Postage Service

Zoë Cohen asks us to create our own activist art.

by Shaun Brady

Michael T. Regan COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS: Visual artist Zoë Cohen gathers friends and strangers alike to express themselves with magic markers. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The ways passers-by react to solicitation are familiar to any urban dweller: They either ignore it with a resolutely head-down, eyes-forward, earbuds-planted speed walk, or semi-apologetically demur.

But on a windy, gray May evening, Zoë Cohen was approaching strangers not to beg for money or pass out religious tracts, but to offer them the opportunity to make a drawing to express themselves about anything they had on their mind.

Cohen, a visual artist with an interest in social activism, conceived "Show Someone How You Feel About Something" when she returned to West Philly after earning her MFA from Brooklyn College in 2006. "Part of being a graduate student in the arts," Cohen says, "is getting inculcated into this belief system that you need to spend a lot of time alone in a room in order to make good art. ... This was sort of an assignment I was giving myself: How can I create a project where there's no way that I could possibly do it by myself, and it's not in a room, it's out there on the street?"

That concept found its first iteration through "The Listening Station," an installation consisting of two facing stools and a timer, designed so that two people can take turns listening and speaking. The idea for "Show Someone" is a different spin on a similar concept.

"It was the same basic framework: I want to think of something that brings some kind of creative experience to people in public spaces and changes the nature of public space. For this one, I was thinking about what kind of art activism brigade I could form."

She began gathering friends in Rittenhouse Square, approaching strangers with blank sheets of paper, magic markers, a list of addresses and a stack of envelopes. Those game for the experience could create a visual message for a politician, public figure or personal acquaintance, and at the end of the day Cohen would drop the images in the mail.

She was invited to re-mount the project at Old City's Powel House, with less satisfying results. "The kinds of people who were coming by were not as given to the same civic or activist impulses," Cohen says.

This third incarnation has altered the piece by adding a gallery component. Throughout May, Cohen and volunteers have spent every Monday evening and Sunday afternoon at West Philly's A-Space and Saturdays in Clark Park. They've compiled a month's worth of drawings that will be on view at the A-Space through this Saturday, when she'll hold a final Postage Party where participants can view the complete array and help seal up the drawings in envelopes. Postage largely comes out of Cohen's pocket, though she is taking donations.

Having work on display helps explain the project, Cohen says, but also encourages reluctant viewers to participate. "It gives people an entry into the project they wouldn't have otherwise. It gives people ideas, too. ... We get taught that you're not supposed to copy, but so much about art is being inspired, whether by the natural world or by other artists."

By mid-May, the walls of the A-Space were covered with dozens of drawings.Envelopes were addressed to the White House, Mayor Nutter, all three presidential candidates, the NRA and Pope Benedict, among others. Anti-gun messages dominated, along with calls for George Bush's ouster (one voiced by Fred Flintstone).

"Streets and trash and guns" are the issues Cohen has encountered most often. At the beginning of this particular evening, Nur Greene, a young woman of half-Palestinian descent, sat outside coloring the message "We cannot own time and space/ Only love can save this place" in bold colors, addressed to American U.N. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

Later, the project's more personal implications became clear when Nancy Iannitelli, a visual artist from Florida, stopped in. In town to care for her daughter-in-law hospitalized with cancer, Iannitelli created a drawing to "let her know that wherever I am, I'm thinking about her."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Final viewing and Postage Party, Sat., May 31, 5-9 p.m., free, A-Space, 4722 Baltimore Ave., showsomeone.blogspot.com, zoecohen.com.