talk informally about topics presented during the conference: art and education, community building, evaluation and documentation of the creative process. Candido's Community Cooking Club is an ongoing collaborative cooking and eating event where participants prepare recipes from guest artists, authors and educators, and then eat what they have prepared together at a communal table. During the event, participants break into groups of 2-4 to work together to decipher different recipes, creating a menu of seasonal dishes. The Cooking Club functions as art because it offers a hands-on engagement among its participants, who learn from and with their peers in a direct, experiential way by sharing cooking skills and feeding one another. Candido's practice is generous because it creates conversations and social connections by feeding people. She uses the social nature of food as a medium for building community and discourse around creative production. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Tracy.

Images: 

Sweet Tooth of the Tiger, 2008-2010

Pub Discussion Series, May 2011

From Community Cooking Club, various locations, 2010-ongoing

Food Tarot, 2011

Practicing Utopia Dinner, June 27th, 2012

Keith Haring Lolipops, Brooklyn Museum, May 2012

Nicky Enright is an artist whose practice is informed by his activity as a world music DJ. He takes on the persona of DJ Lightbolt, a sound artist who incorporates music from all over the world. He has traveled extensively to gather his sounds, learning languages to communicate more effectively with his musical resources. In the US he applies his research by performing for audiences in nightclubs and lounges, as well as in an art context in galleries and museums. He applies his technique of researching and bringing it to people, in an attempt to reach as many people as possible in his performances and interventions. He invented a universal currency named The Globo. It is devised from a fusion of legal tender from over twenty-five countries to suggest a vision of world unity, and by contrast, the ever increasing reach of globalization. He often walks around with the currency, handing it out freely to pedestrians where ever he may encounter them. The exchange provokes conversations about the legality of the Globo, and the current state of local and global economies. In one instance, he attempted to exchange the Globo at a currency exchange in the airport, where it took the cashier a while to realize that the currency was not legal tender. In another project entitled, Rome, he designed matchbooks with a spin on the colloquial expression, "Rome wasn't built in a day." Enright's version replaces the word "built" with the word "burnt." Like the Globo, Rome is distributed to the hands of his audience, implicating the one who is in possession of the matchbooks in the construction and destruction of the empire. In the tradition of his activity of free distribution, he mounted the Free Flag on a flag pole outside of the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx. Instead of representing a territory, it stands for those who yearn to be free. For those who encounter the flag, it symbolizes global citizenship, and represents those who wish to travel and live wherever they choose. The flag is Enright's contribution to the dialogue about the contemporary experience of immigration, travel, and homeland. His generosity is tied to the concept and enactment of freedom. He admires the way music is able to communicate with people all over the world, and he applies this transcendent quality to his projects that travel from hand-to-hand and ear-to-ear.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Nicky.

Images:

Images of Globos

Rome matchbooks

Images of the Free Flag installed outside of the Andrew Freedman Home in the Bronx

Sean Fader is an artist who uses photography and performance to get face to face with his subjects. His background as an actor is his heaviest influence, and he applies his study of characters, images and identities to the photographic medium. In I Want To Put You On, he makes portraits that fuse his body with that of his sitters. The images are the result of a process in which he asks his subjects to pose in the way that they envision themselves being seen. Fader takes the photograph, and then poses himself accordingly in order to merge the two images into one. The composition of these portraits is humorous, sensual and otherworldly--it appears that Fader is “wearing” the body of his subjects.  For Sup Or What Are You Looking For, he spent a year making portraits of men he met through online dating sites. He calls this approach “lived performance” because he recognizes that the art (or performance) is inseparable from his daily life experiences. For this piece he went on dates with men whose profiles he was attracted to. Upon meeting, Fader asks for permission to take portraits  - posing his dates in the manner he envisioned them. He then asks his companions to express themselves by posing for an image that represents who they are in that moment. The two images are presented side by side. This work focuses on the way people edit themselves to appear more desirable, and the disjunction between our public and private selves. The generosity in his practice comes from his desire to use photography to create intimacy between people, and bring awareness to how we image ourselves as a way of getting closer to the authentic self.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Sean.

