Hi publically creators,

It was a real pleasure to visit the blog after quite some time and review all the projects. I think each project is so delicately executed. It's high season at THE POINT and I have put up two exhibitions and have been completely swamped. Invites to follow.

I would also like to put out to you an invite to our Hunts Point Fish Parade on June 25th. This playful bit of public art highlights the pathway from one lovely park to another and points to an urban design problem that we seek to solve, -- the rough industrial terrain that joins the two. I think almost every project in the workshop would work along the parade's path. And with a certain critical mass would make for a much more pleasant and intriguing walk for the residents after you have all left your marks. http://thepoint.org/events.php?event=214

In the meantime I wanted to let you all know that JR is doing an action in Hunts Point. To remind you, Kendal showed us some of his work; he makes black and white portraits of people who live in a neighborhood, blows them up and pastes them on building facades and walls. He chooses often tough neighborhoods like the favelas in Rio...

Our project is about the mothers of hunts point and their ever expanding force in keeping it all together in the inner city. We are scouting locations and doing the photo shoots now. I would like to invite you all to the pasting which will be from June 26-29 I think. I will keep you posted.

On a technical note, I was unable to upload image or videos. Any thoughts? Also I am not able to go back to the first postings.

Best, Carey

Everywhere: Children's Drawings - The Day After

Later that day, around 6 pm, I decided to go into a scavenger hunt to find the drawings or their remnants. Not all walls (or 'public' spaces) are treated the same way. Walls of city buildings or newer residential buildings, had the least tolerance - no remnants at all. I pasted many on the tables and sitting areas of the park across the red cube sculpture - most of the drawings had been torn (or attempted to be torn). The in-between spaces, that seem without an owner, spaces that show signs of abandonment and other interventions (artistic or not), in those areas the drawings were untouched.

Everywhere: Children's Drawings

On Monday May 16th, 2011 at 12am, my friends and I headed to the financial district in Manhattan. We had with us sixty copies of children's drawings, two containers of wheat paste, a brush, a camera and a mission. Our mission - to paste the drawings on walls (and other architectural surfaces) and not getting caught - we succeeded. Here's the proof.

POST-IT FINAL

Hello Everybody,
It was good being outside this afternoon, despite the rain,
and witness some of the projects coming together.
Here are photos of the post-it stickers on the streets,
again, the website for the project is:
http://www.zidny.us/
if you are interested in high-res photos, they can be downloaded here:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/MEtTWUhnMm1RWUpjR0E9PQ
hope to stay in touch - danijel

i [ ] u update

So I 'installed' my postcards at Bluestocking Books on 172 Allen St. in the Lower East Side (lower left image). When searching for local bookstores, a few friends told me about Bluestocking. I checked out their website and was excited by their mission.

http://bluestockings.com/

I'm a Brooklyn girl...so I felt compelled to leave my anonymous mark there also! I chose the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). They have a great little gift shop/bookstore where you can find African centered books and gift items made by local and international artists of color.

www.mocada.org

"Free Poetry" update.

I was able to layout and print 4 different Sufi poems, with an image on the reverse. They are diecut cardstock used for invitations etc. Don't produce very sharp images, so I stuck with found images that were either not too detailed or were soft in nature. Since the research time was so short, I had to rely on Rumi a bit more than I would have liked, but all 4 short pieces are lovely and I think if someone is at all open to them, they will enjoy them and serve to 'open a door' to further thinking.


Hope to see you at the Staten Island Ferry Terminal (5:45+)... I've made 150 cards. No idea if I'll go home with 149 or give them all away in 3 minutes. This will be fun.

Curb Patches

Project title: Curb Patches

Site: Around the triangular Greenspace formed by Broome, Watts, and Thompson Streets in Soho.

Description:
This project is a kind of drawing, one that uses patches of blue color to highlight irregularities on the periphery of the street, in order to draw attention to the slowly shifting and organic nature of urban infrastructure and its effect on the streetscape. The blue patches focus on places there the curb is broken or not level (including corner easements).

The audience for this project is a person who walks to the Greenspace to sit and rest, perhaps to eat her lunch (which I have done many times, when I have had day jobs in the area). The official entrances to the Greenspace are on the west side of the park, at the corners of Broome and Thompson and Thompson and Watts. To get to the Greenspace from the east (from West Broadway), one must cross often-heavy traffic that feeds the Holland Tunnel. For me, and I assume for many others, the Greenspace is a shady, small oasis amid bustling Soho shoppers and tourists and speeding cars.

