When you walk down 14th Street this October, watch for signs that life isn’t as it has been.

For the second year, Art in Odd Places, NYC’s free annual public art and performance festival, gives daily life from Avenue C to the Hudson River an artistic twist. Under the rubric ‘SIGN”, over 60 artists, from New York and beyond, creatively engage the street, using ideas, imagination, humor, and politics to encourage its residents, workers, and visitors to experience it anew.

Projects include the ephemeral – real and imagined gay love letters left on a bench, dollar bills planted in an exploration of the gift, or handmade sculptures of dying silkworm moths on walls and signs – and the spectacular – video projections on windows of the street’s bawdy, protest history, an alternative election campaign or a satirical costumed race for the Arctic. It includes the simply odd –public napping, wearable sculptures in crochet and campy frills – and the oddly simple – tributes, through tour and installation, to the ordinary brick or to manholes, or a shamanic cleansing of the street by an artist with a broom.

“We invited artists to explore the freedoms of the public realm and find imaginative apertures in it,” say guest curators, Erin Donnelly and Radhika Subramaniam. “In 14th Street, we had a site uniquely calibrated to encourage art that manifests the signs of our times while also being a signpost toward future possibilities.” “Art in Odd Places continues New York’s tradition of grassroots artistic collaboration with grand ambitions,” says Ed Woodham, Director of Art in Odd Places.

WHO: Sixty plus artists and performers from around the world. Guest curators: Radhika Subramaniam and Erin Donnelly. Directed by Ed Woodham. Collaborating Organizations are openhousenewyork, School of Visual Art's Public Art Residency, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, free103point9’s Radio Festival NYC 2009, Theaterlab, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and ArtLog.com.

WHAT: Art in Odd Places 2009: SiGN is the 5th annual NYC festival featuring tours, performance, interventions, installations, video and more in public spaces.

WHEN: October 1 to October 26, 2009; for schedule, visit ArtInOddPlaces.org

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2009