I’m a New Yorker; I swear to it, it’s true. But I’m still unfamiliar with most parts of the city. Before this class, whenever I took trips to the city, my friends and always ended up visiting the same places – Times Square, Central Park, Harold Square… I mean they had all we needed anyway: good food/green space/karaoke bars. But it wasn’t that I never ventured anywhere else. I’d been to Greenwich Village a few times, OK one time before the project. At the time though, I hadn’t realized the area was called Greenwich Village, I had assumed that the rest of the population of New York had given the region the same name I had “that area around NYU.”
I managed to meet up with the rest of my group at Washington Square Park, after a couple of city slickers pointed me in the wrong direction. The arch looked amazing all lit up at night. “There,” I thought. “That’s art.” Then went to a coffee shop, where we sat and ate along a window, staring blatantly at the passersby. I was convinced some artsy-looking fellow would walk in and sit down. One actually did. This fellow mentioned an artist in the area that sits on stoops and paints the community around him. What else did he consider art? “The old buildings and all that, that’s art.”
We walked back to Washington Park where we came across an NYU theater group dressed in mid 20th century clothing chanting about the evils of Prohibition and the like. They were obviously too preoccupied to interview but I’m sure if had interviewed them they would’ve told us that their performances are prime examples of art in the Village.
We then did the unthinkable: an infiltration of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. I walked into the building, right up to the security guard and on the spot made up some mumbo-jumbo about an arts seminar that had to be worked on. Too easy.
Walking through the gallery, I saw mostly photographs, and nothing really stood out to me. While we were in the Tisch school we stopped a student and asked him where we could find some artwork in the Village. “You won’t find any around here,” he said. “Unless you’re in this building.” He sounded kind of uninformed for a student studying art in the area but I was still very grateful for his opinion.
And I didn’t think of it until now, but people of Greenwich Village are particularly fashion-forward, even for New Yorkers. The residents’ individuality is showcased through their clothing. Scarves, boots, and brightly colored tights; standout accessories strategically placed here and there. Their clothing creates an expression, sometimes even a message. And it can be deemed as art because that’s what art is, creatively putting something together to display a message, even if that message is as simple as “I like stockings with patterns on them.”
