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.
H: Has the art community felt open to you? Have you found it accepting?
EW: Like most of my experiences with the art world, I've approached it from an independent position, including my queerness. I've never been particularly interested in seeking validation from social ecosystems, institutions, academia, the market, or the media, either as an artist or as a queer. Over the years, I've watched both the art world and segments of the queer community capitulate to gatekeepers, branding, and market forces. In the process, too much of the radical imagination, risk, and transformative potential of both has been diminished. I've always been more interested in the margins, where people invent new ways of seeing and being.
H: Admirable, but it’s harder to pay the bills on the margins. Have you never desired market success?
EW: I've certainly fancied paying rent, buying groceries, and avoiding panic attacks when opening the mailbox. But I've never purposely desired market success, celebrity success, or culture-world success because I've been keenly suspicious of the terms and conditions attached to it. What I've aspired to is integrity and success. I've hoped to be beneficial and useful. I wanted to make work that remained true to itself and created possibilities for me, artists, audiences, and communities that might not otherwise exist. I've observed artists, organizations, and institutions posing dangerous questions, but ultimately protecting a brand. Once that happens, imagination and honesty are silenced. I've been fortunate to have a long expedition creating work that mattered to me, even when it didn't make financial sense. Art in Odd Places certainly falls into that category.
That said, if a wealthy collector would like to support radical public art, I remain completely open to personal growth.
H: Who are your mentors? Did you have queer mentors?
EW: In Atlanta, I found mentorship through TABOO, a provocative queer artist collective founded by Larry Jens Anderson, Michael Venezia, King Thackston, and David Fraley. Frustrated by the conservatism of the Atlanta art scene, TABOO used satire, humor, and performance to confront AIDS, sexuality, gender politics, Southern identity, and other subjects that many galleries considered unshowable.
H: What does mentorship mean to you?
EW: Teaching continues to provide some of my most meaningful mentorship relationships. I don't see mentorship as a one-way exchange. My approach is deeply influenced by Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire believed knowledge emerges through shared inquiry, experimentation, and dialogue. The hierarchy between teacher and student dissolves into mutual learning, critical thinking, and collective humanization.
Other important mentors include Linda Mary Montano, Bonnie Stein, William Pope L., Radhika Subramaniam, LuLu LoLo, Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM), and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib.
H: How does your queerness manifest itself in your art?
EW: My queerness has given me fortitude, perseverance, and perspective. Growing up queer in the Deep South during the 1960s and '70s, amid nationalism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia, shaped the way I see the world and myself.
In 1980, I fled to New York City seeking psychological, sexual, and creative sanctuary. I arrived just as the East Village arts scene was flourishing. Many of the artists, performers, and dreamers who became my chosen family were soon devastated by AIDS. The epidemic was not only a public health catastrophe. It was a catastrophe of dignity. Friends and lovers were treated as lepers, abandoned by institutions, and made to feel disposable because of who they loved. I watched brilliant, beautiful people disappear while being told, implicitly and explicitly, that their lives mattered less. That experience remains embedded in my work. It taught me how quickly humanity can be withdrawn from those deemed inconvenient. It also taught me the power of community, resistance, humor, and care.
H: What's a queer artwork that's important to you?
EW: The "NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt," initiated by Cleve Jones in 1987, remains one of the most important queer artworks. The monumental work is deeply meaningful to me because it transforms grief into a vast, collective testament to humanity: an overwhelming and undeniable expression of remembrance, community, and resilience.
I'm also continually inspired by the art and activism of Audre Lorde, Stephen Varble, Agosto Machado, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, David Wojnarowicz, Larry Levan, Lady Bunny, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, and Edmund White. Each, in their own way, expanded the possibilities of queer cultural expression while refusing respectability as a prerequisite for visibility.
H: What does Pride Month mean to you?
EW: This is a difficult question.
Having lived through more than 50 years of queer history, Pride Month often feels complicated to me. I remember when being visibly queer could cost you your family, your job, your housing, your safety, or your life. I remember the AIDS crisis, when our community was abandoned, mocked, feared, and treated as disposable while thousands died. Pride wasn't a celebration then. It was a declaration that we existed and refused to disappear. Today, much of Pride feels disconnected from that history. Too often it has become a marketing season, a rainbow-wrapped product that offers visibility without accountability. The corporations, institutions, and politicians eager to celebrate us in June are often absent when queer people, especially trans people, are under attack the other 11 months of the year.
Throughout my life, I've watched certain members of our community repeatedly pushed to the margins, even within queer spaces themselves. Trans people, particularly trans people of color, have carried an enormous share of the struggle while receiving a fraction of the resources, recognition, and protection. What I value about Pride is not the branding. It's the resistance. It's the refusal to be erased. It's the artists, activists, caretakers, troublemakers, and visionaries who continue to imagine a more expansive world than the one we've inherited. At its best, Pride is not a celebration of assimilation. It's a reminder that our differences are not a problem to be solved. They are a source of creativity, resistance, and collective power. We will not be constrained or erased.
H: Do you feel connected to upcoming queer artists and artwork?
EW: Absolutely.
Art in Odd Places and my teaching practice continually connect me to extraordinary emerging and established queer artists. These relationships keep me curious, challenged, and hopeful. The Leslie-Lohman Museum consistently presents boundary-pushing exhibitions that amplify queer voices and histories. Visual AIDS continues to produce urgent exhibitions and programs that remind us of the power of art to confront erasure and sustain community. The younger artists I encounter are often fearless in ways that inspire me. They remind me that queerness is not a fixed identity but an evolving conversation.
H: What are you working on these days?
EW: On July 11, I'll premiere "Love Saves the Day," a short documentary marking the first anniversary of my sologamist wedding to myself, which took place on June 15, 2025, at KoKo Lot in Brooklyn. In August, I'll be an artist-in-residence at Cold Hollow Sculpture Park in Enosburg Falls, Vermont. I'll spend time wandering its 200 acres of remarkable landscape while developing new work and engaging with the surrounding community.
I've also been working on Art in Odd Places 2026: UTOPIAS, the 21st edition of the public art festival, which will take place September 26 and 27 along 14th Street in New York City. This fall, I'll teach the third iteration of "Social Malpractice" at the School of Visual Arts. The project operates as a speculative think tank that imagines a future in which independent cultural expression is tightly regulated, asking participants to explore creative resistance strategies before they become necessary. From December through January 2027, I'll exhibit a series of silkscreen prints alongside paintings by queer New York artist Angela Murel in fisura at Galería LANDS in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.
