Blog – Art in Odd Places

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.

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.

The Alchemy of Tasha Dougé

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