AtmosphereThe ‘atmospheric’ interior is described by Jean Baudrillard as a space that ‘permits’ a fluid movement between intimacy and distance, warmth and non-warmth, a space in which relations are mobile and func-tional. This corresponds to a neutralization of the subjective aspects of relating (e.g. desire): a situation in which taste (as a process of inter-nalization) does not have a place, only information and organizational structures. This externalization of atmosphere corresponds to a state in which fixed divisions (private interior, absolute exterior) no longer hold.

AttentionWalter Benjamin wrote, in his “Work of Art...” essay, that distraction is the mode of reception characteristic of architecture. Helene Furjan has suggested that distraction, as Benjamin formulated it, “[...] is not so much a peripheralizing inattention as it is a mood [...] an active engagement with the matrix of information flowing towards the viewing subject.” This is getting close to the mode of attention that Simone Weil wrote about so beautifully in Waiting for God: “Attention consists of suspending our thought [...] Our thought should be in relation to all par-ticular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” This is very different from the contemporary forms or processes of attention, caught up in the circuits of capital.

BoundariesThe attention to framing, to the structures that configure comprehen-sion can appear or be interpreted as a labor of making and maintaining boundaries and categories, of refinement and purification, of interroga-tion and exposure. By a slight shift, however, this activity might also be thought of as a kind of testing out of boundaries, an attempt to make a break, or better, to simply drift outside into the vague, the peripheral, the in-between; as Robert Smithson wrote, “Look at any word long enough, and you will see it open into a series of faults, a terrain of fis-sures each containing its own void.” But perhaps it takes more than time to reconfigure the gaze of the modern subject. As curator Anselm Franke writes: “Boundaries are never given to us in the form of a priori categorical separations... Representations, aesthetic processes, and media images consolidate, reflect, and reach beyond these boundar-ies. They are the very expression of the liminality of all things, including the liminality of all subjectivities. All social practice is, in these terms, boundary-practice, although every boundary is organized and con-ceived differently. ”

Moving in and out. Atmosphere of displacement. Multiple walls, partitions, fragments. Implicit thresholds. Cement. From a factory to an office, from a warehouse to a gallery. From the Italian rotonda. Wood floors, concrete steps, a foyer with tiles or mirrors. A passage. A large area with a depression. The story a horizontal plane set into the plan. Marks from the former printing press. Layers of paint. Grey on white. Irregularities from the drift of materials. Variable light. A car. Traces of use and repair. Bodies wearing it out. Drift from one place to another. Perfume of somewhere else. Layers of codes and styles. There are no modern ruins, only demolitions and renovations. Bubbles, inflations, circulation. The gaps filled with concrete as the boards wear out, the concrete crumbling and cracking. The load bearing walls cut-up. The ground raised or lowered. Everything getting chewed up over time. Partial enclosures. The glass opening things up to the other side. The breeze moving the trees on the street. The flow of traffic, the movement on the sidewalk. The movement of sediment and rock. Everything eventually opening to the outside. Unfolding and refolding. Moving in and out.

A Glossary for Other Spaces

ImagesThink of an image as something other than a visual document, some-thing more than a distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation; perhaps as a sudden event in life, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard would suggest. Images do not only represent, they operate in multiple, differing modalities: offering concepts of spacing and organizing, defin-ing zones of visibility, articulation and imagination, producing affects... They interact: folding, transposing, intermixing, destabilizing... Bernard Cache relates the practice of framing images to that of architecture: “Architecture, the art of the frame, would then not only concern these specific objects that are buildings, but would refer to any image involv-ing any element of framing, which is to say painting as well as cinema and certainly many other things.”

InteriorsAn interior is produced as much by inhabitation as design: it is in-habited as much as it is perceived. There is a story by the modernist architect Adolf Loos that goes something like this: A rich man commis-sions an architect to re-design his home, to ‘bring Art’ to his home at any cost. The architect takes control of the space, producing a highly organized interior in which the man has to re-learn how to live. When, on his birthday, he receives some gifts from his family, he turns to the architect to help him place them in the space. The architect responds with hostility, stating that the interior he has designed has already ‘completed’ his client, and that nothing else is necessary or should be accepted into the space. The man then realizes that his identity has been fixed into place, and that he will be unable to continue to develop in relation to the ongoing flux of the world.

Other SpacesA gallery is like a container ship at sea. Or perhaps it is more like the container: opaque and interchangeable. The ship at sea is an enclo-sure that is nonetheless caught in the flow, moving along with the other strata. Michel Foucault wrote about ships as an instance of a hetero-topia, an other space – a term for the ambiguity or tension in spaces where flows and temporalities pile up and multiply, where intimacy and displacement coincide. Then there are the ‘non-places’ of Marc Augé or Michel de Certeau – defined as non-relational, non-historical and not concerned with identity, or as a space that is absent from itself, respectively. The non-place is the product of a mode of attention (or distraction): the being-elsewhere typical of modern transportation, for example.

RepresentationIt is hard to resist the mode of thinking that arranges concepts and the anonymous materials they territorialize – subject/object, interior/exterior, mind/body, etc. – according to a dichotomy or hierarchy and a prioritization of product over process: freezing, confining, making static. But such arrangements should be approached with careful attention to the illusion of stability, the reality of drift, of contingency, of differ-ence. To attend to the existence of things apart from representation is to aspire towards a process that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds.

TerritoryIn her text, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site-Specificity,” Miwon Kwon describes the affects of electronic networks and the flux of global economies on bodies and territories: “Within the present context of an ever-expanding capitalist order, fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications, the intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life.” In the section of A Thousand Plateaus called ‘How do you make yourself a body without organs?” philosophers Deleuze and Guattari suggest a radical engage-ment with this reality of deterritorialization: “This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, pro-duce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensity segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight.” Negotiating the flows is an artistic process. It is the pro-duction of ephemeral territorialities, like a bird’s song in the forest.

© David Court, 2013

March 14 – April 27, 2013 · Featured Artists: David Court Aisha Cousins Malesha Jessie Hiroki Kobayashi Martin McCormack Mark Reigelman · culturalfluency.info

Cultural Fluency:Engagements with Contemporary Brooklyn

Presented by

“For the artist, obtaining cultural fluency is a dialectical process which, simply put, consists of attempting to affect the culture while he is simulta-neously learning from (and seeking acceptance of ) the same culture which is affecting him.”– Joseph Kosuth, “The Artist as Anthropologist,” 1975

Cultural Fluency: Engagements with Contemporary Brooklyn brings together six artists whose active and purposeful engagements with the city embody its culture. The exhibi-tion is part of a wider dialogue examining the creative exchange between urbanism and art practice. In the spirit of Cultural Fluency, this newspaper/exhibition catalogue includes conversations with the artists as well as with contributors from different fields.

The exhibition, ranging from public artwork and photography to “guerrilla opera bombs”, highlights artwork that depicts Brooklyn while also altering our perceptions of and experiences in the borough. The artists featured all regularly operate at the intersec-tions of art, place, and community, often with an innate political awareness.

Working in response to the exhibition concept and the gallery space itself, David Court’s text-based work, A Description Without Place & A Glossary for Other Spaces, expands throughout the gallery walls, exhibition postcards, and this newspaper. In a playful yet strategic manner, Court draws attention to the multiple forces at work in the production of space, specifically addressing the materiality of BRIC Rotunda Gal-lery, the layout and experience of the exhibition, and its implication in larger frames of building and inhabitation.

From Here I Saw What Happened and I Could Not Understand (aka The Obama Skirt Project) is a year-long performance artwork by Aisha Cousins during which she vowed to wear fabrics bearing President Obama’s image every day. The fabrics were collected shortly after Obama’s election in 2008 from Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, South Africa, and Tanzania, where there is a long tradition of depicting the faces of black political leaders on clothing. She wore the Obama fabrics until her friends and neighbors began to see them (and the mind-set they represented) as normal. Cousins documented her experi-ences by writing a series of performance art scores. The piece expanded into the cre-ation of a group called The Story Skirt Project, whereby participants re-perform Cousins’ work by wearing Obama fabric and documenting their own stories.

