Wes Holloway, Community Ties (courtesy of the artist)
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) returns to NYC from September 23 to 25, 2022, featuring artists and groups such as Nick Daniels DANA Movement Ensemble, Natalie Jauregui-Ortiz, Emily Tirana, Tamara Wyndham, and Dr. Evilletown. It will take place along 14th Street in Manhattan, NY – from Avenue C to the Hudson River.
Curated by Jessica Elaine Blinkhorn, AiOP 2022: Story will be its seventeenth annual public visual and performance art festival featuring 40+ local, national, and international artists' projects from the Disabled, Incarcerated, Elder, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Allied communities.
Some of the projects include Yu-Ching Wang’s performative action Breathing in New York covering her head with a colorful plastic bag as protection against COVID and disguising her identity. In artist Wes Holloway’s Community Ties passersby are engaged by his attempts to tie his tie and encouraged to tie one on each other addressing gender, disability, and ableism. Ellice Patterson of Abilities Dance Boston will improvise along 14th Street letting the sounds, people, and overall city energy inspire her movements.
Incarcerated Chicago artist Juan Hernandez asked Latino artists at Dixon Correctional Center to respond to the prompt "What's your story?” in the form of art or writing. He collected their responses printing them on the front of a postcard. During the festival, the postcards will be displayed publicly so 14th Street passersby can browse and write or draw responses to whatever story calls to them. The postcards will be collected and mailed back to the incarcerated artists, providing a rare opportunity for them to share their stories and receive feedback and correspondence.
In the participatory installation Healing Altar, Toba, artist Julia Justo invites pedestrians to write stories placing them in the box as an act of solidarity and community storytelling. The collective Poets, of Course’s The Armchair Salon, is a public pop-up poetry room that invites the transient 14th Street community to sit, take a breath, and listen to some neurodivergent word-craft.
Through a durational feat of endurance and strength carrying a large heavy object (body) across the length of 14th Street from East to West, Noah Ortega wrestles with the material, metaphysical, emotional, and psychological weight of trans* embodiment and asks the question "how do we make ourselves a body?" in their public project [you]phoria, part ii.
Official website: http://story.artinoddplaces.org/