IN, OF, AND CROSSING ESSEX
Essex Street Market & Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York, NY | April-June 2018
Artists: Sonia Louise Davis, Dillon de Give, Hatuey Ramos-Fermín
In Fall of 2018, Essex Market prepared for its relocation as part of the Essex Crossing real estate development. At this time of transition, In, Of, and Crossing Essex presented three artist projects by Sonia Louise Davis, Dillon de Give, and Hatuey Ramos-Fermín. The artists’ projects offered participatory encounters which engaged both the site of the market itself, and the community of shoppers and vendors who make it a unique part of New York City’s history. Visitors had opportunities to explore the public and private histories of the Market through the stories, perspectives, and lived experiences of the people who work and shop there every day.
Sonia Louise Davis’ Become Together Freedom School is an experimental platform to cultivate critical improvisation and a container for collective study. This first iteration of the project featured workshops and a printed guide that stimulated site-specific interrogations through abstract and ephemeral actions. The artist opened up her own methodology by facilitating score-making and authentic movement in a number of public sessions, using participants’ inherent improvisational skill sets and imaginative strategies as starting points. In addition, a printed zine offered text-based prompts and activities for market visitors to respond to on their own as they explored the market and its surroundings.
In Dillon de Give’s project Go Between, the artist worked with a group of trained facilitators to collect and deliver messages from Essex Market. Facilitators were stationed inside Cuchifritos, where they met visitors and accompanied them on a stroll through the Market, and helped them formulate a message to send to anyone within the Lower East Side and, on special circumstances, New York City. Facilitators memorized and attempted to physically deliver the messages by reciting them to their intended recipients, creating an inter-personal telegraph service sending spoken postcards from Essex Market around the city.
For Messages to go, Hatuey Ramos-Fermín interviewed Essex Market’s vendors, learning about their experiences as business owners and documenting their unique perspectives on the role of the market within its neighborhood, the Lower East Side. Quotes from these interviews, featured on reusable shopping bags designed by Ramos-Fermín in consultation with vendors, were available to customers who purchased items at participating businesses throughout the market. As a result, the bags have become part of a larger network of visitors outside of the Market, amplifying the stories and anecdotes featured in their designs.