Images:

I Want You to Put On, Gus with Maxie, 2007

I Want You to Put On, Raini, 2007

I Want You to Put On, Dad, 2007

From SUP or What Are You Looking For, 2011

Alicia Grullon is a performance artist whose work deals with encounters between people. She works in public spaces, creating social interventions and re-enactments of true stories in which passersby are invited to participate. Her interventions pertain to race, class and gender-based identities and ideas of belonging and not belonging. The re-enactments she does examine the space between memory and experience. Her re-enactment Illegal Death responds to the deaths of undocumented workers in the Tri-State area. It is inspired by the scene where a 20 year old undocumented worker from Honduras was found frozen to death in a make-shift shelter in a forest on Long Island. She originally restaged the scene in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx by playing the undocumented worker. In this version, the performance is presented to the audience through photographs, which echoed the way Grullon learned of the tragic event through images in the media.  In another re-enactment entitled No Cookies, Grullon recreated signs from the 2009 strike at the Stella D'oro cookie factory in the Bronx. For 10 months,  workers were striking to protect their wages, health insurance and sick leave. Ultimately the factory moved South to avoid conceding to its employees' demands. Grullon remade the signs, and stood at the site of the strike where the now empty factory remains, handing out cookies to people as they passed by on the street. In her conversations with people at the site, Grullon was surprised by how many did not know of the recent event, which had a major impact on the quality of life in the neighborhood. Whether through civic actions like Enjoy the Revolution, in which she handed out flyers that read, "Enjoy the Revolution," in front of the Wells Fargo building on Wall Street, or encounters through activity like the intervention Rice Cake: Structure performed in at a market in Anyang, Korea in which she asked a local shop owner to show her how to make the Korean rice cake delicacy, Dok. Through the experience she reflected on the relationship between her and the shop owner, the action of getting to know a community through its food, and also the loss of local identity in globalizing cities. The work uses the familiar setting  of the food market and the activity of preparing 'traditional' food as sites to explore identity, civic action, and urban form. She creates encounters of generosity in the exchange of information and things in order to observe them and how they unfold in a public setting. As a result, the projects become strategies in observing and documenting many different cultures.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Alicia

Images:

Enjoy the Revolution, New York, NY, 2011

Rice Cake: Structure, Anyang, Korea, 2009

No Cookies, Bronx, NY, 2010

Illegal Death, Bronx, NY, 2007

Thomas Allen Harris is an artist and documentary filmmaker whose latest project, Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR) grew out of the way Harris uses his own family photographs to build narratives for his documentaries. After more than a decade of culling from his family archive to create narratives that engage, entertain and illuminate the intersections of personal family history with the historical sweep of our culture and times, he was inspired to activate the creative potential of many people's family archives.

DDFR is a mobile, participatory, multimedia initiative that travels throughout the United States collecting photographs and stories from families, then putting those filmed interviews onto his website. At the Harlem Stage Gatehouse in 2011, he presented the first iteration of the stories he collected to a live audience. Enlarged photographs with accompanying stories was presented to the audience, who was encouraged to bring photo albums, pictures and momentos so that they could join in the initiative. The entire event was streamed live to the DDFR website. Visitors also have the option of directly uploading images to the website, which also features interviews with scholars, news about family reunions and images by black photographers. In this way, the site functions as an archive and portal for social media. Recently, DDFR, in partnership with Healthy Families Brooklyn and Pratt Institute, brought together some of the residents of the Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens housing projects for a family photo-sharing and media literacy workshop, which focused on instructing participants how to protect their family photo archives by digitizing their images. The workshop also included a presentation on the various tools that can be used to record the participants' everyday experiences, from family life to conditions in their neighborhood using technologies such as cell phones cameras and digital recorders. Harris generously activates personal photographic archives to educate and empower individuals about family identity, and geneology, as it relates to the broader social concerns of community, history and visual culture.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Thomas.

