mohaiemen

Wooster Street [2022]

Digital video (color, sound), 20’28”
Art For the Future, Tufts University
Website
Publication

Featuring the voice of Judy Blum Reddy; Bruno Blum, Home Movies (1945-1970); Jonas Mekas, I leave Chelsea Hotel (1967); Jonas Mekas, Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992). Blum excerpts courtesy of Judith Blum Reddy. Mekas excerpts courtesy of Estate of Jonas Mekas and Re:Voir.

Wooster Street is an afternoon conversation between Naeem and Judy Blum Reddy, at her home–the Fluxus Building was known as the birthplace of Soho’s artist community (and now a lonely remnant of that time). It also represents the webs of happenstance and connectivity that hold hope for beautiful accidents in artist communities. While researching the MoMA archive for Artists Call, Naeem found three submitted slides with familiar names– “Z. Hashmi,” “K. Reddy,” and “J. Blum.” When Erina Duganne learned that J. Blum was Judy Blum Reddy, still living in the original home in Soho that she shared with the late Krishna Reddy, she reached out to include her work from the original exhibition. The original piece shown at Artists Call was not found, but a temporally proximate work was included.

Naeem’s conversation with Judy led to tracking down clips from Mekas’ vast oeuvre of films to find the rare moment in which the Wooster Street building, as well as regular visitors Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Andy Warhol, and Mekas appear on screen. The visual connective tissue for the overall film is home movies filmed by Judy’s father Bruno Blum between 1945 and 1970. The film archives of Wooster Street have not yielded, as of this writing, traces of other fellow travelers of Judy, including Zarina, Ana Mendieta, Camille Billops, James Hatch, Jon Hendricks, Howardena Pindell, and members of the feminist art gallery A.I.R.

Roslyn Bernstein and Shael Shapiro’s Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo (2010), discusses the sprawling history of how Lithuanian artist George Maciunas created Soho's first artist co-ops on the upper floors of four buildings he purchased on Wooster Street in the 1960s and 70s. While upstairs was “illegal” artist lofts, the downstairs floor was dedicated to the Jonas Mekas-led theater of the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, with the participation of an experimental film-making group led by Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol. In 1974, the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque space became home to Anthology Film Archives, with weekly screenings and live performance art, including Joan Jonas's Mirage (1976). Given the many strands of Fluxus and its subsequent artist movements, Maciunas was often embroiled in heated debates with other artist members about the direction, ideology, and coherence of artist movements.  He eventually left Manhattan and passed away at the age of 47 in 1978. The following year the artist's residential spaces created by him on Wooster Street finally became legal.

Judy Blum Reddy is one of the remaining original residents of the Wooster Street artist-run coops.