Vocal artist Malesha Jessie challenges the notion of ‘authenticity’ in opera perfor-mance being tied to a ‘legitimate’ venue and audience. Her guerrilla opera bombs in the barbershops, bodegas, stoops, and sidewalks in Bedford-Stuyvesant engage a sur-prised public who pause to listen and even spontaneously dance to her performances. The 8-minute video loop Guerrilla Opera is presented openly, allowing the film’s music to permeate the gallery space and alter the experience of viewing nearby artworks.

Hiroki Kobayashi’s photographs of the endangered Slave Theater, once a hub for civil rights activities in New York, uncover a history that is at risk of being buried. Abandoned for years and at the center of a bitter dispute over ownership rights and competing visions for a neighborhood landmark, the theater’s future is uncertain. By re-presenting the politicized murals inside the iconic building in a new gallery context, Kobayashi re-introduces the soul of the theater and its history to an expanded demo-graphic, possibly affecting its future.

For over three years British artist Martin McCormack has been walking the length and breadth of New York City, gathering tattered subway maps, tourist maps, and maps found on take-out menus. An active interplay between commerce, leisure, loca-tion, and art practice, The Great New York City Mapping Project is a dynamic re-creation of the city, in graphic form.

Mark Reigelman’s Stair Squares is a response to ongoing activities on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall while actively altering the space. The collection of public furniture accentuates and encourages the use of the public steps as a grand civic stoop. Presented on a custom-built stoop for the exhibition, visitors to are welcome to sit and linger, shifting their perspective and becoming part of the exhibition.

The exhibition is conversational and participatory not only by engaging the public in the gallery space itself, but by expanding the dialogue through its communication materials. Newspaper contributors Laurie Cumbo, Matthew Deleget, Karen Dema-vivas, Keith Gill, Thomas Leeser, Syreeta McFadden, and Hanne Tierney discuss the relationships between politics, community, architecture, poetry, and performance with their art and with the city.

On Thursday, April 4, 2013, Inside Cultural Fluency extends the dialogue further. The public program night features Q&As with the artists and the Bed-Stuy Story Skirters (a group of Brooklyn women who have been re-performing Aisha Cousins’ The Obama Skirt Project), as well as interactive performance art scores directed by Cousins.

The public is invited to visit and participate in the online forum culturalfluency. info, whereby Cultural Fluency will continue to grow beyond the confines of a gallery exhibition. By regularly including new interviews and conversations across fields and globally, the blog will continue to examine the creative exchange between the city and art practice. At the risk of being utopian, it is my hope Cultural Fluency will help our understanding of the human condition in our city and in our society – essentially shaping our ‘place’.

Erin Gleason, Exhibition Curator

Erin Gleason is an artist, curator, and designer based in Brooklyn. She studied Fine Art, Imaging Science, and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and received her MFA in the Art/Space/Nature Program at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edin-burgh, Scotland. Gleason has exhibited and curated in the U.S. and internationally and has created works for a variety of public sites. She is the co-founder/director of the Crown Heights Film Festival, co-editor and designer of the publication FIELDWORK (ASN Mutual Press), and recipient of a Russell Trust Award for research in Greenland. eringleason.com

to be symbolically central to the neigh-borhood. Brooklyn is a multi-cultural city unlike any other, and BRIC House is located precisely at Brooklyn’s cultural center. As such, it seemed appropriate to provide a non-formal place for social interaction precisely between the theater, the TV studio, the gallery and the street. And it is at the street level where we made a small but significant gesture by pushing the street front into the facade as to allow a visual and physical connection with passersby to the symbolic center of BRIC House.

Architecture can have a profound affect on a community. How does engaging with that community and ‘place’ affect you, as an architect?

It is the very reason to be an archi-tect. To affect the community and our environment, which means to change it. Change – in the sense to enable one to understand one’s environment and world around us in a new way – allows us to see things in a different light and to open one’s experience and the way we feel about things. This is what we can only hope to achieve when we design for our community, and this is what affects us as architects in return.

Has your vision and design approach as an architect changed by working with many artists, performers, and arts organizations over the years?

I started as an artist, which I feel is a very uncomfortable description of one’s activities. Maybe this is why I decided to become an architect, and yes, working with artists is always influencing the way I think about things. This is what artists need to do, and this is what I want to be inspired by.

Being based in DUMBO and in a build-ing that includes artist studios, non-profit organizations, and an incubator for media start-ups, is cross-arts collaboration or dialogue something you seek out? Or is it a natural part of your life and work?

It is of course both, but being in an arts community like DUMBO, a lot happens by osmosis. Just walking down the street and seeing many ideas leaking out of the many workshops, galleries or the theater across the street is daily inspiration for me.

Thomas Leeser studied architecture at the University of Darmstadt, Germany and at The Cooper Union, NY under John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, Raimund Abraham and Bernard Tschumi. He has taught at such institutions as Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard universities, and he is currently a professor at Pratt Institute. Leeser Architec-ture has won many international awards, including most recently the prestigious Red Dot Award for the design of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Current large scale projects are under construction in Abu Dhabi, Bangkok and New York.

Karen Demavivas

Can you comment on the concept of “cultural fluency” as it relates to a nomadic life and how it’s shaped your diverse experiences as a culture worker?

To me, cultural fluency is not about con-sistency or expertise in any given locale or field such as art or literature, but more a reference to fluid continuity and inter-connection among sites and disciplines. In my case, it meant audaciously shifting from one community, knowledge system, and ecosystem to another and then, at times, back again.

Perhaps I can begin with Brooklyn. I was fresh out of college in the cornfields of the Midwest, had a taste of study-ing abroad in London, and was seek-ing a more cosmopolitan place to start my career. I got the internship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and that sealed the deal to move East. Cheap rent in those days meant moving to a railroad apartment in Williamsburg and slumming it with other creative trans-plants and early gentrifiers – for better or worse! My wide-eyed self held ambitions as an administrator and curator in the New York contemporary art world and, sure enough, I was exposed early on to some of the most prominent artists and professionals working in the field such as Jeanne-Claude and Christo, Nam June Paik, and Matthew Barney.

But this linear ambition was somehow derailed by a moment of travel in Asia and 9/11. Late in 2001, an undeniable feeling arose that I wanted to do more for the world and that meant leaving Brooklyn for a while. So I went abroad to engage with themes of social change, community-building, and sustainability

through cultural projects and experiences. The initial idea was to break out of gallery walls, then geographic boundaries, then rigid definitions about what it meant to be a culture worker in any given field. My interventions started in the abstract realm of art – in symbolic, poetic, and aesthetic forms and actions. Then they merged into more concrete forms of development work at the international, regional and lo-cal community levels. But I would always meander back to forms of creativity for inspiration and insight on where my vi-sion would take me next.

So I would get off the beaten track but somehow always found myself back in Brooklyn. It went something like this: Chiang Mai, then Paris, then Afghani-stan, then Morocco, then Mongolia, then Chiang Mai again, then Brooklyn, then a global bubble called UN Headquarters, then South Africa, then Brooklyn again (plus the rest of the 4 boroughs in my role at NYFA), then São Paulo, and now – deep ocean breath – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. But not to worry, the exciting mo-mentum of the World Cup and Olympics in Rio will not stop me from returning for a dose of home in the near future.

Each time I would come back to regroup and reposition myself and it would be a different relationship to the surrounding context and communities in Brooklyn. Yet I was grounded in a broader perspective of what it meant to be back in the comfort of home as part of a global community. I had cast a wider net while fishing: grass-roots activists on the Thai-Burma border, conservation ex-perts in Paris, international development advisors and diplomats at the UN, and hands-on culture workers and organiza-tions collaborating with communities of color and immigrants in New York.

I would also stumble upon unexpected moments of continuity in experience among friends in Brooklyn. One of the artists in this show Hiroki Kobayashi and I had both spent time in northern Thailand and our first conversation at FiveMyles Gallery meditated on the different rhythm of life there. There was a prolonged pause as we just sat there in the moment of us knowing and feeling exactly what that meant in that specific time and place for us. Another friend in the show David Court and I had a cerebral discussion about how the concept of “relational aesthetics” penned by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud related to his work on spatial experiences and textual descriptions in a park in Canada. It just so happened that I had met with Bourriaud himself years before at the historic Café de Flore on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris to discuss how this same concept framed the site-specific art project I was researching in the rice fields outside of Chiang Mai.

