Ed Woodham has been active in community art, education, and civic interventions across media and culture for over thirty-five years. A visual and performance artist, puppeteer, and curator, Woodham employs humor, irony, subtle detournement, and a striking visual style in order to encourage greater consideration of–and provoke deeper critical engagement with–the urban environment. Woodham created Art in Odd Places (AiOP) to present visual and performance art to reclaim public spaces in New York City and beyond. Art in Odd Places has been produced in Los Angeles CA, Boston MA, Indianapolis IN, Greensboro NC, and Orlando, FL in the U.S.; Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Sydney, Australia. AiOP was selected as a representative in the U.S. Pavilion, Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012.
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.
Woodham teaches workshops in politically based public performances at NYU Hemispheric Institute for EMERGENYC and at School of Visual Arts in NYC for City as Site: Public Art as Social Intervention. He was a 2013 Blade of Grass Fellow in Social Engagement. For summer 2014, Ed was selected for thedrawing(shed) residency IdeasFromElse[W]here to create a performance work in Lloyd Park, East London. He was a featured speaker for TEDxGowanus and TEDxIndianapolis in 2014. For 2016 he was commissioned to create a socially engaged work for Jamaica FLUX at The Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, NY and was awarded a commission by The Gowanus Public Arts Initiative to create The Keepers, in his longtime neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn. For 2-16- 2017, he was artist-in-residence at The Smith Gallery at Appalachian State University Art Department and produced High Country Spring Promenade – a public walking parade celebrating Boone, NC’s history & environment and the coming of Spring. For 2017-18 Ed was the UVA Studio Arts Board artist-in-residence at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.