Images:

DDFR Workshop at Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens

Photos from the archive of Sylvia Wong Isabel

A participant in DDFR in Harlem

Heather Hart is an installation artist who uses materials to investigate how identities are formed. Her highly crafted projects display her technique and skill as a builder who is interested in the links between people and things. For example, her work like, Uncle Julius' Porch, is very physical, yet the solid structure incorporates music from the 1960s to recall a sense of domesticity from a particular space and time. In another work entitled The Northern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off The Mother, she constructs a rooftop that also functions as a gathering space that people access by climbing onto. She constructs porches and rooftops that elevate the body to spaces of memory and contemplation. Hart's work is a model for generosity in the way that she creates spaces for sharing between the artist and the audience. The work needs human interaction to have meaning - without it the objects are lifeless. She is interested in the way these structures relate to identity, and aims to manipulate identity by recontextualizing materials that recall a sense of comfort or home.  Sometimes, as in the piece JuJu for the Blood, she takes on the role of the artist as spiritual purveyor, offering the audience objects that she claims elicit luck and good fortune. Other times like in the work, Barter Town, she is the architect of economic exchange, where she arranges a temporary settlement of artists who interact with the public by trading services and goods at trading posts. In this way, she is designing networks of interactions between human beings, environment, and identity.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Heather.

Images:

Uncle Julius' Porch, 2008

The Northern Oracle: We Will Tear Roof Off the Mother, 2010

Juju for the Blood, 2010

Barter Town, 2010

Kendal Henry is an artist and curator who specializes in public art. He learns about each location he works in through his interactions with people, and incorporates a listening process to his approach that makes each one of his projects specific to the desires of the populations they represent. Henry has done a variety of site-responsive projects in the United States, Europe Russia and Asia. While in Tajikistan, he worked with a group of local artists to create public art inspired by the uses and availability of water in the area. Tajikistan is a water rich nation, however water politics that involve neighboring countries have made accessibility to the resource scarce despite its abundance. Eleven water-inspired artworks were created, many of them commented on this disparity, and the restrictions placed on how water can be used and by whom. The artists contributed to the awareness of these issues by creating a range of projects at various locations through out the capital city of Dushanbe. For example, an artist built a water bar where pedestrians were offered to taste imported bottle water and local Tajik water. When presented with the question of which water was better, many chose the imported water, even though all the water at the bar was local. In this case, the evaluation of water quality is most often the result of successful marketing rather than any association to actual fact. For another project, a steel water tower was constructed with a nozzle at its base to catch and store precipitation that would be available as a public water source. The structure promoted an alternative to government regulated water sources by the conversation of rain water and snow. Henry's most recent project, Dirt City: Dream City, is a transitory art exhibition that took place this summer in The Quarters neighborhood of downtown, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The neighborhood is undergoing a multi-million dollar urban renewal project, and the exhibition addressed the changes occurring as the location undergoes regeneration. In his typical style Henry worked as a curator, artist and collaborator with ten artists to develop their projects through workshops, community collaboration and an in-depth analysis of the history of the area. This project exemplifies how public art can be used as a tool for economic development as an early strategy in changing the psychological landscape. Henry worked with individuals from the Edmonton Arts Council to get his introduction to the city and to meet local artists. One of the artists, Matt Prins, contributed a piece called 92.1 FM The Mouth Hole, a temporary but real radio station that was advertised on a billboard. The station held broadcast and streaming radio programming hosted by two imaginary characters named Chuck and Chun, also know as The Quarters Morning Zoo - The Voice of the Quarters. The broadcast consisted of a one-hour loop including interviews with non-English speaking members of the community, jingles from non-existent businesses, an ice cream truck playing the Entertainer, and various other transmissions to describe the misinterpretations that occur when the voices of under-represented communities get drowned out by the lounder voices of the city of Edmonton.  Henry is generous in using art as a vehicle to communicate with other people, to build ideas, and implement ideas through projects that ultimately change the physical and spiritual landscape as they increase creative, public, civic and economic investment and viability.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Kendal.

