Joan Bankemper, Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Charles Dennis and Normando Ismay, Jane Dickson, Foundry Theatre, Karin Giusti, Ilya Kabakov, Robin Kahn, Susan Leopold, Christian Marclay, Matthew McCaslin, Betsy Newman, Sara Pasti and neighbors, with Terry Adkins, Hope Sandrow, Glen Seator, Maura Sheehan

July 13-September 14, 1995
Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Photo © 1995 Marty Heitner

For Affirmative Actions: Artists At Work Creative Time invited visual and performing artists to participate in summer-long, on-site residencies at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. Many artists created collaborative art works with targeted members of diverse communities, opening all phases of the creative process to a wide range of participants and audiences. Utilzing the Anchorage’s unique architecture of vaulted chambers, artists set up studios to generate pieces of work, held workshops and performances, and hosted educational programs in the Brooklyn Bridge itself. The range of artists offered visitors such options as watching skateboarders execute daring stunts as they soared from a twelve-foot half-pipe or a tutorial in how to make herbal remedies.

W. David Hancock

July 13-August 6, 1995
Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Photo © 1995 Marty Heitner

As part of Creative Time’s Art in the Anchorage program, W. David Hancock presented the multifaceted play Deviant Craft, a literary, interactive performance/play ostensibly about a group of fictional female psychiatric ward inmates staging Shakespeare’s The Tempest as an innovative rehabilitation technique. Performed by the Foundry Theater company, Deviant Craft drew on theatrical and literary allusions to present an intriguing open-ended meditation on art and chicanery, insanity and genius.

As the audience gathered for the start of the drama, actors approached people and began to converse in character. Eventually ushered into a crude, barnlike theater, the audience watched the “inmates” alternate between an interpretative performance of The Tempest and the oration of their own life stories. New York Times theater critic Stephen Holden described Hancock’s production as “Teasingly enigmatic, deliberately cluttered and filled with relics. . . Deviant Craft invites endless interpretation. It is a theatrical maze that has an entrance but no exit.”

Various

July and August, 1995
Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage
Photo © 1995 Marty Heitner

Café Bizzoso, an informal café/theatre where visitors could present a original work of up to ten minutes in length, featured an open mic night at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage on Fridays and Saturdays throughout July and August.

Negro Art Collective (Tony Cokes, Renée Cox, Fo Wilson)

July, 1995
New York City and Los Angeles
Photo © 1995 Renee Cox

Mama, I Thought Only Black People Were Bad was a poster project by the Negro Art Collective presented during July of 1995. The posters featured the following bold quotation from popular scholar Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve: “In raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most illegitimate children, most people on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes.”

The collaborative team of African-American artists Tony Cokes (multimedia), Renée Cox (photography), and Fo Wilson (graphic design) was invested in fighting cultural misinformation and countering stereotypes about African-Americans. Blurring distinctions between advertising, propaganda, and art, their poster project confronted racist representations of Black people and challenged discriminatory scapegoat practices. The project was supported in part by Gee Street Records, who distributed the poster in Los Angeles. Altogether, over 1,600 posters were plastered in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Los Angeles.

Jennifer Monson

July, 1995
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Photo © 1995 Dona Ann McAdams

Brinca Charcos (High Waters) was an interactive performance project by Jennifer Monson and a group of health advocates and community organizers being trained at El Puente, a community human rights institution based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which serves and empowers residents of the diverse neighborhood. Monson worked collaboratively with the group of young people to develop dance and performance pieces that represented an awareness of their physical bodies in relation to their physical and social environments. Working together, they created a large-scale street performance in Williamsburg that incorporated the traditions of parades and the ensemble-feel of public demonstrations. Following the event, the audience was invited to participate with the performers by learning and adapting their dance and movement skills.