Blog – Art in Odd Places

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.”

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.

Thinker in Residence: LuLu LoLo

The Alchemy of Tasha Dougé