Images:

Images from water project in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Billboard and posters from 92.1 FM The Mouth Hole, by Matt Prins. Part of Dirt City, Dream City in Edmonton, Alberta

Nate Hill is an artist who uses public space, online and offline, to create services that work both for and against people. His work is antagonistic, confrontational, disruptive, and sometimes just gross. His presence, most often in some form of disguise, is that of provocateur. He has led groups rummaging through garbage in New York City's Chinatown to collect what he calls "art supplies for eccentric artists, collector or thrill seekers" in a performance called Chinatown Garbage Taxidermy Tour. He has dressed in costume as a blue fish to provide "Free Bouncy Rides" to New York City subway riders, and with the addition of a white tuxedo, sold and delivered fake crack-cocaine to customers who called by phone to order the Candy Crack Delivery Service to their homes. Hill's costumed service continued with Death Bear, in which the artist, adorned in a black bear mascot head and black jumpsuit, is summoned by text message to a person's home to collect objects that "were causing pain" and returns them to his cave where they "disappear forever." Hill's last mascot character continued his tradition of the house-call performance by allowing interested parties to get their frustrations out on a sympathetic panda acting as a punching bag. After the mascot characters, Hill began wearing whiteface in Harlem and the Upper East Side with a sign around his neck reading, "White People Do Not Smell Like Wet Dog." This performance, called The White Ambassador, protested the stereotype within the black community that white people smell like wet dogs after the rain. This summer, Hill has started to move away from working for people and the public good, and toward attempting to do the opposite with villain characters. One of these projects was entitled Free Cheeseburgers: Second Deceit, in which he dressed as a McDonald's employee and tossed half-eaten, re-wrapped cheeseburgers to--or at, depending on your point of view--pedestrians in New York City from a moving bike. Hill also creates website interventions, such as the website White Power Milk, 2011, which offers buyers the opportunity to purchase milk gargled and "purified" by six different white, young women. The service was real, but no milk was ever sold. Later that year he created White Smell Bot as part of The White Ambassador project. It is a twitter handle that collects and re-tweets comments about how white people smell. This year Hill decided to make fun of claims that he is an "attention whore" by creating Art Fag City.Me a copy of the popular art blog Art Fag City making each new post about himself in real time. Hill's work is physically about giving, and he is generous in his provocation of this action. He is an unconventionally empathetic artist, who is able to put himself in other people's shoes by making unforgettable gestures of offering and service to his audience. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Nate.

Images:

Image from Chinatown Garbage Taxidermy Tour

Images of Free Bouncy Rides

Images from Candy Crack Delivery Service

Images from Death Bear

Images from The White Ambassador

Rachel Falcone and Michael Premo are the co-founders of Housing is a Human Right, an art project that acts as an ongoing documentary portrait of the struggle for home. Falcone and Premo interview people about their community and experiences trying to obtain or maintain a home, and collect these oral histories as well as photographs and multimedia. So far, they have recorded more than a hundred stories in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and South Africa. These narratives describe community and the human right to housing and land in an effort to compose a living portrait of human rights.

