ZOE STRAUSS
WORKS IN PROGRESS: MIAMI 2008

DREAM BABY DREAM: A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL
BY LORIE MERTES

Zoe Strauss is an installation artist and photographer from Philadelphia. Please see slides.

I saw the above on Zoe Strauss’s blog recently. She posted a minor rant about having to write grant applications and admitted to using the second sentence as her artist statement once. It’s cheeky but it’s forthright, which is the only way Zoe Strauss knows how to be.

Zoe’s an avid blogger, making it easy to see how passionate she is about things like baseball (Go Phillies!) and her dedication to social and political activism on both a local and global level. Her art is firmly grounded in, and connected to, these beliefs as well. In 1995, she established the Philadelphia Public Art Project (PAP), a one-woman organization dedicated to providing the citizen’s of Philadelphia with access to art in their everyday lives. Her installations took the form of staged tableaux and temporary murals on abandoned buildings including a celestial map of invented constellations, with stars named for “cowards, brave guys, stools and snitches, nice people, bastards, sonsabitches”—drawn from a list of depression era characters found in Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory. 1

Just before her thirtieth birthday, she came up with an idea for the ultimate in accessible public art: a large-scale installation of photographs beneath I-95, the interstate highway that looms over a large section of her South Philadelphia neighborhood. Despite having taken only a couple of photography classes in high school and community college, she set out with the new camera her partner and family bought for her, taking photographs for what she envisioned would be a ten year project. Her primary subjects were the people, buildings and street scenes in her immediate neighborhood and places she knows in Philadelphia.

The first Under I-95 exhibition was held in May 2001. Expansive in height, width and length—the area she shows in is about a block wide by two blocks long. She’s not positive, but she thinks using the space without permits might be illegal but is not planning on asking. Like most spaces under the highway, it’s a bit of a fringe area where kids hang out and drink and ride skateboards and the homeless sometimes find shelter but, for the most part, it’s an austere space punctuated by a forest of soaring concrete columns. Every year she hangs 231 different adhesive-backed, color prints covering every side of every one of the columns; it’s the same number every year because it’s every available side of each pillar. Held on a weekend in May, the show lasts only three hours and, at the end, people can peel the prints off the columns and take them home.

In it’s eighth year, the Under I-95 exhibition is now a major event drawing devotees from New York and Philadelphia’s art crowd who mix with the South Philadelphia residents and the occasional shopper passing through to the nearby Target. For those who can’t wait for what’s become a mad rush for favorites at the end, laser copies of the prints are available for sale for $5 each at a table manned by Zoe’s sister, friends or interns.

“Ms. Strauss’s images are not without tenderness, but their harsh, unblinking force is a bit like a punch in the face. They show us what most Americans don’t want to see.” — Roberta Smith 2

Works-in-Progress: Miami 2008 is a slideshow of recent images commissioned specifically for the show at World Class Boxing. The slideshow format allows for the images to exist as both individual compositions and a description of the broader project. It also has a sense of storytelling and “wish you were here” nostalgia that the static images don’t convey. In using the slideshow, Strauss consciously references artists such as Helen Levitt, who presented one of the earliest slideshows at MoMA in 1974, and Nan Goldin, whose epic slideshow, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, of nearly 800 images, depicts an intimate visual diary of Goldin’s circle of friends and lovers in the 1980s. For Strauss, the slideshows and the individual Under I-95 shows are all “details,” providing vigorously edited glimpses into the larger Philadelphia Public Art Project.

Zoe describes the decade-long project as “an epic narrative about every place, reflecting the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” 3 The project has grown beyond Philadelphia to include other cities: Camden, NJ; Las Vegas; Rural Southern Nevada; Terre Haute, IN; Biloxi and Gulfport, MS; Chicago; New York; NY; Muckleshoot Reservation, Pacific Northwest; Atlanta; Los Angeles; El Paso, TX; Miami; Denver; and Truth or Consequences, NM.

The subjects and subject matter depicted are oftentimes both formally beautiful and profoundly disturbing. Zoe shows us what we typically don’t want to see: an unsentimental view of the realities of urban blight, poverty, drug abuse, alternative lifestyles and prostitution in cities across the country. The myriad scars, bruises, tattoos, tattered mattresses, blood stains, filthy carpets, graffiti, trash and mangled street signs, while difficult to look at, are beautifully composed. Her portraits are emotionally evocative, addressing issues of identity, gender and the choices people make in adverse situations. Whether it’s for a few seconds, or part of an ongoing relationship, the exchange between photographer and subject produces images that radiate pride, dignity and self-respect. “There’s always a kind of voyeurism in photography,” Zoe says, “—it’s unavoidable, but I present these people with a great affection and as part of an interaction I’ve had with them. Not in a moment of grotesqueness, which is also possible, but that’s not how I see any of them. And I would hope that most others would also see it like that.” 4 In her forthright manner, Zoe has approached hundreds of complete strangers and asked them if she can photograph them. Whether they say yes or not, she feels it’s that moment of exchange that’s essential to the work.

The directness of that moment is distinctive. Zoe’s commitment to social documentation is closely aligned to the work of such street photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, WPA and New Deal photographers, Helen Levitt and Lisette Model, and the New York Photo League of the 1930s and 40s who were dedicated to a progressive social agenda. She pays strong homage to Levitt and William Eggleston’s wit, humor, and eye for beauty in the banal and bizarre. Focused on questions about how people choose their path and how much luck and circumstances shape lives, she shares a similarly uncompromising vision to record the difficulties people face in life that drove the work of another Philadelphia-born artist, Alice Neel (1900-1984).

Zoe’s images to date, now a vast archive, chronicle her experiences and wondering. With joyful exuberance, hope and compassion for pretty much everyone and everything, she continues to seek out the space in which experience happens and community is created. With the Bruce Springsteen mantra “dream baby dream” in mind, she is candid about what she hopes for, “… the strength to keep plugging away and an underlying positivity. Positive, but not unrealistic.” 5

Please see slides.

1 Strauss, quoted in www.zoestrauss.blogspot.com, March 11, 2005.
2 Roberta Smith, “Art Review, Zoe Strauss,” New York Times, June 8, 2007
3 Strauss quoted in www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public2/Stories/Videos/Zoe Strauss, Directed by Phillip Rodriguez and produced by City Projects, 2007.
4 ibid.
5 Zoe Strauss, “Interview with Steve Crist,” America, (Los Angeles: AMMO Books, LLC 2008), 7.

ZOE STRAUSS is an installation artist and photographer from Philadelphia, PA. Recent grants include a Leeway Foundation grant and a Pew Fellowship. In 2006 she had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philiadelphia and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. In 2007, she received a United States Artists Fellowship award.

LORIE MERTES is Director/Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia. Recent projects include: Alice Neel: Drawing from Life; Mary McFadden: Goddesses; IN REPOSE, and Facts, Fantasies and Fictions featuring Christian Curiel, Sarah McEneaney and Matthew Suib. Mertes was formerly Assistant Director for Special Projects and Curator at Miami Art Museum where she was on the curatorial and senior staff from 1994 to 2006.