Voices in the Street
- artandcakela
- Jul 20
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 20
The City of West Hollywood presents Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2025: VOICE with 35 artist projects that refuse to wait for permission
By Kristine Schomaker
I'm sitting here thinking about all the times I've stumbled across art in places it wasn't supposed to be. Like during the pandemic when you'd drive around LA and suddenly there's this installation in someone's front yard, or you're walking down an alley and there's performance happening that makes you stop and wonder what the hell you just witnessed.
That's exactly what's about to happen in West Hollywood this weekend.
Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2025: VOICE / West Hollywood—which everyone calls AiOP because art people love acronyms—is celebrating its 20th anniversary by completely taking over public spaces July 25-27. We're talking 35 artist projects scattered across Plummer Park, West Hollywood Park, and that iconic stretch of Sunset Boulevard where all the music history lives.
The timing feels urgent in a way that makes my chest tight.
This isn't about pretty pictures
Ed Woodham started this whole thing back in 1996 in Atlanta because he was pissed off. The Olympics were happening with all this international representation, but zero local voices. Fast forward to now and we're living through... well, gestures broadly at everything.
"The concept of voice has become more and more charged," Katya Usvitsky tells me. She's the associate producer who's been juggling city bureaucracy and artist logistics. "We're basically living in a police state with ICE raids. There are immigrant artists doing projects based on citizenship and belonging."
One of the artists, Jin Suk Choi, created a piece about helping students navigate the visa process. The brutal irony? He might not even be able to participate because his own student visa renewal is stuck in bureaucratic hell.
Another artist is doing an anti-ICE performance using actual ice.
You can't make this stuff up.
The democracy of stumbling across art
What gets me excited about projects like this is how they completely bypass the whole "am I art-world enough to enter this gallery" anxiety. You know that feeling—like you need to dress a certain way or know the right vocabulary before you're allowed to look at art.
Deborah Oliver, who curated this iteration, puts it perfectly: "There's a certain level of elitism to go into a gallery or a theater, or privilege. This is bringing art out into the public in a mindful, gentle way that we're not forcing art on people."
You might be walking through the park with your dog and suddenly encounter something that shifts how you see the world. Or you're stuck in Sunset Boulevard traffic (because when are you not?) and there's performance art happening right there on the street.
This connects to something bigger that's been happening across LA. Warren Neidich brought Drive-By-Art here from New York during the pandemic¹. Durden and Ray organized "We Are Here / Here We Are" with nearly 100 artists installing work from Santa Monica to the east side². The Terrain Biennial turns front lawns into exhibition spaces worldwide³.
All of these projects share this beautiful refusal to wait for institutional permission.
Sunset Boulevard as laboratory
The location choices here are so smart it makes me want to applaud city planning for once. (I know, I'm as shocked as you are.)
They're using that stretch of Sunset that starts at the Sunset Spectacular—you know, that weird digital billboard thing that the city both loves and finds embarrassing. Then it moves through all that music history: where Tower Records used to be (now it's Supreme), past the Viper Room, past Book Soup.
"You wouldn't believe how many artists are saying, 'I want to be near the Viper Room,'" Oliver laughs. "We can't have 20 people in front of the Viper Room."
I love that artists are gravitating toward these iconic spots. There's something about performing where Guns N' Roses played, or where people lined up for midnight album releases, that adds this layer of cultural memory to whatever's happening in the present moment.
When cities actually support artists (shocking, I know)
Here's what blew my mind: West Hollywood isn't just tolerating this festival—they're fully embracing it. The city council literally proclaimed July 25-27 as "Art in Odd Places Weekend." It's going into the city's official archive.
And—wait for it—the artists are getting paid.
"They're really doing it right," Usvitsky emphasizes. "It's not only about giving them exposure—we're all always working for exposure—but they're actually paying artists."
In a time when arts funding is getting slashed everywhere, this feels radical. West Hollywood is standing up and saying "this is what we support" when other cities are backing away from anything that might be considered controversial.
The Jacki Apple connection
This festival is dedicated to Jacki Apple, the performance artist and writer who died in 2021. She's the one who introduced Woodham and Oliver back in 2012 at a College Art Association event focused on art in the public realm.
I never met Jacki, but I keep thinking about how performance artists from her generation fought to legitimize the body as artistic medium, to make space for voices that weren't being heard in traditional art contexts. Now we're in this moment where those fights feel urgent all over again.
"We both felt like this was really an important direction to take," Oliver says about the dedication. Getting the city to officially recognize Jacki in the press release and city agreement took months of bureaucratic navigation, but Woodham made it happen.
What actually happens when art meets the street
I talked to Woodham about what it's like when performance art collides with regular Tuesday afternoon energy, and he gets this thoughtful look: "Don't be offended that no one stops to see what you're doing, because they have 3 jobs, and they have 4 kids, and they're busy. But they might just out of the corner of the periphery of their eye, see something different in the usual way that they walk through a park, or through a street."
That peripheral vision moment—that's where the magic lives. Someone's rushing to pick up their kid from school and catches a glimpse of something that plants a seed. Maybe they don't stop, maybe they don't even consciously process it, but something shifts.
The artists who are participating have been telling Oliver things like "This show has given me something to look forward to again" and "working on this project was the first sign that there was light at the end of the tunnel."
One artist did pull out because of safety concerns for her family. That's the reality we're working in.
Community as resistance
When I look at the map of all 35 artist locations scattered across West Hollywood, I think about Oliver's description: "When they look at the Google Map and see every pin representing them, they realize this is a cohort coming together to express our voices, our engagement, our agency."
Each pin is an artist refusing to wait for permission. Each project is someone saying "my voice matters" in a time when that feels increasingly dangerous to claim.
There's something powerful about knowing you're not alone out there—that while you're performing or installing or activating space in Plummer Park, someone else is doing the same thing across town. It creates this network of artistic resistance that's both individual and collective.
The ripple effect
Woodham has been working on what he calls a "how-to guide" that he plans to release into the public domain. The idea is that anyone, anywhere, could use this framework to create their own version of AiOP 2025:Â VOICE / WEHO.
"It can be done anywhere by anyone," he explains. "What I teach when I do teach is not to wait—not to wait for recognition, not to wait on brick and mortar, not to wait for validation from institutions. Just do it."
I love this idea of democratizing the tools for public art intervention. Imagine if every city had artists activating public space, creating these moments of unexpected encounter, building community through creative expression.
What's happening this weekend
If you're in LA this weekend, here's what you need to know:
Friday, July 25: Plummer Park, 4-9pm Saturday, July 26: West Hollywood Park, 4-9pm Sunday, July 27: Sunset Boulevard between Sherbourne and N Doheny, 4-9pm
It's all free. You don't need tickets or special knowledge or the right outfit. Just show up and see what happens when artists take their voices to the street.
I'll be there with my camera, probably getting emotional about the whole thing. Because in times like these, when it feels like the world is falling apart, there's something deeply hopeful about artists coming together to say: we're here, we have something to say, and we're not waiting for permission to say it.
For locations and full artist information: voice.artinoddplaces.org
Sources:
Durden and Ray, "We Are Here / Here We Are" exhibition, May 16 – June 20, 2020