The Babel Masks features one artist per week to spotlight through the run of the show, to May 5, 2021. To see the current featured artist, go to the Featured Artist page.

After their feature space is done, the artist’s feature interview will be archived in their individual gallery page. Below is Ed Woodham, our featured artist from November 15-21, 2020.

featured artist interview (Nov 8-14)

From November 15 - 21, The Babel Masks’ featured artist Ed Woodham, a conceptual artist investigating quantum physics, the philosophy, the Zen, the mathematics, the poetry, the visual, the performance, and the absurdity of nothing. He has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions across media and culture for over thirty-five years.

A visual and performance artist, puppeteer, and curator, Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style in order to encourage greater consideration of — and provoke deeper critical engagement with — the urban environment.

10 Questions

1) You were artist in Residence at UVA Charlottesville in 2018, the year after the “Unite the Right” march that took place there. Did that inflect or impact the work you did there? If so, how?

I was hired as the University of Virginia/Charlottesville Arts Board artist-in-residence in May 2017 for the following school year September 2017 until May 2018. I happened to be visiting Havana, Cuba and saw the Charlottesville white terrorists’ march on August 12 at my hotel lobby television tuned to CNN. At that moment I fully realized my work would take on a completely different trajectory. Normally I’d have a specific agenda or a theme for a site that I’d introduce at the beginning of a residency after research, but following my time in Macon, Georgia in 2016 and then soon after in Charlottesville, it became apparent that I needed to change my methodology to implement a long period of deep listening for what the community of Charlottesville needed at this specific time in their history.

With the world watching, the project focus became the community’s voice to reframe how the press and media had presented the city. Also, I felt it was a responsibility to locate, acknowledge, and celebrate the local social practice artists – who may not be labeled as such but were performing the exact same work that institutions defined as social engagement – for decades in their community.  

2. In 2013 in Sydney, you created a performance “Numb & Number” which you say on your website was “waking up the subconscious of viewers through actions of absurdity” in the spirit of social change. We are at a caustic place as a society and – in more ways than one – at a tipping point of our civilization. Absurdity was a potent protest tool in the 1960s and 1970s. How do you blur the line between the artist and the activist, and how might absurdity as political statement and performance affect public perception in such a way as to bring about change?

I am an artist who at times in my practice attempts to rupture the status quo – which embodies elements of activism and art with considerations of site, aesthetics, form, and function. I believe that artists can be vital in communicating ideas of change for long overdue gender, sexual, racial, economic, environmental equality and justice. Absurdity is an aesthetic choice that reflects my politics. I have not been able to make sense of the incomprehensible divisions in the U.S. and internationally. I’m aware that these divisions are fed copious amounts of ridiculous false information via press and social media platforms – designed specifically to bolster their respective viewpoints. It’s open fertile ground for absurdity in all its forms, where nothing seems to make sense except the absurd. Numb and Number morphed into an ongoing work that continues to address environmental injustice called The Keepers. Also, a work I’m developing currently is the public performance squad Absurdity Emergency which I began in the autumn of 2019 before the pandemic.

3. You founded Art in Odd Places (AiOP) in New York to take advantage of derelict spaces and recontextualize them as places of spontaneous creativity and as way-points where artists could land and gather strength and support. Over time, AiOP developed on a trajectory that took it all over the world, at one point representing the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2012. Can you talk about some of the inflection points of that development and some of the catalyzing events and people that moved it forward? What is the story of the evolution of AiOP?

Art in Odd Places is an ongoing experiment created annually in NYC by a fresh collective of artists, curators, administrators, volunteers, and audience since 2005. AiOP was founded to challenge the rules regulating our civic gathering areas and to acknowledge the importance of public space as an essential thread in the fabric of our democracy. Public space is supposed to be our space.  Historically, it’s where we gather to discuss and fuel change regardless of our social economic status, our gender identity, age, culture, religion, or beliefs.  It’s imperative to acknowledge that the land occupied in public and private spaces is stolen land, colonized by genocide and forced removal.

Art in Odd Places 2021: NORMAL curated by Furusho von Puttkammer, along 14th Street from Avenue C to the Hudson River will present artists from diverse backgrounds who seek to critique the mythos of the American Dream and the history of American politics. The festival will present visual installations and performances along the entire 2.2-mile length of 14th Street from May 14-16 following social distance guidelines.
  Application deadline: December 1, 2020, 11:59 PM EST.

4) In your piece “Unleashed” in 2016, you created a performance in Georgia to mark the demise of the Mill Hill Artist’s residency. Can you talk more about the substance of the ritual and how you decided to use the semiotics of the E-collar in different settings as a focal point?