Premo and Falcone work with a variety of community partners locally and abroad to meet the people who they interview, and are working with the tradition of oral history. Stories are recorded in sound and shared in interactive exhibitions in unconventional spaces and broadcasts via traditional and new media outlets. Their website acts as the central repository that holds their collection of audio stories, documentation and special projects. The "Stories in Sound" page is the first volume of nearly a dozen audio recordings collected in New York City. Visitors to the site can hear Lorenzo Diggs discuss the conditions of the Bedford-Atlantic shelter in Brooklyn, Beverly Corbin dispel the stereotypes of being a resident of public housing, and James Roberts share his story of taking care of his partner who has HIV in their home together, among other stories that provide a diverse perspective on what home is and means. On another page, Falcone and Premo document the human right to housing movement where they follow advocates, grassroots and social organizations to document the strategies being used to bring awareness to issues like housing foreclosure, vacant buildings, and homelessness. One such story focuses on an elderly Brooklyn homeowner, referred to as "Mama" by her family, friends and neighbors, who was facing a foreclosure related eviction after residing at her residence for 44 years. The Special Projects page features a short documentary entitled, More Than a Roof, which chronicles the United Nations Special investigator's first official mission in the United States on the right to adequate housing. The page also features information on a web-documentary entitled, Mandela's Promise: A Dream Deferred, which offer a look into the lives of South Africans who are struggling to realize the promise of a new South Africa, post-apartheid. Falcone and Premo's work in this project is generous in its action of bringing increased awareness to housing rights issues from the voices of the people who are directly effected. They are embarking on increasing this generosity by connecting people across the United States and around the world who are engaged in and effected by the struggle to claim and sustain a home.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Housing is a Human Right.

Images:

Images from Ms. Ward' Eviction Defense Rally in Bedford-Stuyvesent, Brooklyn, August 18, 2011.  Photos by Michael Premo.

Stills from More Than a Roof.

Stills from Mandela's Promise: a Dream Deferred.

Images from Day of Action on May 19, 2010.  Photos by Michael Premo.

LuLu LoLo’s life as an artist is grounded in the legacy of her parents. Her home is full of photographs, documents, and objects that recall their prolific work as community organizers. LuLu is an international performance artist, playwright/actor, and multi-disciplinary artist. Symbolism, ritualism,memory, and myth, all contribute to the aesthetic spirit of LuLu’s art. This is evident in her performance as “Mother Cabrini, Saint of the Immigrants” in Campagna, Italy, and when she appeared attired in top hat, white tie and tails as “The Gentleman of 14th Street” recreating the ritual of “tipping one’s hat” as a sign of greeting for Art in Odd Places: Ritual.  She incorporates research with performance as “14th Street NewsBoy” attired in knickers and a cap for Art In Odd Places: Sign, handing out four weekly issues of the “14th Street Tribune” which she researched and wrote recalling the famous, notorious, and tumultuous events from the history of 14th Street. LuLu has written and performed six one-person plays Off-Broadway highlighting her Italian immigrant family heritage, and her passion for historical research and social justice – especially as pertaining to the dramatic struggle of women in New York City’s past. LuLu’s practice is rooted in her love for family and community. Her performances in public space are compelled by a strong sense of giving. She turns herself over to the characters she portrays ushering the audience with her to another place and time. Her art generates from the collective memory, and puts historical records back into public circulation by means of performance.

Clickhere to see the un-edited footage of LuLu

The Gentleman of 14th Street, 2011

14th Street Newsboy, 2009

Soliloquy for a Seamstress: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 2010

Matthew Morrocco is an artist who has been photographing gay men in their homes and in his studio. He uses the connection between the photographer and his subject to study how identities are formed in the negotiations between family, religion, and sexual orientation. Morrocco is questioning how identity informs relationships, and, in turn, how relationships develop into community. For him, identity is a performance that can be put on or taken off depending on which community an individual is engaging. He is motivated by his experience as a young, gay male who denied his preferences and sexuality, and now his work seeks to visualize how the need to perform affects the men he photographs. He meets his subjects online through social media and dating sites, and intentionally selects men who are older and looking for younger companions. Morrocco, who is sometimes naked, half dressed, or in his underwear, poses himself intimately with his sitter, where it appears as if some kind of sexual act has just or is about to take place. He opens up the privacy of this implied sexual encounter through use of the photograph which he intends for public, visual consumption, and by using the public domain of the internet to find his subjects.  Morrocco's pictures are about the relationship between him and his subjects, each one building on the next to be representative of the communities that he belongs. These are conflicted relationships and the awkwardness of the compositions reflect this confusion. There is a awkward sense of freedom and loneliness that comes from being a constant performer that Morrocco wants to show in his photographs. Morrocco also photographs his family in these private moments that he sets up. His mother is a recurring character, and the two of them, mother and son, are arranged in traditional and non-traditional versions of The Pietà. In one such arrangement, Morrocco is supporting the body of his mother as they both gaze into the camera. He is heavily influenced by his Catholic upbringing, and this powerful visual trope, of Mary holding the deceased body of Jesus after the Cruxifiction is reworked in his portraits with men as well. In this way, Morrocco is metaphorically sacrificing his own body to show, not only how being gay affects his subjects in terms of the formation of performative identities, but also, and most importantly, the desire and necessity to be in relation with others. The work is an expression of the artist's and subject's loneliness within communities as well as creates a platform on which to build relationships, and thereby community,  through proximity, affiliation and identification. He generously gives his body to explore how performance is related to group dynamics, and combats isolation by communing through the photograph. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Matthew.

