Publicly Creative: A Public Art Workshop

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.