There is quite a history behind the performance piece Unleashed. In July 2016, I was selected for the inaugural Mill Hill Artist Residency in Macon, Georgia. Initially, it seemed a good fit: a community project with an altruistic intent – which I researched before the application process. I’d never spent any time in Macon but had grown up in nearby McDonough, and studied for two years in nearby Cochran. It was hugely exciting to return to Georgia to develop a social practice project whose intent was to identify and connect the community’s voice in the Ft. Hill section of Macon.

The Mill Hill Project in Ft. Hill, led by the Macon Arts Alliance, was funded in part by NEA and The Knight Foundation. When the time came for me and the other resident, Chicago artist Samantha Hill, to begin our process of inquiry and investigation, Macon Arts Alliance offered a peculiar interference, providing us with a script intended - so it seemed - to smooth the way for development, construction, and architectural firms to mow through the historically black East Macon community to create an “arts village” over a well-established community already living and working there. Our inquiries revealed that some of the MAA board members were in fact people connected with those very architecture, construction, and development firms, and all of them were white.

Samantha and I started to ask questions about this situation. Our residencies were abruptly terminated and our assigned housing revoked - the reason being given that we had not fulfilled our contractual obligations. Neither the NEA nor the Knight Foundation interceded. However, we had our allies - local artist Charvis Harrell, and other Macon artists, archivists, social workers, and historians. After we were fired – the majority of local, regional, and national art press were contentious and offered few facts about the development scheme at Mill Hill, making the situation even more painful for us. But later that year writer Maya Mackrandilal’s powerful essay, The Impossibility of Art as well as her interview with us in Sixty Inches From Center gave justification to our experiences and our discoveries.

The inherent problems of firms enacting gentrification plans that damage or destroy old (often historically or predominately black) neighborhoods naturally invite examination of issues around race, privilege and power, provoking interrogation of the way outsiders can arbitrarily determine outcomes for long-established communities and their artistic heritage. During the residency, we struggled with these issues, very painfully, in real time.The experience was very traumatic for us on many levels, and out of that lived experience grew more work, including Unleashed.

The E-collar ritual of Unleashed is a performance work referencing Charvis Harrel's and Samantha Hill's respective trauma in Macon as they shared it with me in trust. As I bear witness to the breadth of their pain, the E-collar enforces the physical, historical and emotional limitations inherent in my privilege as a white man. The collar curtails my impulse to "lick my wounds" and requires me to reflect without indulgent self-distraction, even as my understanding of Black generational trauma from systemic racism is finite.

I also created Unleashed to maintain the reverence I feel and the honor I wanted to offer for my sense of the sacredness of the physical land of Georgia. I’d been born and bred there, and had returned in the years 1987-1997 to create the Atlanta multidisciplinary arts center, 800 East. I didn’t want the Mill Hill experience to stain my love for home. In 2017 I was fortunate to be chosen as an artist in residence at Hambidge Arts Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia during the total eclipse of the sun to create the work of the same name TEOTS.

5) What do you see as the role of the artist in a time like COVID, and what adaptations might performers and audiences of all sorts take to continue performing and witnessing? What early adaptations have you seen and been a part of manifesting?

I believe art lives at the intersection of inquiry and understanding, forming the foundation to build a more perceptive and just world. Art offers radical opportunities to change the way we see the ourselves. Now is an important time to reframe our intertwined individual and collective stories, our surroundings, our patterns and our lives.

I’ll repeat when asked about ‘artists at this time’ in a recent interview in BUST Magazine: “Do not judge your strange behavior and your berserk newfound daily patterns based on the Pre-Pandemic archaic modalities. Those were put in place by the ‘homogenized cis heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy’ to restrict self-realization in order to block access to personal power(s). So, no wonder we are uncomfortable, at odds with what to do and who we are – as these obsolete systems and imposed mores […] crumble into dust. It’s okay to do nothing, not knowing what to do – as it’s a reasonable response in the initial stages of reinventing ourselves”.

6) Can you talk about your piece Useful Tables? What is its core concept?

Useful Tables was about my ongoing work on the observation and collection of data concerning serendipity.  I began Useful Tables in 1999 following threads from searches on my new lime iMac G3 computer.  Using a dial up modem, I’d browse search engines like Ask Jeeves, Lycos, or MSN for searches on ‘tables’. For instance, I came across a publication called Grey Round Table which was a zine published in Northern California for grey parrot enthusiasts in the regional area. The scene Table Manners was created for four puppeteers who owned grey parrots (puppets) for a gathering one fine day as table manners were projected on the screen behind them.  Other useful tables were table of contents, an operating table, tableware, periodic table, navigational tables, and multiplication tables.

