Grid Scenes

A performance marking the 200th anniversary of the 1811 Manhattan Grid. The Commissioners’ Grid began at Fourteenth Street, the first street in the grid to span from the Hudson to the East Rivers. Professional and amateur performers, as well as artists, offered a condensed two-hour event beginning at sunset on Fourteenth Street — a partnership between Art in Odd Places and urban@newschool celebrating and imagining the future of the grid.

We aim to renew the grid to create new socio-cultural relations to the region’s natural resources. Our relationship with climate, food, animals and with ourselves is up for discussion. The under utilized and overlooked spaces of our city afford environments for a wilder imagination. The Urban Festival seeks to raise a discussion about ecological and social inclusion in our dense city grid.

Grid Scenes was a collaboration between Harmattan Theater and the course ‘Cinemetrics’, alongside curated installations from ‘Urban Interventions’, work by The BroLab Collective, and Hydrophony — a chance-sound installation of underwater field recordings taken from both the Hudson and East rivers, by artists Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter.

Photographs by Joshua Kristal.