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Today we're in New Orleans to meet Brandan Odums.
He's an artist, a filmmaker, a writer,
and the founder of 2-Cent Entertainment,
an organization that encourages young people to use film,
video, and social media to express their ideas
about issues they care about.
And Brandan is the mastermind behind Exhibit Be,
this five-story collaborative street art exhibition that's
in an unoccupied apartment building in the Algiers
neighborhood.
He transformed another housing complex in 2013
into the site of Project Be, a series of large scale
painted portraits of civil rights heroes.
While that project was largely closed due to safety concerns,
this one will be open to the public for a short time
as part of Prospect.3, a biannual art exhibition that's
spread throughout the city.
Brandan and other talented artists
took this largely overlooked site and gave it a new life.
And he's going to ask you to do something similar.
Peace.
This is Brandan B. Mike Odums and this
is your art assignment.
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I was always taught in school the way
I interpreted the message from my teachers
were if you're not selling art or if your art is not
on display somewhere, then, you know, you're not an artist.
So when I wasn't selling anything
and when my art wasn't on display, I was like,
I was discouraged, I guess.
And here comes me paying attention
to street art, which existed beyond all those rules,
you know.
It wasn't, it wasn't created for attention or glory or money.
Because you didn't know who was doing it.
They couldn't sell it, so I was like, wow,
this was amazing to me that this was existing beyond these rules
that I thought dealt with art.
So I became attracted to that to the point
where I wanted to duplicate it.
I wanted to do it as well.
The first space I painted in, it was more so me
like exploring something new.
So I didn't really, I didn't really
think beyond the surface outside of just me being
in this new space painting in this new medium.
The second project, Project Be, really
became about understanding what art can do as a function.
I started to see how this space that was forgotten,
people started to come to it.
And what did that mean?
And how, just as simple as paint was able to transform a space.
And not only me, but other artists
all started to come to this space.
It wasn't like somebody was going
to give us a check at the end of the day,
but everybody's just out there having fun
and people were coming out and experiencing it.
And it was this idea, this alchemy
that happened where we transformed that space
and that was something new.
And then with this particular space,
it was a different feeling because in this space,
there was a long.
The space at the Florida housing project
was a new apartment building.
It had just been built before Katrina,
so it was not even occupied.
It was partially occupied before the storm,
so a lot of the spaces were like brand new apartments.
So we didn't really have to come across people belongings
or step over people's objects that they had left.
When we came here, that's what happened here.
Like, this particular space, you couldn't avoid the idea
that this has a long story, that people used to live here.
That this was once inhabited by lots of people.
And so that forced us to think about,
what does that mean that a space can exist for this long
and be empty.
Your assignment is to be an alchemist.
It's to be an artistic alchemist and to transform an object.
It can be anything.
It could be something discarded on the side of the road
or it could be something you find
in your basement and your attic, or it
could be something you find in the trash.
But use art, use paint, use your paintbrushes, your pencil.
Use something and you transform that object
into something else.
And think about what that story is behind that object.
Like, how did it get in your hands?
Where did it start from and how did it get to where it is now?
Or try to figure out how you can transform it into something
that's now valuable.
Take something that was no longer valuable
and make it valuable.
So John, you're kind of a sucker for abandoned spaces.
I do enjoy an abandoned place here and there.
I've broken into slash visited a lot of them in my life.
I am a big fan of photography of certain abandoned spaces.
And why is it, you think, that you like it so much?
I don't know.
I mean, some of it is that everything that we build
is going to fall apart, so it's a way of glimpsing that future.
Some of it is I'm interested in the world that
once was and no longer is, and that's a way of visiting it.
Yeah, there's something really seductive about it.
But we aren't the first generation
to be interested in ruins.
In fact, there was a whole movement in the 18th century,
a kind of ruin mania.
Right, Diderot wrote about it.
He was like, "we contemplate the ravages of time,
and in our imagination we scatter
the rubble of the very buildings in which we
live over the ground; in that moment solitude and silence
prevail around us, we are the sole survivors
of an entire nation that is no more.
Such is the first tenet of the poetics of ruins."
So I guess that's what I love.
I love the poetics of ruins.
Yeah, that's really lovely.
But what I really appreciate about this assignment
is that it works on several different scales.
Like Brandan could work with an entire abandoned building,
but you could sort through your basement
or your attic or the trash and find something to work with.
Yeah.
That reminds me.
Don't break the law.
We are not telling you to break into an abandoned building.
No.
Although there are artists who have done that to great effect
in the past, including my favorite artist of all time who
I would leave you for if he were still alive,
Gordon Matta Clark.
I don't even blame you.
SARAH URIST GREEN (VOICEOVER): Gordon Matta Clark
studied architecture in the 1960s
but spent most of his short life dismantling buildings
rather than creating new ones.
He called this anarchitecture and is best
known for his building cuts in which he used chainsaws
to carve into abandoned buildings.
For splitting, he took a house in Englewood, New Jersey that
had been slated for demolition and sliced two vertical lines
through it.
He then jacked the entire structure up
and off its foundation, tipped one side back,
and literally split the house in two.
Matta Clark filmed the process and took photographs
from inside the bisected building.
The cuts allowed daylight to spill
into the previously sealed off structure
and exposed interior surfaces that bore
traces of previous residents.
What he called his undoing of the building
was and is rife with metaphorical resonance,
as if he were creating space for the house's spirits to escape.
It was demolished just months later.
And nothing of the work remained.
Brandan is asking us to perform a similar transformation
to take an abandoned item and think about its past life,
to make it into something different, something
transcendent, if even for a short time.
So the object I chose to transform is a tire.
You can find them all over the place,
they're all over the streets around here.
So, found one and I'm going to try to figure out
what I could do to it.
The first thing I'm going to do is clean it
and then I'm going to just paint it.
A teacher approached us and said, well, can
we do a tour with our students.
And we were like, oh, this is perfect.
So we started thinking about, OK,
what could we do with the students
while they were here to sort of get them
in the same vein of what we have done.
All throughout the street out there is tons of tires.
And a few of the artists, as a part of this exhibit,
kind of were working with the tires.
Repurposing the tires, cutting them up,
and turning them into sculptures and painting them.
So like, it'll be cool to challenge
the young people to think what they could do with these tires.
You know, we just leave some art supplies,
and what would you do with the tires.
So one tour, we left some tires out, we had all the paint.
And we kind of gave them instructions
about what street art is.
It's about identity, it's about transformation.
And we told them we wanted you to do that with these tires.
We want this tire to become you.
Like we want to look at this tire
and say, oh, I know exactly who did that one.
That's you right there.
So we wanted them to transform it and make
it a part of their identity.
And we broke them into groups and each group of three
would take one tire and they would just paint on it.
And it became an exciting thing.
Like the tires would become transformed, become colorful,
become filled with words, filled with life.
And then we would leave them around the site
and point them out to people as they
do the next tour, like, oh, some students your age,
they created those tires over there.
So that's kind of what we have them do.
We have like an hour to just sort of sit and play
with the tire and transform them using whatever colors, whatever
mediums they want to use.
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Sorry.
I'm good, I'm good.
I just keep thinking about it, it's like, but it's good.
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