BIO

Ed Woodham

For more than 25 years, Ed Woodham has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions in a variety of media and cultural contexts. He is best known for founding and producing the annual Art in Odd Places festival which has become a fixture of the New York Arts calendar and is beginning to enfranchise globally. An accomplished visual and performance artist, puppeteer, curator, and lecturer, Mr. Woodham draws on a diverse range of influences from Fluxus and Situationism to Jane Jacobs, John Cage, and Gordon Matta-Clark. He employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style to encourage and provoke greater and deeper consideration and critical engagement with the urban environment.

As founder and director of the arts collective 800 East in Atlanta Georgia (1990-98), he brought an artistic perspective to civic engagement, turning a derelict post-industrial space into a community arts center, reviving and sustaining both an artistic collective and the local neighborhood in the process. 800 East served as a base of operations not only for a living, studio, gallery, and performance space for local artists and monthly community art shows, but as a nexus for visiting artists and a base of operations for a series of factory shows and urban interventions. Since moving to Brooklyn in the late 1990s, Mr. Woodham has continued his practice, creating a network of artists, sponsors, and city administrators to make Art in Odd Places a signature annual cultural event of the city.