While grappling with this research on Southeast Asia, I was already working in a different field at UNESCO Headquarters focused on Central Asia. It was a role grounded in another area of my research on how nomadic tents during the era of Genghis Khan’s campaigns informed sedentary architecture in what is now Afghanistan. In both regions, I also had a driving interest in how the politics of cultural heritage related to community development: in Thailand with ethnic communities from the Northern region and Burma; and in Afghanistan with the ethnic Hazaras (of Mongolian descent) who were historically repressed by the dominant Pashtun tribes in the region. Yes, I know, it’s a head spin for me, too.

These dynamic moments of exchange inform a fluid cycle: as I move forward and engage with new faces and experienc-es, the more and more I am reminded of people, sites, and contexts from my past.

What would be another name besides “culture worker” for your role in the field?

“Accidental ethnographer” comes to mind: a way of informally entering and exiting communities and places without ever fully saying goodbye. It is “acciden-tal” in that I was never formally trained as an expert in these observations and engagements with culture and commu-nity. Rather, my “field work” developed organically, grounded in the reality of the day-to-day, chance (or fate), the recognition of windows of opportunity and reciprocity, and acting upon them. I would fluidly and respectfully learn, adapt, and contribute to specific relation-ships, projects and places. Then I would slip away without much ceremony, but still maintain a kind of continuity, an opening to return…

I once lived for a time with a herder community in the steppes of Mongolia. I would help set up the ger (a permeable felt-covered trellis tent), ride horses, herd the sheep and goats on the hillside, milk cows, and welcome visitors. They would often come unannounced. We would serve them buttermilk tea with milk straight from the cow that morning, some dried mutton from animals slaughtered in winter, and steamed dumplings. There would be some talk of horse thieves, the changing weather, the state of grazing, the health of the herds – and perhaps some throat songs. Then the visitors would get up and head for the tent opening without so much as an adieu. They would simply

Thomas Leeser

When designing cultural institutions and museums, what is your approach to the building’s relationship to its community and the city at-large?

Architecture is itself a form of cultural production and as such one of the first things to consider is its impact on the community, on the institution itself and its contribution to the city at large. Ar-chitecture plays a key role in the way we feel about our cities, neighborhoods and the environment we live in. It is therefore very important to realize that architecture is in many ways one of the most powerful voices an institution like a museum may have. This puts the architect into a posi-tion of extreme responsibility far beyond the mere functionality of a building.

Since the recession, have you seen a shift in attitudes for design that reflect an arts organization’s relationship to the city, including issues such as politics, race, and gentrification?

All I know is that when we started with the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, it was a very different neighborhood. Many things changed over the years, and after we opened the museum in 2011, it had become apparent even to people who initially felt that the architecture wouldn’t matter that much in a neighborhood with very little foot traf-fic, that it was quite the contrary. Archi-tecture mattered in a real big way. It sud-

denly helped shape a new identity for the neighborhood. People who you wouldn’t expect to pay attention to Astoria sud-denly talked about it as if it was a new institution on the Upper East Side. It was really interesting how people who would never go to this part of the city suddenly knew about it. At the same time, it was really satisfying to see how people who had lived in the neighborhood for a long time suddenly developed a new sense of pride. This was really one of the great-est moments for me as an architect – to see how architecture actually affected peoples lives in such a positive way. It was a confirmation of what I believe is our biggest task as architects in our society. And I think a similar thing is happening with BRIC House. All of a sudden, BRIC House has a face that one can see, a locus that one can recognize and orient oneself on within parts of Brooklyn. All of a sud-den you can feel and see the institution that was literally invisible before.

Your design for BRIC House (which will for the first time bring the organi-zation’s contemporary art, performing art, and community media programs under the same roof), incorporates a very large indoor stoop. Are there other architectural gestures that encourage interaction and exchange between artists and the public, or that ties the building’s activities to Brooklyn culture?

The large stoop is of course central to the design, the institution, but it’s also meant

Aisha Cousins

What is a performance art score, and why did you begin creating them?

I define a performance art score as a set of written instructions for a live art piece.

I was introduced to performance art in college, but I don’t recall learning to see the instructions as a separate work of art until years later at the Museum of Modern Art. I happened to land a job there right when the museum was increasing its focus on performance art. As a result, I was exposed to a ton of live art as well as documentation and critical thought about it. Anyhow, I can’t recall exactly when I stopped saying “I’m a performance artist” and started saying “I write performance art scores,” but I’m pretty sure it was while I was working at MoMA.

Before that, I had been making mu-rals and mixed-media drawings. Murals were my public art form of choice. I loved them and thought I would make them for the rest of my life. Over time, however, I became frustrated with the way murals create a one-sided con-versation where the same statement gets repeated for decades, as opposed to adjusting to the changing times. I started experimenting with other media and wound up creating a performance art piece I felt really good about, called Diva Dutch. I started morphing it, getting other people to perform it, etc. After a while, the performances began to feel like a one-way conversation too. I shifted directions and started writing

the instructions down, so other people could do them in a way that highlight-ed their unique talents, ideas of beauty, and personal histories. That’s why I like writing the scores down. I like that it allows them to become a way for each new person who performs them to express themselves.

How important is community par-ticipation in your work? How have these dialogues influenced your work and upcoming projects?

You know, I was on such a mission to make works that created a two-way con-versation, that now most of my work doesn’t function without participation. I need performers to bring the scores to life, and the works generally aren’t com-plete, unless an audience engages with them. They don’t necessarily require a group of people to come together and say “we are a community” though. They just bring people together by engaging them in a conversation about an experi-ence or an interest that everyone has in common.

The people who participate totally affects the end result and influence whatever new work evolves. When I write a score, it’s not finished until it’s performed a few times. I ask for feed-back, and often use it to adjust both the format and the content of the scores.

You must have a lot of funny and interesting stories about the Obama Skirt Project.

Tons of them, especially during the phase when I wore Obama fabrics for 365 days. When I was working at

MoMA, Michelle Obama came by to check out the artwork. Ironically, I probably would have met her if I’d not had on an Obama dress. One of her guards saw the Obama on my chest, and I could almost see “stalker alert” going off in his head. I wanted to explain it was an art project, but he had a gun and he wasn’t trying to hear it. Anyhow, she came all that way to see some art and missed the one piece that referred to her husband. I, on the other hand, did not get arrested by the Secret Service. And I’m happy about that, you know... Plus, when the guard got that “stalker alert” look in his eyes, it oc-curred to me she probably would have thought I was a stalker too. Not exactly the first impression I want to make, so again, I’m ok with that.

All my co-workers were disap-pointed, but I thought it was a good experience because it pushed me to think about why I wanted to meet her. People are always pushing me to tell the Obamas about the project as if they have some magical power to make it grow. I don’t know if that’s true though. It’s not really about them. Well maybe about Michelle, but definitely not about Barack. People get engrossed in the Barack Obama aspect of it because he’s such a huge public figure right now, but the project is actually a documentary about black women. I just wanted to meet Michelle Obama because I’ve seen her make such awesome comments about the role of artists in society. I wanted to tell her about my work in general because I thought she might dig some of the other pieces like Diva Dutch or Brer Rabbit Day. I didn’t really picture her getting an Obama skirt though. As much as she might dig the concept, she doesn’t strike me as some-one who would feel comfortable wear-ing her own husband’s face on askirt.

Brooklyn-based Aisha Cousins is a writer of performance art scores. Her projects include public performance art scores focused on engaging black audiences from differing backgrounds. Her scores have been performed on the streets of historically black neighborhoods from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Brixton, as well as inside institutions such as the Museum Of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Project Row Houses, Houston, TX;  The Kitchen, NY; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. aishacousins.com

Ms. Allyson wearing her Obama skirt. The Bed-Stuy Story Skirters is a group of women who have been re-performing Aisha Cousins’ project, which is based on a pop culture practice found in many African countries of wearing clothes that depict political leaders. © Andrew Beard

Ghanian-American designer Carla Nickerson shares her story about this fabric she designed just after President Obama’s election in 2008:

“I wanted commemorative fabrics like the ones I’ve seen featuring royalty and politicians in countries all over Africa. After calling everywhere, including West Africa, I wasn’t even hearing plans for a fabric, which I thought was absurd. I flew to Ghana (my paternal homeland) to final-ize an online order that I rushed through Akosombo Textiles Ltd., and I got the fabric back here before the inauguration.

