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About

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The theme of AiOP’s tenth annual public art and performance festival is FREE.

Open. Autonomy. Gift. Independent. Unoccupied. Commons. Wild. Nothing. Everything.

The 1970s Warriors-era New York City lives in the imaginations of many as the kind of town it used to be. That gritty, wild, at times dangerous place was also a site of agency and possibility. The New York City of present day is much more polished, and encumbered by big money than recent decades; a statement not meaning to invoke nostalgia for the way things used to be, but as a simple point of fact. New York City has changed. Chain retailers (and their shoppers), real estate developers (and their high-paying tenants), and cultural tourists (and their transient economy) now rule the landscape. Between private corporations and city-mandated public space regulations, our every move is watched, recorded, policed, and normalized. Patti Smith said it. David Byrne said it. New York City is not a place for artists.

Or is it?

Sure, money has moved in. But have the people stopped responding? Has creativity simply dried up? Or, like the city itself, has it just changed? Shape-shifted and transgressed the usual models into more inter-disciplinary, life-specific, and self-directed contexts?

We think so.

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Fourteenth Street in Manhattan is at a crucial nexus of this issue. As a kind of informal divider between the “uptown” and “downtown” worlds, 14th Street spans the widest part of the Manhattan island, and has been an important site for trade, light industry, radical activism, transportation, housing, and culture. It is an artery through which crowds of New Yorkers flow everyday to work, play, live, dissent, shop, parade, and create. It has also undergone tremendous change and gentrification, with high-end retail and big box stores dotting the street to accommodate a shift toward an increasingly privatized sidewalk experience.

Art in Odd Places has integrated into this space to startle New Yorkers from their usual paths, and consider their environment in wholly unique and singular moments of creative intervention. Following its decade-long history of artful protest in New York City, Art in Odd Places 2014: FREE presents sixty-two projects that actively engage and respond to the history and heterogeneity of 14th Street. AiOP: FREE asks us to consider what it means to be autonomous in this milieu, with all of its surrounding conditions. Creating a test site for the possibilities and limitations of public space, AiOP: FREE prompts artists to highlight civil liberties, forms of exchange, and personal and collective freedoms in forming a critical idea of what our urban commons looks like, and how it functions.

The festival’s ethos has always been one of sharing, openness, and accessibility; produced without a budget, outside of permitting regulations, and taken up completely on the initiative of the organizers and participating artists. AiOP is collaborative, horizontal, and constantly in motion. AiOP is FREE.

–Juliana Driever & Dylan Gauthier

Sumner Press

Past Years

2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 20092008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

Other Festivals

IndianapolisEndicott College | St. Petersburg | Los Angeles | Australia | Greensboro

Mission

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) presents visual and performance art in unexpected public spaces. AiOP also produces an annual festival along 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC from Avenue C to the Hudson River each October. Art in Odd Places aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange of ideas.

History

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) began as an action by a group of artists led by Ed Woodham to encourage local participation in the Cultural Olympiad of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In 2005, after moving back to New York City, he re imagined it as a response to the dwindling of public space and personal civil liberties – first in the Lower East Side and East Village, and since 2008, on 14th Street in Manhattan. AiOP has always been a grassroots project fueled by the goodwill and inventiveness of its participants.

People

Ed Woodham
Founder & Director

Juliana Driever
Curator

Dylan Gauthier
Curator

Claire Demere
Curatorial Manager

Sandra Carluccio
Curatorial Assistant

Meredith Degyansky
Public Programs Coordinator

Sarah Brozna
Program Manager

Claire Choi
Social Media Manager

Carey Estes
Website Designer + Developer

Jorge Garcia
Program Guide Designer

Laura Forero
Community Liason

Elana Grossman
Volunteer Coordinator

Matthew Morowitz
Blog Editor/Head Writer

John Critelli
Social Media Specialist

Elaine Choi 
Social Media

Ruthie Snoke 
Blog Contributor 

Art in Odd Places is a project of GOH Productions – Bonnie Stein, Executive Director.

Special thanks (in no particular order): 14th Street, participating artists, all the artists who applied, our volunteers, Hjordis Linn-Blanford, Camille Diamond (14th Street Y), Cookie Brindle, Carlos Altomore and Gia Lisa Krahne (Alchemical Theater Laboratory), Simon Mukkatt (NYCHA), Sairalyn Ansano (Campos Community Center), Cathy Ho (Spontaneous Interventions), Bonnie Stein and Vit Horejis (GOH Productions), Gowanus Studio Space, Chelsea Pines Inn, Zhenia Stadnik, Anna Carluccio, Australian Council for the Arts, Al Cascio, Jack Cascio, Elvis the dog, Reva Morowitz, Alex Gordon, Shannon Novak, Lord Neptune, Kendra Sullivan, Ben Cohen, Holly Senter, Fritzie Brown (CEC Arts Link), Howie Demere, Colleen Lynch, Alexandra Zevin, Kaloyan Ivanov, Joshua Suzanne (Rags A Go Go), family, friends, pets. And to you, our audience.