Images:

Images from the series Men

Images from the series Growing Up and Getting Old

Kambui Olujimi invites his audience to engage in social customs like dream interpretation, penny wishing, and photo sharing (in the contemporary sense) to make artwork that expresses ideas about mythology, fantasy, and imagination. He works in many genres and a wide range of venues to encounter different types of audiences. Fishing for Wishes is an installation piece that was exhibited in a bank in Queens, New York. It consisted of a table filled with pennies, that gave special mention to ten influential wishes in the artist's life. Placing the artwork in a bank highlights the symbolic value of the copper-plated objects as a form of currency (in its lowest denomination) and as a conduit for superstition - the collection of which, in both cases, represents the accumulation of good fortune. The customers of the bank were presented with the option of depositing their pennies in the collective table of wishes in the midst of  taking care of their day to day banking.  The Lost Rivers Dream Index is an installation inspired by interpretive dream books that can be found in North America, the Caribbean and China. He was fascinated by the books as records of cultural mythologies that are thought to be visualized in the human mind during sleep.  For his installation, he was interested in the relationship between the author of dream books and its readers. He created an 85 foot mural illustration of a dream book to observe how the audience intreperted the symbols into their on own mind, deciding what to keep, believe, doubt or leave behind. A Life in Pictures was a two day photo-sharing event that took place at a non-profit arts space where Olujimi printed out over a thousand of his own digital images to exchange with visitors for pictures from their lives. The picture exchange mimics the way the public shares images online, but decontextualizes the exchange by creating a physical space for the giving and receiving of photographs. The audience was made up of people who were invited by the artist, as well as visitors who were made aware through the gallery's website, in addition to whomever happened into the space during regular hours. The project reflects how virtual communication shifts the meaning of biography and authorship when identities are increasingly informed by social media, and the collection of images it perpetuates. He generously collects symbols by which human reality is constructed, and gives these collections back to the public as evidence of the collective imagination. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Kambui.

Images:

Fishing for Wishes, 2004

The Lost River's Dream Index, 2007

From A Life in Pictures photo exchange at Apex Art, 2012

From Mis-Marked series, 2011, paper, ink, paint

Lissette Olivares and Cheto Castellano are two of the three artists that make up Sin Kabeza Productions – a collective of artist and activist reseachers who use filmmaking, enthnography, science fiction, and curatorial practice to create installation and performance sites for people to come into contact with distant cultures. These "distant cultures" are imagined, composed, and recorded by the artists who give the viewer the impression that they have traveled through time and space to document a futuristic community. The artists share the evidence of this time travel by displaying their footage in a multimedia installation that includes video projection, televised transmission, photography and artifacts from the film shoot. Sin Kabeza's most recent project is a nomadic installation venue known as SEEDBANK which houses a futuristic video documentary entitled SEED about a post-gender world where animals are scarce and seeds are illegal, causing drastic transformations in human society. Both of these elements come together to produce an environment where the artists invite the audience to contribute through the submission of photography, video, performance and discourse to the evolution of art and culture by focusing on an ecologically conscious future where traditional definitions of biology are in flux. The photography and video submissions are projected and continuously screened onto the walls of the temporary exhibition space, and the site is used as a symposium or concert venue to accommodate audience-generated proposals for public programming and other performance based events. Their nomadic, documentary and installation based art projects are guided by their idea of “symbiotic coevolution,” a combination of the terms symbiosis and co-evolution, which is grounded in the proposal that unlike organisms living together play fundamental roles in each other’s development creating the possibility for news forms of sociable life among human and non-human beings. The artists need the audience to contribute to the display and conversations generated by this idea to activate the changes that can occur through the participatory environment. These artists are generously using the vastness of their creative capacities to depict a new world based on the combination of art and biology where human beings are an integral part of the development and sustainability of the cultural and natural environment. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Sin Kabeza Productions.

