Ed Woodham in All the Odd Places
The beloved artist and public art champion discusses his work, activism, and queerness in an interview with Hyperallergic.
Just when you're about to give up on this power-hungry, money-obsessed, star-fucking art world and its market-driven media, people like Ed Woodham come along and restore your faith in what art can do for society.
The decades-long practice of the 69-year-old Atlanta-born artist, curator, and educator is thoroughly rooted in community. He's most known for leading Art in Odd Places, a public art group he originally co-founded as part of Atlanta's cultural programming for the 1996 Summer Olympics. After the September 11 attacks, when he was living in New York, Woodham relaunched the group as a response to the dwindling of public space and the quashing of civil liberties under the condemnable PATRIOT Act of 2001. Since 2005, the group has held carnavalesque, DIY annual street festivals — first in the Lower East Side and East Village, and since 2008, along 14th Street in Manhattan — that have become a New York cultural fixture. For its 20th edition last year, the festival invited artists, collectives, and the general public to participate in the defiant act of "doing nothing" as the first step of changing everything.
In addition to Art in Odd Places, Woodham leads a workshop titled "Social Malpractice Art" at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. There, he teaches students how to create "secretly coded work to challenge unchecked power" through off-kilter performances and interventions that call out corporate America's artwashing of its capture of public space.
"Artists became cultural placeholders — helping rebrand a neighborhood while the conditions for removing the people who lived there were quietly assembled," he wrote in an opinion for Hyperallergic in March. "Experiences like this forced a difficult question: What happens when the language of social practice becomes a tool of the very systems it once hoped to challenge?"
And now you know why most public art sucks.
In what follows, Woodham and I discuss his youth in Atlanta, his unflinching art activism, and his life as a badass queer elder.
Hyperallergic: When and how did you come out?
Ed Woodham: I came out quietly, undercover, with my first boyfriend and first sexual experience in 1976, America's Bicentennial year, as a freshman attending Middle Georgia College in Cochran, Georgia. Within a few months, we moved into the same dorm room together. We were both actors in the theater department and cast members in the musical 1776. I played Thomas Jefferson. He played the dying drummer boy who sang the haunting ballad "Momma Look Sharp." Our relationship was an open secret, very much a "don't ask, don't tell" arrangement before that phrase entered the national vocabulary.
We lived in the heart of the Bible Belt. Theater people were generally more accepting than the broader college community, but acceptance had limits. Although we were in love, we lived with the constant danger of being discovered. Fear was simply part of the architecture of daily life.
H: Oh, you poor man, why did you play Thomas Jefferson?
EW: Because every Southern queer kid should ultimately confront the Thomas Jefferson propagandized hagiography. Honestly, I have no idea. At the time, I was a tall, skinny, nelly queen who could hit the high notes, trying to survive the Bicentennial. In retrospect, it's hilarious. I was daringly in love while portraying a disturbing founding father of American heterosexual mythology. Meanwhile, my boyfriend sang the saddest, most beautiful song in the show and brought down the house every night at the first-act finale.
