Art in Odd Places 2015: RECALL at New Museum’s IDEAS CITY

Celebrating its 11th (odd) year anniversary, Art in Odd Places (AiOP), New York City’s annual public visual and performance art festival will preview nine projects from its upcoming October festival RECALL at the New Museum’s IDEA CITY festival StreetFest on Saturday, May 30 from 12noon to 6pm. Curated by Kendal Henry and Sara Reisman. ARTISTS' PROJECTS Daniel Bejar Poverty Line This site-specific intervention installs yellow barricade tape reading “Poverty Line Do Not Cross” throughout the rapidly gentrifying area of the Bowery. Using familiar police language as a departure, the intervention illuminates the invisible poverty line associated with income inequality on the Bowery, which at one time defined the term “skid row”. With about 1.7 million New Yorkers living below the official threshold for poverty, ”Poverty Line” makes this reality visible. Location: Placed throughout festival area Michael Paul Britto The Brown Man Experience: In Our OwnWords The artist seeks to give a positive voice to men of color as well as empower them to both confront and shift constructed racial perceptions. The process involved re-contextualizes aspects of law enforcement as its starting point. Men of color are publicly singled out, not to be “stopped and frisked” but rather to be “approached and interviewed”. Each person is asked to write something about himself on a small dry erase board and is then photographed holding it against his chest. The rounded corners of the white board and handwritten, self-defining statements act as a strong symbolic contrast to the square, black, police mug shot board containing numbers rather than a name. Location: Roaming throughout the festival area Ghana ThinkTank with SUNY Purchase College-Art for Social Change. Guerilla Street Signs: Black Lives Matter Street signs Location: Placed throughout the festival area. Leah Harper Free Compliments An interactive public installation that distributes free compliments inside capsules from a toy vending machine. All the compliments are sumitted by the public, either on-site or online. Originally created for the Art In Odd Places 2014: FREE, the project re-invents public space by making it more playful and engaging, creating a platform for conversation, and offering a brief uplifting respite from the urban bustle.To share a compliment, please visit bit.ly/submitcomp. Location: In front of the AiOP festival tent Samuel Jablon Poet Sculpture A performance-based sculpture that is performed by poets. The installation is a moveable platform, made out of different sized crates. Each individual crate is designed for a departed writer. Performers interact with Julia de Burgos, Jayne Cortez, ee cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Guest, Langston Hughes, Tuli Kupferberg, Taylor Mead, Frank O'Hara, and Pedro Pietri. The formation and words of poets define the sculpture. Poet Sculpture is in flux with poets physically interacting with the structure creating and manipulating a visual poem/structure while performing their work. Location: Sara D. Roosevelt Park, Basketball Court at Hudson & Forsyth. Tomashi Jackson Untitled (CMYMe) The artist will draw three portraits of three women: Tanesha Anderson (died Nov. 13, 2014, age 37, Cleveland, Ohio), Alberta Spruill (died May 16, 2003, age 57, New York City), and Alesia Thomas (died July 22, 2013, age 35, Los Angeles) onto street-facing glass using cyan, magenta, and yellow oil sticks. She will then clean the color from the glass. Each of the three women died after physical encounters with police, but none of them died from gunshot wounds. In this scenario, the artist’s body represents the Key color. Location: Window at Leekan Designs, 4 Rivington Street between Chrystie & Bowery. Pedro Lasch Who Are the Secret Nine? A simple text piece that speaks to the abstraction associated with numbers, as well as their connection to mysteries and conspiracies, both real and imaginary. In the national context, the mention of the secret nine may conjure the only armed coup to ever demote an elected government in U.S. history, but the associations made by viewers and passersby will extend to many other possible readings and contexts. The work is installed as a large format text banner and a series of small ephemeral sign interventions across the neighborhood. Location: Placed throughout the festival area. Jabari Owens-Bailey Nigrum Paenitentiam: When Oprah Wept In our “post-racial” American media sphere, mass participatory surveillance has allowed us to witness the Golden Age of the Public Redemption Cycle, where a high-profile celebrity or public figure is rendered persona non grata as a result of a grievous social error. Typically the offense is of a culturally insensitive or ignorant nature on hot-button topics like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, politics, and so on. In an effort to take back their narrative, the popular figure begins a publicized odyssey of damage control across media platforms. The Nigrum Paenitentiam seeks to do this for the common man without the benefit of a PR team. Through the act of a secular confession into a mobile confession booth worn upon the performer's back the sinner confronts his reflection in an enclosed space and is able to absolve himself. The confessions are recorded and the sinner’s words archived as a means of presenting the fact that we are all insensitive and seek absolution. Location: Roaming throughout the festival Edith Raw Collapse Through a series of movements plus visual and psychological spectacle, the artist asks the following questions of herself and viewers: At what stage is our humanity and relationship to the planet? Do we hide from truths about these stages under various cloaks? What are those cloaks and can we effectively dismantle them while being visionary toward our future? Location: Roaming throughout the festival PANEL: Art in Odd Places: RECALL / 11 Years In response to the constrictions of the homeland security paradigm after 9/11, Art in Odd Places (AiOP) was conceived in NYC in 2005 to assert and exercise civil liberties and engagement through art in public space—without seeking permission or approval. Since 2012, the festival has also exported its mode of creative civic occupation, intervention, and transformation to other cities. This panel is moderated by AiOP 2015: RECALL co-curators, Kendal Henry & Sara Reisman with past AiOP curators, Dylan Gauthier, Juliana Driever, Radhika Subramaniam, and Christine Licata as they share some of their experiences. Location and time: The ETH Pavilion, First Street Garden at Houston and 1st Street. 3:30-4:15pm.