The project is primarily meant to be seen by someone within the Greenspace, whose peripheral view (if not blocked by cars) would take in a rough pattern of bright blue patches that draws a perimeter, like an intermittent stream surrounding the island of the Greenspace. Pedestrians in the immediate area may discover the patches of blue along the curbs on Broome and Watts and follow them, like crumbs on a trail, to the blue-highlighted easements on the corners opposite the entrances to the Greenspace.

About the experience:
I planned to execute the project on Sunday morning, when I thought the car traffic would be at its lowest ebb. Because of Sunday’s rainy forecast, I decided to use bright blue gaffers tape and not custom-mixed floor paint, in order to work more quickly and not be concerned about curing time. Because the gaffers tape would not adhere to wet concrete, I placed tape only on metal curbs. Using strips of tape rather than paint suggested a mending of the broken parts of the curb, not just drawing attention to them, which I like.

My studio artworks have long been influenced by materials and how they dictate variables in my working process. In a similar way, this project (my first in public) was influenced by the weather, available working time, materials acquired at short notice, and the conditions of the support surface (the concrete and metal curbs)—but I had much less control than I usually have in the studio. But I was excited by improvising and adjusting my plan on the spot, when I realized that I had only one color of tape that would stick to the curb—I had hoped to combine two shades of blue—and thus less tape than I thought I had.

I arrived at the site at 9:30 a.m., and I had about an hour and a half of working time before it started raining again. Pedestrian and road traffic became much heavier by 11 a.m. As I was working, most people ignored me. I did talk to two people, one guy who said, “There are so many interesting things in New York,” and another, named John, who liked what I was doing and took a picture of a tape patch; he lives a block away from the site and is interested in images of tape.

I got a little wet (and really sore from repeatedly bending over the edges of curbs—I must stretch better next time!), but overall I am happy with the result, given the limitations and compromises. With all of the rain, though, I have no idea how long the project will last.

Please share your thoughts on this project; any and all feedback is welcome. (I have many more photos, but I can't put them all here!)

It has been really inspiring to learn of everyone’s projects and experiences—I wish you all the best!

History Scavenger Hunt: First Two Signs Up

What fascinates me the most about New York City's history is the way different groups of people have inhabited areas for centuries, constantly re-shaping and re-defining the way spaces are used and interpreted. What I'd like to do over the summer is install several signs or other markers giving clues that direct people to historical locations which tell the story of those who have lived in Lower Manhattan. This would take the form of a scavenger hunt, an activity that invites passersby to discover previously unknown histories of the area they are in. I would love to collaborate with anyone who is interested, and thank you to those who have contributed really awesome ideas on how to make this project more interactive.

Today I put up the first two signs, one clue and one answer, in Chinatown. Since it was raining, a tarp covering a street vendor's cart partially obstructed the view of the first sign, but I think you can still see it okay today.

"Triangle" (work-in-progress)

Artist: Andrea Arroyo

Title: "Triangle" (a tribute to the victims of the Triangle Factory Fire, March 25, 1911.)

Status: Work-in-progress.

Media: Mixed media (146 pieces of hand-ripped fabric, thread, ink.)

Dimensions: variable.

Location: TBD

Neighborhood Acronyms Revised

I created a NOHO revised sign & decided to use the old rock club, CBGB as a reference, which has been replaced by Varvatos boutique. Extra Place, a tiny street that runs north from First Street, between Bowery & Second Avenue, was one of the last remnants of the block's pregentrified past. In the pre-gentrified era, CBGBs backstage door led out to the small street. Avalon Bay, developer of luxury condos has repaved Extra and now hosts shops & boutiques there. I put up the sign early this morning-don't know how long it will be before it appears on some security screen...

Signs of the times

Signs Of The Times:

Renaming Wall Street Campaign by

Felipe Galindo

My public art proposal is about giving to Wall Street a new name.

The original has become a metonym for financial markets in America.

It originated when the Dutch ruled New Amsterdam, now New York City.

By the 1640's the street was the boundary between lower Manhattan and the rest of the island.

But since 1792 when traders and speculators formalized their association and originated the NY Stock Exchange in the area, money and its trade activities have been the main ingredient of such place.

New York city occasionally changes or ad a name to its streets, like Malcom X Boulevard was added to Lenox Avenue, itself part of Sixth Avenue which is also known as Avenue of the Americas.

And that’s the reason/soul of my proposal, since we all associate Wall Street with the "money" term.

My campaign will consist in providing the general public with an opportunity to participate in the renaming of the street and to give them some alternatives to vote.

I have 4 proposals:

#1 Change the name to Money Street.

#2 Ad a Dollar sign to all the lamp posts along Wall Street.

#3 A Dollar Bill as a sign along the dollar sign in the post.

