The Giving Project

I met a bartender with a sociology degree who publishes his poetry under a pen name. I met multiple people in their thirties and forties living off of trust funds. I met retirees and professional actors, musicians, and photographers. In year one, before there was a Project, I met and have since mentored a younger artist who works on Orchard Street. Sharon Zukin and Marin Kosut are both correct that New York attracts and has attracted for generations people of a certain twenty-something age range, some post-college or post-relocation, and so I did meet many people in their late twenties and early thirties. I met many people who had a creative aspect to their lives: musicians, DJs, people in film production, visual artists, digital artists, game designers. Very few of them try to pay their bills via their creative work; it was another point of connection because it spoke to a common background where in supporting one self mattered as much as one’s creative output. I met many people involved in one form or another in the cannabis industry to pay their bills: security guards, delivery people, managers, owners, marketers, logistics people. I met people who sell clothes, people who own small businesses, people who prided themselves on being survivors in a hostile world, who would order soda water with bitters because the only cost was simply a tip to a sympathetic bartender. And these people were the ones who reminded me most of myself. I know why self-pride matters and how it sustains hope.

One of the most impactful moments came from a bartender who had no number in mind but who, upon randomly pulling the piece, broke into convulsive tears in the middle of the sidewalk on the Lower East Side and then hugged me. The night before, he had been thinking of his deceased grandfather. The number he pulled was very meaningful to that relative and his grandson to the point of making him break down in front of me because he saw that moment as confirming something that mattered to him about his relationship with his grandfather. I simply enabled this and got to witness it; I was as much a participant as he was.

Another memorable moment came at a restaurant where I gave a micro-canvas away to one of the waitstaff; a mother and small child, perhaps five or six years old, who were sitting next to me, witnessed this, and so I naturally used it as an opportunity to add two more participants to the Project. I have been able to give 30 or 40 pieces away to children, and their reactions, as I suspect many artists have experienced, are the ones I intentionally try to remember because of how pure the excitement and wonder. More importantly, in this case, it became an opportunity for one artist to talk to another, for the little girl herself was an artist. Those two moments only happened because I broke down the barriers that separate us, between waitstaff and customer, between parent and stranger, and most importantly, between young artist and older artist, for I still remember my first art teacher at five and his encouragement of me even now, five decades later.

Additionally, there were people who I met in previous years before the Project or during it who were no longer present because they were random people, and so there was no way to necessarily see them again. They were present at various locations, and they had moved, they had gotten a different job, or they had been fired; all the usual in-motion energy of human life takes place everywhere. New people replaced them; in some instances, those people became more closely part of my network. In other cases, not just people but entire places disappeared. People go out of business. Businesses change direction. There is only so much any archive can record.

In order to discuss whom I met, I have to draw some distinctions in the various groups of people to whom I gave these objects. There is a tranche of people who received these who are truly strangers, either because the piece was left for them or the interaction was literally a matter of seconds. In these I would intentionally make that moment about the person and the object. Outside of the Geo coordinates, the date and time of the interaction, I know virtually nothing else. The second group of people are those with whom the interaction was not as brief, but who I never saw again after those moments together. These interactions might have been a moment or two or they might have been several hours of time, but it was a one off in the sense that , it was meeting someone and becoming an acquaintance of another person briefly as one does. A third group of people either followed me on social media or in some fashion connected with me as an artist,and so we had an ongoing professional relationship, meaning they are interested in my artwork and in what I make . Some of these people have liked and followed me on social media accounts and purchased artwork from me as a result of becoming aware of me through this Project. A fourth group became the network in which I found myself.

A fifth group was people with whom I had relationships with outside of this Project. We interacted because I was a member of the neighborhood. This has not been a systematized programmatic project wherein simply because I met someone I gave them a piece of art. That is simply not the case as noted elsewhere in this document. I’m a very good member of the neighborhood. I take care of other people. I have an ongoing tug-of-war with multiple people who try to give me free things, and I then over-tip because of that, and those relationships have nothing to do with this Project whatsoever. They simply speak to, I think, who I am as a person when I’m simply trying to live on a day-to-day basis. Year three, in particular, the hottest summer recorded around the world, was very difficult for me physically because of ongoing chronic health issues. I found myself needing to be in the neighborhood in climate controlled areas for extended periods because of health reasons. I was not in shape to progress this Project sometimes because of how I felt. These people took care of me, looked after me, not because I was the artist in their lives, but because I was someone they had grown to know and cared about.

I can also discuss a bit how I found a certain commonality in many of the people with whom I did spend at least some time because of this Project. Almost everyone I met has some kind of creative endeavor that they do, and almost everyone pays their bills in some other way, which, like me, reduces them and their visibility. This makes them important to the ongoing working of the world around them. In Naked City, Zukin talks about a “creative class” who are imposing upon the city, but almost all of the people I interacted with don’t really live off of their creative endeavors. Rather, many, like me, worked as bartenders or servers, baristas or taxi drivers, in order to afford themselves creative freedoms. Others worked in offices or worked remotely from home. The creative skill range included audio, visual, performative, culinary arts and more. I met many people with degrees in various humanities disciplines and people who had previously studied in the sciences but who had pursued creative areas because they were intensely interested in and questioning the place they were in in their careers. They found themselves needing to support themselves and those around them in ways that required their bodies to be instrumentalized into function. Based on some of the conversations and the reactions that I had, I think part of the reason this Project resonated so much was that I truly was an older version of many of these folks. I truly had done the work that they were doing, and I had done creative work in their field as I have been across many fields. I think it’s a combination of the authenticity of the giver, of residence, of experience, and sharing that with the receivers. Giving to a stranger works, and certainly creating a longer-term relationship with someone who started as a stranger is only possible, if there is some kind of connection from the moment of contact.