When President Obama travelled to Ghana in July 2009, Akosombo reprinted the fabric using an identical color scheme and design. A long-time friend and fellow Ghanaian actress was miffed that they reprinted one identical to mine. She suggested we look into legal action, but I was flat-tered to see everyone in Ghana wearing my design while the first family was there!”

Obama fabric designed by Carla Nickerson

mount their horses and ride off without a glance – until next time – to venture out into the wide, open space of the sublime Karen Demavivas is an internationalist, culture worker, and change-maker who resides in Brooklyn when she is not living abroad. She served as Program Officer of the Immigrant Artist Project at the New York Foundation for the Arts. Prior to that, Karen was a two-time Fulbright Fellow, which led to specialist roles in culture and development at UNESCO and the UN Population Fund, NY. Her art and culture writing has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail, the Bangkok Post, and Art4D Maga-zine, among others. She is currently based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Laurie Cumbo How do you feel Museum of Contem-porary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) has influenced the greater arts community and Brooklyn resi-dents at-large?

I believe that the MoCADA has had an incredible impact in the greater arts com-munity. Prior to founding MoCADA, it was not commonplace to visit the larger institutions and see works of art, perfor-mances, film festivals, etc., by or inspired by African Diaspora artists. Through our work, we have demonstrated that these artists have something very special to con-tribute in creating a comprehensive un-derstanding of humanity and the cultural landscape. When I founded MoCADA, it was with the goal of creating an under-standing of “one another” across all racial, class and social lines. The artists that we feature are of all races, addressing issues that impact us all ranging from gentrifica-tion and police brutality to rebuilding Haiti and capital punishment.

Many people enter art or politics to represent those who don’t always have a voice or the chance to speak up, bringing awareness of issues and sometimes even changing policy. Do you see more similarities or differences in the ways artists and government of-ficials engage with their communities?

Excellent question. It draws a parallel that I have not quite made yet, but I thoroughly understand. The exhibitions and programs MoCADA curates utilize the creativity of the artist to speak for the community in a way that summarizes, through a work of art, how the commu-nity feels about a particular subject. The public programs allow the community to discuss a topic through discussion of the artwork – it is a way that is not as confrontational as directly discussing the topic. Politics require you to address the topic head-on, without the intermediary of the art/artist. As the future Council Member for the 35th Council District, I hope to utilize culture to bring people together and to then impart important messages to the community.

Do you see the relationships between art, community, politics and ‘place’ as adversarial, or more as a fluid exchange? How have you personally navigated all of these areas?

Art, community, and politics are one in the same for me, and I see myself as a vessel to connect these three powerful entities. I understand very clearly the needs of the community and how art can articulate those needs in order to create dialogue that transcends into govern-ment. Art is so real and it speaks for itself. It provokes dialogue and opposing views, and it is in that space that change can occur. That is what I look to foster and capture. What role do you see artists and arts organizations playing in rapidly changing (and dare I say gentrifying) neighborhoods? Do they alleviate tensions and help solve problems, or do they contribute to the issues that divide communities?

Artists have always lived in communities that are now considered gentrified. This is more of a race issue than an arts issue. In predominantly black communities, there have always been artists and arts organiza-tions that were working there to help build and grow the community. They were indigenous to the community, and were working to foster and cultivate the existing culture. Artists and arts organiza-tions that are considered to be gentrifying the neighborhood are generally not from that community, and are mostly white (but not all). They are bringing a cultural aesthetic that is generally contemporary in nature, and outside of the cultural norm of the existing community. These artists/organizations then create a “cool” or “pop culture” environment that becomes attractive to developers who lack the tools and savvy to make something “cool” themselves. The developers then utilize their skills to “capitalize” on what was created. The “pop culture” envi-ronment sends a huge signal that the community must really be safe and that race relations must be stable, or else why would that community allow someone from a another race to create in that com-munity so freely? This then opens up a gateway to gentrification. Was the shift from founding a museum to running for office a natural one?

Running a not-for-profit museum requires one to have a very close relation-ship with government on the federal, state and city level in order to raise necessary funding on the expense and capital side as well as a close relationship with the many different agencies. It also requires one to

have a love for the community and the people that comprise the community. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, and my passion for the Borough and its people will be evident in everything that I put my mind to, from running a museum to running for Office.

Are you still a practicing artist?

I am not a practicing artist in the way of creating a visual work of art. I consider myself a curator of the community. I love to bring very different people together and challenge them to find their com-monalities in order to discover solutions. Laurie Angela Cumbo was born and raised in Brooklyn and attended Spelman Col-lege, Atlanta, GA, where she studied Fine Art. She received her MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University in 1999. Cumbo is credited with developing the business plan for Brooklyn’s first Mu-seum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), to assist in efforts to revitalize the Borough economically, socially and aesthetically. Cumbo has dedicated her life to community development and preserv-ing the dynamic elements of diversity. She will next run for the office of City Council Member for the 35th Council District.

Hiroki Kobayashi

As a Japanese photographer who has lived in Crown Heights for six years, do you feel like you are a part of the com-munity, or an outsider, or both? Has making your neighborhood your sub-ject matter affected this perspective?

I definitely feel like I am a part of the community now. The neighbors who have lived their whole lives in this neighbor-hood are very welcoming and are open to me being here. Through working on projects, I met a lot of neighbors and we have became friends

I often feel like I am living in a small village in New York, which I never imagined to happen. I think it’s such a wonderful thing to experience, and I ap-preciate it very much. At the same time, of course, I can’t be a native in this com-munity because I come from a different culture. I think it gives me a unique point of view and position.

Why The Slave Theater?

Since I moved into this community I no-ticed that it’s changing very quickly. The gentrification naturally became a main interest and is reflected in my projects. I think the history and current story of The Slave Theater tells a lot about this neigh-borhood very clearly and symbolically. I was really surprised that it exists, and at the same time, not too many people care about the fortune of this incredibly beau-tiful building and its cultural heritage.

The first time I visited The Slave Theater, I met Hardy Clarence, who was a caretaker of the building. He was so passionate in sharing stories about the theater and its founder, Judge Phillips. He dreamed about reopening the theater again someday, and keeping it in the hands of this community. Unfortunately, the theater totally closed in February 2012, and Hardy Clarence isn’t there anymore.

Has immersing yourself in the neigh-borhoods you are working with affect-ed your approach to photography? Is this something you will continue when you move back to Japan?

Photography is an important tool to understand subjects for me. The simple reason I started these projects in Brooklyn is because I am here. I will continue shooting wherever I will be in the future. I always find the similarities between human beings and places in different locations. I believe those similarities are the important things. I try to reveal the truth which exists in them, and share it through my photography.

Hiroki Kobayashi is a Brooklyn-based photographer originally from Hiroshima, Japan. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Kokugakuin University, Tokyo. Kobayashi has produced varied bod-ies of work focusing on people and places in Brooklyn. He has had recent solo exhibitions of his images at FiveMyles Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary African Dia-sporan Arts, both in Brooklyn; and a group exhibition at Skylight Gallery, Brooklyn. hirokikobayashi.com

Hanne Tierney What are the parallels between your work as an artist/performer and as ar-tistic director of FiveMyles (a perfor-mance and exhibition space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn)?

Running FiveMyles is actually an on-going performance. People are in and out, I passionately explain the art on display (sometimes I have to fake it of course), the neighborhood kids come in to use the computer to do their homework – another performance, being the very con-cerned mother-type about the importance of studying – and then, of course, the young artists who need a performance in aesthetics, as to how their work should be best displayed. All this is about persuad-ing someone to like something we offer, as every artist does with his or her work. Except that a performer, metaphorically speaking, looks the audience straight in they eye and tries to hypnotize them into believing and loving what they see.

A long time ago I worked as a bar-tender, and actually I would say that running FiveMyles and performing has quite a lot in common with bartending – being behind the bar and directing the whole show.

FiveMyles has this in-credible fluidity between you as an artist and curator, the neighbors on the block, local and international artists and performers shown there, other arts organizations, and the greater Brooklyn community. How have all of these conversa-tions and relationships throughout the years affected your work? Is there a significant shift that happened in your work after you founded FiveMyles?