Images

Stills from SEED: Visualscapes from the Future 

Images from SEEDBANK

Leon Reid IV makes sculptures that are wholly responsive to a site. He observes the architecture, objects, plants, animals and people that make up the composition of a particular space. Reid began intervening in public space as a graffiti writer when he was a teenager. His development into the public sculptor he has become revolves around the notion of permission. The illegal placement of some of his early three-dimensional street art like Fleur D’acier and The Kiss urged the pubic to consider street art as more than a random act of vandalism. Reid obsessively returns to the site of his installations to document the work and observe how it comes to life through public interaction. With Fleur D’acier #2 he witnessed signs that the community had began taking care of the steel flower-shaped object, allowing for the work remain at the site much longer than anticipated. Seeing this impact, it became increasingly important that he have permission to put his work in public space, even if only for a day.  In his 2011 project Tourist-in-Chief, he received permission for a day from the Parks Department and Community Board Members to adorn the statue of George Washington in Union Square with emblems of a NewYork City tourist, complete with MTA transit map, shopping bags, camera, and I Love NY baseball cap. His quest for permission to legally embellish the statue opened a portal into the bureaucracy of creating public art, and the systemic processes that decide how an individual is to behave with the objects and statuary situated in public space. The artist's navigation of the system of permission is as much a part of the artwork as the artwork itself. This aspect of his practice is connected to his history as a graffiti writer, and marks his evolution into a public sculptor making the three-dimensional, site-specific, installations that he produces today. One of his upcoming projects, 100 Story House, is a free outdoor library in the shape of a brownstone house designed for Cobble Hill Park in Brooklyn. The project borrows from the existing book-sharing culture of the Brooklyn neighborhood, and hopes to encourage more of it by adding a centralized location from which books can be donated and taken away. 100 Story House relies of literal exchange, but all of Reid's work is about a figurative or metaphorical exchanges that happen in shared public space. This is why documentation of his work includes people as a means of visualizing the affect a sculpture can have on people in a public environment. As a generous artist he is not just thinking about how he sees space, but how others see and use space as well - giving empathy a particularly large role in his work.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Leon.

Images:

Fleur D'acier, 2003

Fleur D'acier #2, 2002

The Kiss, 2004 

Tourist-In-Chief, 2011

100 Story House Site Rendering (not actual placement location), 2012

Shane Aslan Selzer unearths the impulses that compel the artist to make by building forums for discussion. She develops micro communities where visual artists can expand on larger social issues and deal with generosity, exchange, and failure. For one of these conversations she organized a Saddle-fitting Seminar where she used saddles and saw-horses to explore the ideas between art, craft, function and uselessness She collaborates with Kianga Ford to facilitate the Global Critic Clinic, a 10-day international studio critique workshop, that engages in rigorous idea-based dialogue with artists in communities with limited access to MFA style studio critique. Her Failure Talks are designed to take an intimate look at the concept of failure, as presented by other artists, as a productive condition, one that encourages creativity and imagination as a means of transgressing it. In each of these projects she assembles spaces where people can learn through interaction with others by provoking discourse that is informed by circumstances that are too often held ‘outside’ of art.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Shane