Useful Tables first began as a commission by DreamWorks Puppetry for the New York City Village Halloween Parade. I created a 10 foot wooden table walked by a puppeteer on each leg for twenty-three blocks up Sixth Avenue. Later I was able to remount the concept of an animated dancing table that become a puppet stage along with massive background projections at St. Ann’s Warehouse for Labapalooza.

7) “Big Little Match Girl” like many of your performance works, is highly theatrical. This work is listed as ongoing since 2013 and pays homage to those who died in the earliest wave of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Can you unpack the signs and imagery of the performance? How is the match girl connected to these many people who died, or what makes her the focal point of the work? What story is she bringing present-day New Yorkers about AIDS and victims of 30 and 40 years ago, and what is the intent? What is important about making this an ongoing piece?

Big Little Match Girl (BLMG) is an ongoing homage to a dear friend, Michael Hebert aka Michael X, who always imagined creating this work on the snowy streets of Manhattan. Sadly, he died of AIDS in 1994.

The story of Little Match Girl relates to the tragedy losing thousands of people during the AIDS pandemic – many of whom were friends. Only a few of my friends survived to reminisce about the experiences of the 1980s in NYC from the piers, to the clubs, to the ballrooms, to the fashion, the music, the graffiti, the sexual liberation.

8) Connecting to the AIDS epidemic, are there things those of us old enough to remember have gathered that affects how we relate to the present crisis? Are we mentors, or cassandras, or the forgotten fogeys, or the acolytes to our ancestors? Are we suitable demon guides through the hells of the present? What does the piece offer those too young to remember the epidemic?

One of the many conflicts presented in Big Little Match Girl is the importance to be charitable to those less fortunate, which regrettably was not the case during the AIDS epidemic. The loss of humanity illustrated in BLMG by the bitter cold, the obvious fact that no one cares for her, nor is anyone buying matches – Big Little Match Girl holds onto the spirit of her grandmother’s love who is no longer alive.  She debates whether or not to waste a simple match for a tiny bit of comfort because she’s been devalued – shamed for being poor and for being herself. Similarly, the LGBTQIAPK community during the AIDS epidemic were shamed, treated as lepers, pushed aside as though we were preordained to die this horrible death because of our sexual identity. It is an unforgettable despicable time in history that is intensely personal.  I will always remember what it did to the spirit of my brothers whom I watched slide into the abyss, made to feel unworthy of respect, dignity, and life – everyone’s birthright.

This work presents the tragedy ignoring suffering and injustice thinking of our own well-being. BLMG is ongoing and important because willful ignorance continues with numerous tragic examples.  From Hurricane Katrina, to the migrant families at the immigration detention centers at U.S. southern border, to state-sanctioned police murder and brutality of people of color, to white nationalist terrorism,  to the COVID-19 pandemic as it attacks people of color in greater numbers, there has been little attempt to seek solutions.

9) How are you sustaining your practice in the midst of shutdown and in the situation of large numbers of people leaving the city for economic or health reasons? Has this altered your practice?

The shutdown has drastically altered my life including my practice. At the time of the NYC mandatory stay-at-home order, I was immediately furloughed and national projects were canceled. I’m still currently unemployed, however my NY State unemployment insurance has run out– I’m unable to collect unemployment moving forward.  Plus there is no stimulus or pandemic funding for financial assistance at this time.

I don’t have any clear answer to sustaining my practice in NYC. I’m quickly accessing my capabilities and the current opportunities to reinvent my practice and livelihood. It is a struggle to maintain residence in a city that has been in a slow pre-COVID process of eliminating support for creatives to continue working, experimenting, rebelling, hoping, and simply living here.

10) What advice would you have for a beginning artist who is getting their career under way in New York? What do you wish people had shared with you when you were getting started?

Don’t wait to be recognized by institutions, press, or academia. Don’t wait for grants or money or brick and mortar spaces. Don’t wait because you think you need something you don’t have. You have everything that you need already:  your ideas, chutzpah, tenacity, and consistency. Keep doing it over and over and over again until it takes root. If you’re rooted in your own sustained practice and staying true to your process, you will naturally standout.  Be discriminating where you place your energy and ideas.  Always have an agreement or a contract – even with friends as it honors your friendship. Like in Macon, arts organizations supported by major funders, real estate developers, and bad actors will exploit your concepts and talent for their own agendas.

I can’t emphasize enough the importance to cultivate and protect your independence. Be fiercely autonomous so you don’t have to answer to anyone who wants to wield control, power, or censorship over vital new ideas. That independence is the life-force where art has its essential meaning with the strength and imagination to create change.