I don’t think so at all. From the beginning, I’ve been interested in a theater of gestures, a kind of ab-stract theater that concen-

trates on gestures as symbols. Investigat-ing how intensely I can produce gestures in objects and materials, in such a way that the audience reads them as expres-sive emotional statements, has been my challenge throughout my performing and art career. FiveMyles didn’t enter into this at all. My studio is adjacent to FiveMyles. The neighbors often come in and hang out while I’m working, and often some-one will say, “That looks stupid.” But just as often, someone will say, “Heh, that’s what you should do with that aluminum siding,” and when I try it, it works! It might even be a kid who says it. FiveMyles has become an integral part of Crown Heights, not only as a home for artists, but as a gathering place for the neighborhood. The area is currently going through some of the most rapid changes in all of New York City. How have these population changes and all of the tensions which surround them affected FiveMyles? Have these changes affected your work as an artist? How is it different than what happened in Soho, where you are also based?

I have never doubted that when we all moved into these lofts in Soho, 40 years ago, we replaced a way of life for the workers who worked in these small fac-tories, day after day and for years sewing, welding, or whatever the product was. People who work together become close to each other, and all that was destroyed. In our neighborhood in Crown Heights it’s somewhat different, a whole commu-nity of families has been devastated.

When I first opened FiveMyles 14 years ago, it struck me right away how close everyone was on this particular block. On summer evenings everyone sat on the sidewalk. The gallery’s chairs were brought out, and I think even the dominos were kept at FiveMyles. The boys shot baskets and the girls double-dutched. It truly was like that. And when we had an opening, everyone often danced on the sidewalk, including the old ladies from the senior residency across the street.

This happens no more. The few kids who are left don’t play on the street any longer (although they play inside Five-Myles, which isn’t all that great for me), and the grown ups are too anxious about being evicted to enjoy leisurely sum-mer evenings. Not to mention the strict surveillance by the police that has never happened before. A beer outside on a hot summer evening is a thing of the past.

The pain the neighborhood has gone through during the last six years or so has been tangible, and there isn’t any way that making art from this pain would mean much, because with our art we inevitably are preaching to the already converted.

What’s next?

FiveMyles needs much more organiza-tion and solid infrastructure than I am competent to give it. We need to be able to hire a managing director who manages things. But the catch-22 here that we function on kind of a shoestring, and the funding venues don’t really see why they should increase funding for FiveMyles. They say, “Look how well they do with so little.” Basically, we’re looking for a sugar daddy – but then, who isn’t? Theater-wise, I’ve started thinking about doing one of Gertrude Stein’s earliest plays, the random sentences that cover worlds of wisdom and emotions.

Hanne Tierney is currently the Artistic Director for FiveMyles, a performance and exhibition space in Brooklyn. Since 1980, she has been performing at venues and festivals around the world, including The Kitchen, NY; Franklin Furnace, Brooklyn; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Espace Kiron, Paris; Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; and the Jim Henson Festival of International Puppet Theater, Long Island City, NY among others.

Matthew Deleget Does a “pluralistic approach” to your work include purposefully engaging with other artists and other types of creative practice?

By “pluralistic” I mean to say that everything is on the table. All content, all materials, all strategies, historical and current. Yes, and that does include directly engaging, collaborating with, or even sometimes undermining other artists both here and elsewhere.

How have these engagements and the founding of MINUS SPACE (a gallery and platform for reductive visual art on the international) affected your art practice?

It has made my work much better. I’ve been able to directly engage in a divergent array of ideas, histories, contexts, and strategies from around the globe. I’m specifically interested in abstraction and NYC does have a long history with it, but it is by no means the only history of it.

How do you view your work and MINUS SPACE in the wider context of the city?

I view MINUS SPACE as a Brooklyn gallery and I see it aligned much more with artists’ studio practice than a retail space. As everyone knows, the lion’s share of NYC’s artistic community lives here in Brooklyn. I lived here for nearly 20 years. I went to graduate school at Pratt. I’m raising my family here in Boerum Hill. I want my gallery to be a part of my neighborhood. I believe many people think Brooklyn galleries really aspire to move to Manhattan, which definitely happened during the early 2000s (most of those galleries are now closed). I’m not one of them.

Is it important for you to operate in the “gray area’?

If by “gray area” you mean uncompro-mised and sustainable at the gallery, it’s very important to me. It’s a lot of hard work, but I’ve honestly never been happier.

Matthew Deleget is an abstract painter, cu-rator, and writer. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, in both solo and group exhibitions. Deleget has received awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, Brooklyn Arts Council, and The Golden Rule Foundation. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Flash Art, and Artnet Magazine, among others. From 1998-2009, Matthew worked at the New York Foundation for the Arts, where he founded and directed NYFA’s Information & Research Department. In 2003, Matthew founded MINUS SPACE, a platform for reductive art on the international.

Mark Reigelman

Why public art?

Every artist has a set of personal goals, interests, and needs that need to be satis-fied. I want to have conversations with a greater audience, work on a large scale, research and experience new people and places, explore a variety of concepts and materials, and offer something unique to break up the monotony of everyday life. While studio work allows me to address some of these criteria specifically, public

art is the only art form I have experienced that can address them as a whole. One particular interest that public art satis-fies is my appreciation of community. Community is incredibly important to me personally, and thus a vital charac-teristic to my public works. This notion was reinforced early in my career by the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam, which highlights the ramifications of social interaction. My work discusses a variety of topics from westward expansion to overprotection, but is always founded by the importance of community. Public art, especially site-specific works, allows me to become intimate with a particular site, environment, and neighborhood members. Public art not only requires an artist, but more importantly, a team of dedicated people that appreciate and celebrate artistic intervention in public space.

Your humor and personality is often seen in your work. How does interacting with the public influence this personality, and on future or cur-rent projects?

My work is really a direct reflection of my interests, humor and personality. In fact, I think a small portion of my soul is imbued in each work I create. I regularly recall the experiences of main character Basil Hallward in Oscar Wilde’s book The Picture of Dorian Gray, as he dis-cusses his inability to exhibit his work. “I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.” 

For me, public art is a constant conversation and not a statement. Each project I create offers a specific and unique experience and is thoroughly documented and analyzed. If there was a particular interaction that was intriguing in one I will explore it in new ways in future projects. 

What are the beginnings of the Stair Squares?

The original Stair Square proposal used the Metropolitan Museum of Art as the installation site. Unfortunately, months of emails and phone calls got me virtually nowhere. During this initial phase of the project I was still located in Cleveland, and at this same time period Christo and Jeanne Claude were lectur-ing at Severance Hall. I remember the presentation like it was yesterday: I was sitting in the balcony on the edge of my seat listening to the craziest and most inspiring lecture of my life. Afterwards, I approached Christo and Jeanne Claude, interrupting their socializing in the pro-cess, to talk to them about my project. Jeanne Claude listened to every sputtered word and looked at all the images I of-fered. She then wrote their fax number on a sheet a paper, and told me to fax her over the details the following week when they returned to New York. I did as she commanded, and within hours of my fax she replied with contact info for several curators at the Met and informed me that she already spoke with them about my project. In a matter if days, I was having serious discussions with the Met about the project. And while the Stair Square project was never installed on the famous Met steps (due to liability issues) this chance encounter with Christo and Jeanne Claude began the chain of events that led to the installation at Brooklyn Borough Hall. Their sincerity and gener-osity will never be forgotten. 

Where are the Stair Squares now?

Since the Stair Squares were designed and fabricated specifically for the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall, there weren’t many options for their afterlife. So, after the installation all 12 went into storage in Downtown Brooklyn. They stayed there untouched for about five years. Then two were sent to a collector in Cleveland and one was sent to a collector in NYC. Sadly, the rest were taken to a metal recycling company in Brooklyn and turned into structural beams. Un-fortunately the pieces in Cleveland have been discarded so the piece on display is the sole survivor from the original instal-lation at Brooklyn Borough Hall. 

How do you respond to the inherent temporariness, the politics of opin-ion, and bureaucracy of place that’s involved in public art?

