Bryant Park Shoeshine, 2016
42nd Street and 5th Avenue, Manhattan, New York City
For this participatory public performance, I bought a pair of all-white Air Force 1's and received a shoeshine at the stand on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The work embeds itself in the practice of shoe-shining to explore it's material and metaphorical qualities, and it's relationship to aspects of identity, power, and labor.
Bryant Park Shoeshine
public performance
42nd Street and 5th Avenue, Manhattan
New York, New York
2016
In this project, I had a pair of all-white Air Force 1's shined at the stand on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Through disrupting the status-quo (by my gender, the choice of shoes, etc.) the performance presented an opportunity for spectators to look more closely at the ritual of shoe-shining, and to explore the wider implications of inequity, power, and race that the act reveals.