Images:

Saddle Fitting Seminar, 2009

Global Crit Clinic at the Dei Centre in Accra, Ghana, 2012

Outcross Bend, 2007

William Sylvester and Bayeté Ross Smith are two of the collaborators on Question Bridge, a project that aims to represent and redefine black male identity in America through a question and answer exchange that addresses the economic, political, geographic and generational divisions for black men. The artists are creating generosity by using the camera as a listening device to bring together over 1600 question-and-answer exchanges from 160 men across the United States. This project is composed of many voices that illuminate the complexity of character that is often flattened by racial and gender categories. In so doing it grants agency to the individual in authoring the complexity of being a black male in this country. It also illustrates and generates community through the use of media in building dialogue around the subject of identity. This innovative five-channel multimedia video installation was launched at five venues simultaneously: The Brooklyn Museum, The Sundance Film Festival,  Utah MOCA, Oakland Museum of California,  and the Chastain Art Center in Atlanta, GA. The exhibition installation is supported by a high-school curriculum,  inter-generational community events, and a robust website.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Will and Bayeté

 Images:

Installation view of Question Bridge

Images from Question Bridge in process

Risë Wilson is founder of the Laundromat Project, a non-profit organization that brings art-making programs to Laundromats in low-income neighborhoods throughout New York City. The Project promotes community engagement through art-making, and creates opportunities for artists to develop projects inspired by the uniqueness of the space. The organization also has a professional development fellowship for artists whose work is socially engaged. She has made a career around creating positions for artists to teach, make work, and expand their professional networks. She approaches her project from the position of a grass-roots artist whose primary goal is to promote creativity in a very useful setting. The fleeting nature of her work is built into the name: by calling it a "project" she acknowledges it as collaborative, experimental and temporary. The organization is built to sustain the life of the idea, which has a powerful, but transient character. Wilson is concerned with process over procedure, access rather than outreach, and quality over quantity.  This is the description of her generosity and the seat of her practice as an artist. 

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Risë

Images of Laundromat Project:

Ed Woodham is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator dedicated to working in public space. He is best known for the public art project, Art in Odd Places, a festival that happens along the length of 14th Street in Manhattan every October. It's 10 day-long performance piece, created by a number of curators, artists and designers, and composed of performances and installations from artists all over the world. Woodham insists on producing AiOP as an insurgent, without non-profit status, a budget or permission from city officials because he wants to maintain the integrity of AiOP as an art project. These limits generate freedom from rules and regulations so Woodham and his collaborators are more responsive to the site. They also limit production values to help artists avoid spectacle. His art practice is managing the work of many collaborators: his own. His work only succeeds if his many collaborators of artists, curators, designers and pedestrians trust the process -  so Ed must approach his work with a generous spirit, and work to build trust. Woodham has a background in theater and performance art. The limitations of the traditional artist/audience dynamic encouraged him to seek the spontaneity of the streetscape as a means of invigorating his practice, by offering pedestrians the possibility of an unexpected encounter with creative action. Woodham sees 14th Street as his studio, and he uses his work as a means of bringing awareness to the politics of public space, and the flow of energy that transgresses the urban landscape on a daily basis.

Click here to see the un-edited footage of Ed.

"This Is My Studio" video:

Images:

Linoleum cuts from Ed Woodham's "Homopropaganda" series

"Homopropaganda is an initiative that aims to change the systems that create injustice for the LGBTQ (henceforth Queer) community by promoting a pro-queer agenda through performance actions and guerrilla marketing."

Images from Art in Odd Places

Crystal Gregory, Invasive Crochet (photo by Ed Woodham)

Yoonhye Park, Bodies of Pyongyang (photo by Kenneth Hughes)

Olek, Thank you for your visit have a nice day (photo by Olek)

Liz Linden, Copy (photo by Ed Woodham)

Other Works by Ed Woodham

Costumed performance

Useful Tables at St Ann's Warehouse (photo by Richard Termine)