I am not sure there is inherent tem-porariness in public art (at least not in the particular area of public art that I am engaged). In fact, most public art is designed to last a minimum of 25 years before any maintenance is needed. So, I would argue that the temporariness of public art is purely the impact and conversation it has with the individuals in the immediate community. Most per-manent pieces end up becoming as over-looked as the surrounding architecture. I think it’s important for cities to have

a balance of permanent and temporary pieces to ensure the public is constantly being challenged and engaged. I believe Public Art is about having a conversa-tion and not making a statement. There is an excellent reading that pertains this this topic – One Place After Another: Site Specificity and Locational Identity by Miwon Kwon. It doesn’t talk particularly about temporariness, but it does discuss the importance for artists to consider the specific environment permanent works are placed in, to ensure that the conversation with the local community is valuable and important. This article is also an excellent transition to the political facet of public art. The public art process is saturated with bureau-cracy, public opinion, city policies, and assortment of logistical constraints. But I embrace it all! At times it’s aggravating

and painful – it’s a constant push and pull – but the challenge is what makes the work exciting. At the end of those months and years of diligent work and persistence, the project is realized and there is no greater feeling in the world (Except for space travel, I can assume that space travel is probably better).

Mark A. Reigelman II is a Brooklyn-based artist specializing in site-specific product design, installations, and public art. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculp-ture from the Cleveland Institute of Art, OH, and an Advanced Product Design Certificate from the Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design, UK. Reigel-man’s work has been exhibited in public spaces, galleries, and museums across the country including the Cleveland Museum of Art, Port Authority Bus Terminal, NY, and Brooklyn Borough Hall. markreigelman.com

Keith Gill

What do you see FREECANDY’s (a multi-arts venue/gathering space/ home for artists) role as in the city?

We like to think of FREECANDY as what the offspring of a weird Paradise Garage, CBGB, and MoMA 3-way would be (hot right?). As a physical space, we want FREECANDY to be a center for artistic discovery – a place where people of creativity meet and are inspired to produce. It’s an environment we try to make comfortable for both art-ist and arts appreciator.

How does the exchange between community, artists, businesses that happen at FREECANDY affect its programming and the evolution of its vision?

Community as I see it consists of people whose day to day lives affect each other directly. That exchange definitely has an effect on our programming. We take great lengths to make sure the artists, musicians, and events we feature are built using local talent, business services, and creative collaboration with local arts organizations. I believe FREECANDY’s role in this exchange is that of facilitator. As an example, the local community can come and enjoy live music and visual art for free at our “FREE Market” events, which brings together and supports local artists, artisans and businesses.

How does this sense of community ownership and involvement affect you as a curator and program director?

I’m a Brooklyn boy, born and raised. I’m from the community we serve. I went to high school (Brooklyn Tech) right down the block. I’m from here. I live here. I work here. I’m also part of a larger community of artists and innovators. I belong to both, and as such, I am also servant to both. The service I do (and it’s very important to me) is providing access for my arts community into my local community, and vice versa. So that is definitely in front of mind when we cu-rate art exhibits, pick musical talent, and choose organizations to partner with.

Welcoming a cross-arts approach and inclusiveness of community is the opposite of segregation in the arts. Where do you see this going? Do you think it’s a moment in time, a representation of our era, or is it part of a larger, long-term shift in our culture?

Information is consumed now at increas-ingly higher speeds and volume. People are bombarded with different messages, ideas, and entertainment. The world of art is no different and should be keeping pace (if not out-running) the changes in society. Going to see your favorite band perform, and then being surprised to en-counter great visual art work at the same place, is an example of what has been most effective to our goal of discovery. It’s that cross-pollination that is most effective in opening the conversation between the expected and the welcomed unexpected. I think the major arts revolutions come at times of financial upheaval. The repressed global financial situation has been a quiet blessing for the arts community. It has forced people to be more creative in just managing their day-to-day lives, and in so doing, has made more people aware of their own artistic ability and/or interest. Ha! Every-thing is a moment in time. The question is, how long can that moment endure? Nothing is really ever lost or finished within the arts. Each era builds upon the last. This paradigm shift will just be used as a foundation for the next shift. I want to see more syncing of artistic mediums, and it’s my goal to participate in the creation of that new paradigm.

Originally from Brooklyn, Keith R. Gill is a graduate of Howard University, Wash-ington DC. He has worked as a brand strategist in both the US and in Greece. In 2007, Gill helped form FREE DMC, a boutique influencer marketing, branding, and experimental events company. After assisting in the launch of InfluencerCon, Gill lent his efforts to the formation of FREECANDY, a live music and arts gal-lery where he currently is General Manager and Gallery Director. Gill is also a film producer and founder/editor of the digital magazine The Bubblegum Experience.

Syreeta McFadden What is the relationship between language, art, politics, and ‘place’ in your work?

I guess the best way to describe that relationship is integrated. Integral? I’m still trying to figure that one out. I don’t think I separate language of written word from visual representation. Both have a language and are in dialogue with one another. I think story is the key undercurrent to my work. I’m deeply interested in overlapping narratives that exist in communities, which is reflected in my use of overlapping forms in prose, poetry, and photography. The identity of place is a big part of my process, and is informed by my previous profes-sional experience in urban planning and community development. In that work, the narratives that place or places carry were key to understanding the language, the collected memories of communities throughout the city. You cannot trans-form a neighborhood into your image, ignorant of the legacy a building or park carries with it in the imagination of the long-time residents of a community. And certainly, by extension, you can’t build or create new spaces ignorant of the social fabric and identity the community has embraced after years of change. Perhaps that’s where politics enters? Maybe.

Are publications and various media outlets part of your art form? How do these outlets differ from performance?

I’m one of the co-founders and editors of an online literary journal called Union Station. It’s strictly an online medium – no accompanying printed matter as of yet. When we created Union Station two years ago we were responding to a void that occurred in the literary world, a journal that presents a pluralist representation of writers in America. We wanted a forum to engage these narra-tives. Union Station is premised on the idea that every city (town) in America (and globally) has a Union Station, a main hub of activity and interconnected-ness that by the happenstance of place, whole worlds of people connect and collide, and like a Venn diagram, in that overlap comes the story, the poem, the photograph…

I think the digital world can be per-formative too. We’re seeing a great deal of innovation and some back to the fu-ture elements (the GIF is dead! long live the GIF!). In the absence of live perfor-mance, we’re able to connect to a wider audience through internets, to capture or isolate moments in performance. I’m hoping to refine that idea some and play with the form of digital storytelling.

Live performance lends itself a differ-ent lens of discovery that’s so immediate between you and the audience. I don’t do enough of it. Last summer at a perfor-mance I did at The Kitchen to a majority Croatian-New Yorker audience, I really got the sense and feel of that wall break in an intensely shared moment of col-lective memory about American identity and otherness.

How important is community en-gagement in your work and how does it influence your art? What type of engagement or cultural exchange with the city itself do you practice?

I think community engagement with some of my projects is extremely impor-tant. I’m a photographer and co-curator of a public art experiment called PUP (Poets in Unexpected Places), where a group of poets, about 8 to 12 of us, go out on subway cars, the Staten Island Ferry, a laundromat, a public park and perform poetry in kind of a spontane-ous/flash mob way. Poets literally pop-up and offer poems to an unsuspecting pub-lic, and in the words of Laurie Anderson, “snap them out of their art trances.” The surprise is that we find that people are often charmed, hungry, and eager to hear more poems. We’ve had poets of various ages, gender, and ethnicities appear with us over the past three years. We encourage interaction with the audience. There’s no false wall that sanctioned performance space mandates.

Additionally, a chunk of my work is collaborative, so I rely on my artistic community to act as collaborators, even ‘actors’ in the new photo work I’m devel-oping as part of a newer project.

Any funny or interesting stories about a project?

As we were crossing the Manhattan Bridge on the Q train, during one of our PUP appearances, a group of women were so taken in and moved by the experience, that one of them jumped up and began singing and dancing. She was dressed traditionally, in a sari and didn’t speak English. The beautiful moment of discovery and connection is that it didn’t matter the language she spoke, but her heart connected to the words offered on the train in that moment. The largest les-son is that people connect in a language across culture and community in the lovely urban coincidence riding on the Q Train to disparate locations.

Can you describe the reciprocity in storytelling between you, your work, and the city?