#4 The Dollar sign along the new name.

What the project involves for me to do is to go dressed in a businessman suit to that area in

Wall Street, explain my campaign and request votes from the general public.

I will show my proposals on a board, with some renderings of how it will look.

I will include other proposed names for the street like Greed Street, Big Bucks Street, Ground Billions, etc. and ask for proposals from the public.

I'll have flyers for them to select the proposals and a box for them to put their ballots on.

A fellow volunteer artist will document the event and will be posted in YouTube.

Felipe Galindo, May 2011.

Hi everyone!

So I spent this weekend making i [ ] u postcards using different papers and printing methods (stamp, lino cut and stencil). I wanted the cards to be 'gender neutral' and to have an aged feeling as well as a handmade feel. I selected papyrus, two heavy wood type rice papers and a drawing paper which I stained with tea.

After printing, I went back in and adding subtle detailing to each card by burning and using florescent markers, pencil, gold paint and chalk pastels. I'm excited that no two postcards are the same. My plan is to install small stacks of them in a local library (there is one really close to CEC that I'm thinking of..) as well as a few independent bookstores. I also thought of the post office but I'm afraid they may have two many federal restrictions : (

I'll post again when I have some addresses. Looking forward to seeing your projects!

Here are a few pictures from my installation this evening. I have installed eight little signs betweeen N Moore Street and Bogardus Plaza on Hudson Street.

It took me hours to figure out how to make something temporary that would look decent, coping with a lot of my own technical limitations. In the end I fell back on some painting skills and ability to adapt to a time frame, and was OK with the results. I like the way they look different and stand out from the rest of tags and stickers and so on. I think they will last for a few days a least. I wanted to explore in this temporary installation how it might look best in some sort of critical mass and what the best formula might be for unified look to link them to each other. What I found was that I liked that each was a bit different but still connected to each other. I liked the fact that with their random white frames they stood out a bit from the rest.

As for the experience of "tagging up" in Tribeca, however genteely, it was a piece of cake. Nobody really gave a damn. But what if I had looked like a homeboy? But also since nobody really gave a damn, I figure they won't really notice that they are there so what difference does it make. I was highly attuned to risk and the difference between public and private property and in a cowardly fashion found myself finding the spaces where other taggers had been.

I found the placement of these little signs magical for me as a painter. I was sizing everything up as a formal solution, visually, socially and personally on a canvas that was multi-layered, like 3-D Chess or something. It tuned my awareness to the present and what surrounded me in this altered and extended light. Of all my walks down Hudson Street in the decades that I lived there, this might have been the most revealing.

The process of these workshops and working with you all has given me a lot of tools in sorting out the shortcomings of this work. I am sorry I can't be there for the viewing tomorrow. But looking forward to staying in touch.

WTC- Welcome to My Neighborhood

Artist: Janet Goldner
Location: Spots where visitors can see the WTC construction site
Status: Work in progress, research stage

1st test run interviewing visitors to the WTC site for a couple of hours was on Sunday.

It was a damp foggy day. Nina was with me. We circumnavigated the site, looking for places where people congregate to look at the site. Mostly we were in the World Financial Center.

We encountered Americans as well as Germans, Dutch people, Israelis.

It was easy to have casual conversations with visitors but recording either audio or taking photos with the people didn't seem possible.For one Dutch man it was his third visit to the site. He had been up in the towers many years ago and had visited the site a year and a half ago. He was happy to see so much activity on the site.

He spoke of his shock on 9/11 and how he works in the Hague near the American Embassy. He used to walk by the embassy regularly and greeted the Marine guard on his way. After 9/11, the guard was behind glass and now the embassy is being moved out of center city into the suburbs.

We encountered a large group touring NYC before a cruise that leaves for the Bahamas tomorrow. An older couple in the group from St Louis had been to NYC once before in their 20's.

Another Dutch woman said "We started your city."

Visitors seem to look at the site and reflect on the enormity of the event.

The Winter Garden is open and noisy. Other spaces are more quiet and contemplative.

Some people thought the construction was moving along slowly and others thought it was further along than they had expected.

People wanted to ask me about living in the neighborhood. Was I home? Was my house damaged?

I need to distinguish what I’m doing from the many tours that are offered. The guides give facts about the sit and the towers. There were 50,000 people who worked there each day. They talk about knowing people who died. Or where they were that day. But the visitors weren't asked about their experiences and thoughts.

If I had more official status with a table or a booth perhaps I could record the interviews and visitors could leave their reactions as written statements or drawings.

In the meantime, I can continue to have casual conversations with visitors to my neighborhood.