I’m a creature of the city. Asphalt and blood. It’s a symbiotic relationship. It’s the source of a great deal of creative inspiration for me and probably the real driving force behind my earlier career in community development. Cities demand

intersectional narratives to be fully real-ized in art. New York is the city where Basquiat agitated to crown black men kings, Ayn Rand found her fountain-head, and Joan Didion couldn’t stop herself from coming back. As an inter-national city, more than any other place in America we witness the manifestation of a more perfect union (with her warts and all) by the shared common dream of living in this ridiculous crowded and expensive place because it’s in our blood. How could I not be interested in these stories and where we overlap? The typography of the city is so necessary to showing the world how and why we connect. I think the biggest takeaway for me in developing these stories written or visual is engagement. The city works as metaphor and talisman in the prose, and as witness in the photographs.

Syreeta McFadden is one of the found-ing editors of the online literary journal, Union Station. A former urban planner and housing development specialist, she holds degrees from Columbia University in the City of New York and Sarah Lawrence College, NY. Her writing has appeared in the The New York Times, Feministing, The Huffington Post, Salon and others. She has been a featured reader at various New York area readings series and her photographic work has been featured in local galleries and online. McFadden is an adjunct professor of English and Literature and is currently working on collections of short stories and essays.

Martin McCormack

How did The Great New York City Mapping Project begin?

Very often people will come up to me in the street and say, “Martin, how is it you started your map project anyway?”

“Well,” I reply, “let me bring you back to that chilly day in November when it all started.” I straighten out an old half-finished cigarette, which I produce from

my shirt pocket, and light it. Pulling deeply on the smoke, I begin: “You see,” I say, “I was walking through Bedford-Stuyvesant with my girlfriend and our mutual friend Chela Edmunds, when I saw an old restaurant menu lying on the ground. Now, rubbish on the ground is no rare thing, but this piece of rubbish had a little map, which intrigued me at the time. The map helped illustrate the exact location of the restaurant by show-ing a few blocks, the names of a couple of streets, and an arrow, as I’m sure you’re familiar with. Following a habit I had observed in my father, I put the piece of rubbish in my pocket.”

“The story, such as it is, might have ended right there at the pocketing of the menu, had I not found a second menu a little further along the road. This menu was from a different restaurant than the first. This menu also had a map, but it showed a slightly different area of town than the first, illustrating its different lo-cation. I found to my delight that when I put the two maps together they made a larger, contiguous area. I surmised, foolhardily, that if one were to walk the whole length and breadth of New York City, one may very well gather enough such maps to build a complete map of this vast metropolis.”

So The Great Map Project was born, and I have talked about little else since to the detriment of friends and strang-ers alike.

You must have walked countless miles, meeting a lot of people along the way.

I’ve no idea how many miles I’ve walked over the last three years to collect all the hundreds of maps that make up the collage, and the hundreds more I didn’t use for one reason or another. All of my routes are written down in the form of lists of addresses. I could enter them all into some kind of “Google maps thing”, and maybe it will tell me all the miles I’ve walked. It feels like more than 100 but less than 10,000 – some-where in that range. I wish I had worn a pedometer. I hardly ever meet anybody, only when I’m in a good mood in a nice neighborhood, and not hungry or need-ing to pee or feeling shy and awkward, which is rare enough. I prefer to lurk, at first startling then bemusing the locals.

Have the conversations you have had with people you met along the way influenced your work?

I try to keep a written record of my expe-riences exploring the different neighbor-hoods. In this respect, the conversations I’ve had with people while collecting

the maps have influenced the work. My natural inclination is to write about a neighborhood, like some kind of embit-tered but semi-literate P.J. O’Rourke. But after talking with people and getting to know a place a little better, this im-pulse is usually tempered. People are of-ten good hearted and well meaning, or at least benign, and it’s not really their fault that they live in an ugly, disspiriting sub-division that is ill-conceived, unimagina-tive, and blighted through generations of social mismanagement. In the beginning of this project, I focused on the buildings and infrastructure. But a neighborhood is more about the people, and I’ve made an effort more recently to show that.

Do you feel like NYC is more of your home since you started this project, or does it make you feel more like an outsider?

I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider wherever I’ve lived, and although it’s a cliché to say it, New York City is a very accepting place where you can be or do anything you like – provided you’re not bad at it. If you’re bad at it then this city is brutal. If I feel more at home here, it’s not through any new understanding of the city. Doing the mapping project, and exercises like this, has rather helped me understand myself and my place in the city. This is the first time that I’ve had to think about myself in terms of geography, so I suppose that’s a “yes.” This project has helped me feel more at home here.

A memorable encounter?

As I trudged along the still snow-covered sidewalk of Astoria Blvd., the tempera-ture quite perceptively began to plunge. The filthy puddles of melted snow began to skin over with ice. The wind took my breath away, and I zipped my hood up like Kenny McCormack to keep out the cold. I could hardly hold my list of addresses for the cold, but a noble voice from within urged me forward. Would mere cold keep me from mapping Queens entire by the year’s end? Non-

sense! Forward!A seemingly

senseless quirk of my route-planning process is that I rarely know en-route where it is I am going or what it is I am looking for. I found my-self still walking down Astoria Blvd. long after the commercial and residen-tial aspects of the road had abruptly ended and the four-lane

highway began. As the cars and trucks blasted past me, I bleakly beheld what surely was my intended destination. On the right lay a snowy, forsaken graveyard, penned in between highways and with no entrance in sight. Cursing the day I was born, I skirted the fence until I found an entrance several hundred yards further along. Past rubble and building sites, past gravestones of dead Germans and Italians, the wind still bitterly blowing and the temperature dropping further, I walked towards a flagpole sensing that graveyard attendants gather under the colors of the US flag. I was right and I collected my prize – a map of St Michael’s cemetery. Beautiful, but unfortunately too big to use.

After pissing and uttering some gib-berish to the kind ladies in the office, I took my leave whereupon, almost im-mediately, I got lost among the winding paths and German and Italian grave-stones. I was about to turn back to the kind ladies when I met with the most extraordinary vision. Standing right there in front of me, blocking my way, was the most enormous white cockerel sporting a quite blood-red head. I stopped dead in my tracks. Astonished beyond all telling, I attempted to ascertain the amount of danger I may be in. The cockerel moved not one inch during this time except for his beady yellow eye, so I decided some-what reluctantly that I could pass the creature without incident. Possessed now with calm sobriety, I saw that the crea-ture was not as enormous as I had feared, but merely standing there in the tundra with its feathers puffed up for warmth. Why it should pick such a bleak and windy spot was beyond my reckoning, and as I was eager to leave such a place, beyond my patience. I took the vision of the cockerel with the blood-red head as some kind of portent, and decided to forego the rest of my damned list of ad-dresses and make directly for home. And with my hackles raised I did just that.

Some time has passed since my meet-ing with the cock, and my thoughts do turn to it from time to time. Could it be that a cockerel lives wild here in New York, albeit not in a very fashionable part of the city? Or was the creature a figment of my imagination, brought on by the intense cold? Was its presence for good or for evil, or was it a neutral force exist-ing for its own benefit and amusing itself by lurking eerily to frighten passersby? I suspect a simple phone call to those very nice ladies who so kindly helped me with the map would clear up most of these questions, but in God’s name, what would the fun be in that?

Originally from Liverpool, England, Martin McCormack is a Brooklyn-based artist who graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He has produced “exhibitions” on various trees, walls, and embankments throughout New York City and in Colorado, in addition to exhibit-ing in a number of galleries including Leo Kesting Gallery, NY, and Five Myles Gallery, Brooklyn. 8ozgrip.com

David Court

How/why did you start exploring the relationship between language and space? Influences and intent?

It began as a pedagogical exercise. I was studying at the University of Toronto and wanted to learn more about archi-tectural language as part of my studio research, which was working with space and representation in terms of the image. So it was intended to support my art work. I worked with fellow artist-student Josh Thorpe and a professor from the architecture department to learn habits of reading and talking about space. The quality of the language that came out of the in-situ conversations we would have was quite different from the texts I was reading for the same purposes, and interesting to me in its particularities. At a certain point I started to integrate this work into a site-based project I was working on. So the first iteration was recorded conversations played back as part of an installation. Then text-based collaborations with Josh, developed from recorded conversations among ourselves and with others, which was primarily editorial – selecting interlocutors and filtering their comments – which we continue to work on together. 

What is the relationship between your writing and other artworks you do?

It seems necessary to write in order to carry forward my thinking in a certain way, which is always parallel with or completely enmeshed in other modes of working. I can’t prioritize one activity over the other in terms of my interest in the production of subjectivities through language, vision, sensation in general and the cognitive processes they entail. In any case the concern is with represen-tation in relation to affect and intensity, and with the slippage or seepage between the actual and the virtual, the material and the abstract. 

Your research often includes inter-views. How does this exchange af-fect the project, or future projects?

The interviews always open up thinking to unfamiliar ideas and materials, and on a practical level suggest new ideas, projects, paths to follow. There is a con-tinuity with the process of collaboration, which I do fairly frequently, where you are finding or creating a common space, and also engaging in exposure to dif-ference, to what you don’t know, think, feel, agree with, etc... and to unknown material, not being able to count in advance what a person or situation will offer up. Something that seems to recur in my projects is the effort or process of going outside, so to speak, in relation to collaborators, the public, or curatorial propositions like yours. There’s a soft risk and contingency, and an opportu-nity to be social. You have to negotiate something. As with the other artists in this exhibition  the work is not private or internal, it is taking place in public, or working backwards from the instance of presentation or exhibition as a compo-nent of the work.

David Court is an artist and writer liv-ing in Brooklyn. He holds a Masters of Visual Studies degree from the University of Toronto, ON, and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has exhibited solo and collaborative projects across Canada and in New York, with recent projects for Printed Matter (with Josh Thorpe), NY; Flux Factory, NY; and the Toronto Sculpture Garden.Toronto, ON. Court has also published widely. davidcourt.net

Malesha Jessie

What made you interested in chal-lenging the traditional trajectory or parameters of an opera singer?

So many things made me want to chal-lenge the traditional idea of the ‘opera singer.’ Firstly, I know that I don’t look like a typical opera singer, and just about every person I meet reminds me of that fact, actually. I knew I had this talent, and I knew it wasn’t typical. Instead of letting that hold me back, I took a step forward and decided to embrace my non-traditional look and my natural hair and boldly share my gift with those who lived closest to me. It’s so strange how we opera singers can travel all over the world, wear costumes and wigs, and sing in several different languages, and the very people closest to us may never hear us sing because they didn’t buy a ticket to our performance. So many of my friends, relatives, and neighbors could know me for years and still not have heard me sing, let alone know I sing opera. I thought it was time to share my gift and abandon tradition. Tradition can hold us back. While there is still great need for the wealthy patron, opera has got to expand and be what it always was: musical storytelling. And anyone, regard-less of their economic situation, can ap-preciate a good story and they deserve to be at the “dinner table.” I am concerned for opera’s role in society today. It has always been an elite art form, but it’s going to need to expand its doors to the whole community. 

How did performing in non-tradition-al places inform your work as a vocal artist? Are you continuing this type of practice outside of Brooklyn?

This venture into non-traditional perfor-mance and venue has caused me to be able to embrace my whole self, the same “self ” that has to act a character. I am more comfortable with who I am, and it is expressed in my voice and my body. It is in fact, me that people pay money to hear. No one wants to watch a phony on stage. 

This boldness helped me to launch Opera Open-Stage nights. I took what I loved about the open-mic scene in Slam Poetry and decided to incorporate that communal and supportive spirit in the opera field. Opera singers need an underground scene to keep us inspired too.  I plan to start Opera Open-Stage nights in Southern California.

Any memorable encounters while film-ing “Guerrilla Opera” in Bed-Stuy?

I loved singing in the bodega and be-ing mocked by a customer who also called me “cute.” I am often mocked by folks, including family and friends. It’s funny how opera can be a joke to so many people and at the same time, be profoundly beautiful. The juxtaposition of humor and serious music-making is in all of these videos.

What prompted you to start MuseSa-lon Collaborative (a socially con-scious network that supports artists and arts organizations), and how does it affect you, as a performer and artist?

MuseSalon came from a burning desire to connect artists with one another. Art-ists are powerful and vital to society and we need each other in order to manifest our talents and visions and color the world. I came to realize this profoundly when living in New York, the artist’s Mecca. My artistic identity is fueled by my awareness of my community, and I want to be an active member of the com-munity. I cannot merely make art and ignore those closest to me, both fellow artists and neighbors.

Malesha Jessie is a versatile artist of both the operatic and concert stages. She received her Masters of Music degree from the Uni-versity of Southern California, Los Angeles, and her Bachelor of Music degree from California State University, Fullerton. Jessie has sung throughout Europe and the United States, including performances with the Boston Pops Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, and the San Fran-cisco and Los Angeles Operas. Jessie recently relocated from Brooklyn to San Diego, CA. reverbnation.com/maleshajessie

Works in the ExhibitionAll works courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.

David CourtA Description Without Place & A Glossary for Other Spaces, 2013Text for newspaper, postcard, and wall; adhesive vinylDimensions variable Aisha CousinsFrom Here I Saw What Happened and I Could Not Understand (aka the Obama Skirt Project), 2009Performance artifacts; clothing made from African fabrics bearing Barack Obama’s imageDimensions variable

Typewritten performance art scores on cards

Malesha JessieGuerrilla Opera, 2010 DVD: 8:00 minute video loopCourtesy of the artist and Shawn Peters Hiroki KobayashiThe Slave Theater, 2010Four images, 30 x 30 in. eachArchival pigment prints Martin McCormackThe Great New York City Mapping Project, 2013168 x 120 in. overallMixed-media on canvas Mark ReigelmanStair Square, 2008Powder-coated steel and brushed aluminum14 ½ x 18 ½ x 24 ½ in. Stair Squares (Day 2), 200819 x 13 in.C-print, acrylic, and aluminum

Martin McCormack: The most enormous white cockerel sporting a quite blood-red head.

BRIC Rotunda Gallery33 Clinton StreetBrooklyn, NY 11201718-683-5604

bricartsmedia.org/contemporary-artfacebook.com/bricartsmediatwitter.com/bricarts

BRIC Arts | Media | Bklyn presents contemporary art, performing arts, and community media programs that reflect Brooklyn’s creativity and diversity. BRIC also provides resources to launch, nurture and showcase artists and media makers. We advance access to and understanding of arts and media by presenting free and low cost programming, and by offering edu-cation and public programs to people of all ages.

BRIC’s contemporary art initiatives aim to increase the visibility and accessibility of contemporary art while bridging the gap between the art world and global culture in Brooklyn through exhibitions, pub-lic events, and an innovative arts education program at BRIC Rotunda Gallery.

BRIC acknowledges public funds for its contem-porary art programs from the Institute of Museum and Library Services; New York State Council on the Arts; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York City Council members Mathieu Eugene, Vincent J. Gentile, Sara M. Gonzalez, Letitia James, Brad Lander, Stephen Levin, Domenic M. Recchia, Jr., Albert Vann and Jumaane Williams.

Additional support is provided by Astoria Federal Savings, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Barclays/Nets Community Alli-ance, Bay and Paul Foundations, Bloomberg, Blooming-dale’s Fund of the Macy’s Foundation, Con Edison, Robert Lehman Foundation, Lawrence W. Levine Foun-dation; and numerous individual supporters.

Special thanks to key sponsors for this exhibition:  Art + Commerce / Nadine Javier Shah and Atit Shah, Beverly and Mark Cheffo, Katherine and Luke Fichthorn, Leslie and James Kerby, and Mary Anne and Richard Yancey.

Additional generous support for this exhibition has been provided by Pamela Brier and Peter Aschkenasy, Gail Erickson and Christa Rice, Julia Kahr and Brian Colton, and Robert S. and Martha A. Rubin. 

Director of Contemporary ArtElizabeth Ferrer

Director of Contemporary Art EducationHawley Hussey

Education Program AssistantLinda Mboya

Marketing and Events CoordinatorAbigail Clark

Gallery and Facilities CoordinatorChristopher Kulcsar Graphic DesignerMatthew de Leon

InternsKatie Clenney, Ilana Harris-Babou, and Sarah Simpson

PresidentBRIC Arts | Media | BklynLeslie G. Schultz Mark Reigelman: Stair Squares, Brooklyn Borough Hall, 2008

Hiroki Kobayashi: Hardy Clarence, former caretaker of The Slave Theater, 2010

Opera Open-Stage with Malesha Jessie