Nicolina ART

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Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.



By James Maher

Name: Nicolina Johnson
Occupation: Street Artist
Location: Portal Zero (Outside the Bean), 3rd Street and 2nd Avenue
Time: 6 p.m. on Monday, April 15

I grew up in Seattle. When I was young I drew all over my parents’ house and all over the walls. I would take a permanent market down the hallway and onto their lampshades and into the bottom of their shoes. They finally were like, “You cannot do this anymore. Please don’t draw anywhere in the house. You can have your room to draw in.” And so I covered every square inch with detailed drawings and poems and secret codes. Even when I was like seven years old I made a little symbol and I put it all around the neighborhood. It was a weird beginning to street art.

I moved to New York in 2002 and to the East Village in 2003. I wanted to see the whole world but didn’t have a lot of money. I just had enough to go to one place and New York was the one place you could go where the whole world was. I wanted culture.

I was a waitress for many years working at the Kitchen Club in SoHo and at a sushi restaurant. I worked a lot of really bad jobs and I eventually got fired from the Kitchen Club. I was devastated and didn’t know what I was going to do with my life until I came to the realization that if I didn’t try art at that point, then there was nothing I could do. I said I would do whatever it took just to make my living painting or making art somehow. 

So I started doing face painting in Central Park for kids and six months after that I painted my first window — at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. That was the beginning of Paint The Town. It started spreading down the block and so I put a portfolio together. Now we have over 40 clients all over the City.

Art spreads like a happy virus. If you paint one guy’s shop, then the guy across the street wants it. We just did a project last year in Rio de Janeiro where we painted one boat in a harbor of 60 and then the guy next to us was like, “Hey can you paint my boat?” We ended up painting 58 fishing boats and working with 45 different artists. It was a floating gallery.

I do a project called the Hearts of the World for the Lower Eastside Girls Club. They were the first ones to give me a chance and now it’s been all over the world. It’s a collaborative project with kids from around the world, basically asking them to paint what’s in their hearts inside the panel of the stylized anatomical heart. I silkscreen the outline for them and then they can paint in whatever they want. 

Recently I did it at an orphanage for blind people in Beijing. I had no idea what to expect and so I outlined the hearts with yarn so they could feel the edges. And one of the children, who was around 7, painted the whole heart blue and I asked him what he was painting and he said he was painting the sky. And then he painted a yellow sun and a green forrest and white clouds. And then he painted over everything in black. And I said, “What are you Painting?” and he looked up at me with these cloudy eyes and a big smile on his face and he said, “I paint the darkness.” I asked him why he painted the darkness and he said, “The darkness is very beautiful. There are many color lights in the darkness.” He painted all of the things he couldn’t see and then he covered it up in the darkness.

I’ve painted on boats, on pedicabs in Central Park, a Tap Tap in Haiti, which are these big, brightly colored taxi-buses, I painted a tour boat in Chile, an Ascensor, which is like a cable car, a few trucks, a piano in Tompkins Square, a canoe. I love to paint moving objects because it will travel to different places and lots of people will see it. It also brings in another level of life and action. I’ve always wanted to paint an airplane. So if anyone has one…

Portal Zero is an introduction to a new project that I’m doing in the East Village with Perola Bonfanti. It was a test to see how many people would use the QR code and to see people’s perception of it. Way more people than we thought used it. Within just a couple of months we had a few hundred people scan it. The official opening is in July. You have to start at Portal Zero outside of the Bean [on East Third Street and Second Avenue]. You scan the QR code and then either answer a question or complete a task and then you can pass through the Portal to the next one.

James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.

 

The Third-Annual NYC Undercover, You-Might-Be-Arrested, Clandestine Errantry Trespassing Adventure Party - Part 1

Soon I am heading back to New York after spending 3 months traveling abroad in Mexico, Cuba, Haiti and Brazil. Spring is by far my favorite season to be in NYC. The streets come alive with happy people liberated from their coats after freezing their asses off all winter. This spring I am most excited about the 13 Portals experience which will take place in the East Village over Spring/Summer/andFall. In the meantime, I’ll tell you a story about a party we threw one spring.

To protect the innocent and/or the guilty, the following may or may not be true~

My friend Nathan Austin, who is one of the sharpest and slickest cats I know, told me of an empty storage room that sits atop a tower on the Williamsburg Bridge. We went that night at 2am climbing over a small gate and then a tall gate and then over a tricky door at the center of the bridge under the towers on the Manhattan side. From there it was a majestic climb up seven flights of stairs overlooking the sparkling East River along the glowing Manhattan skyline. At the top was a manhole secured with a chain and padlock, cracked just enough for us to squeeze through. 

The Williamsburg Bridge. The storage room I am speaking of is at the top of the tower pictured in the foreground. (Photo courtesy of AmericasLibrary.gov)

The space was spectacular. I was freaking out.. The cables of the bridge run through the middle of it and a catwalk connects an identical room on the other side of the bridge tower. This place was magical. Nathan had the smashing and gutsy idea to do a secret party there. I imagined that. 30 people. Get them over the fences, the door, up through the manhole. To share a moment in that space with 30 people all experiencing it for the first time would be pretty sweet. 

Looking out the tiny windows of the storage room with a view down Delancey street (Photo by Tod Seelie)

So we decided to go for it. We picked a date, I made a little poster, we called it the Third Annual New York Under-Covered Errantry Clandestine You-Might-Get-Arrested Trespassing Adventure Party. We told the 30 RSVPS to head down to this Mexican Restaurant on Grand Street at 1 am to ask the bartender for a 1,000 year old egg. 

If you were going you would wander down to Grand and Suffolk and you would ask Bobby at La Flaca’s for this egg and he would tell you, “Well, Were fresh outta 1,000 year-old eggs, but here, have a fortune cookie.”

You would crack open your fortune and find the message, 

You soon will be on top of world

You will met a agent

Follow the rainbow

Upon stepping outside, you would notice the stringy beginnings of a very long rainbow. And so you follow it~

To be continued…

The long stringy rainbow leading to the bridge

The Third-Annual NYC Undercover, You-Might-Be-Arrested, Clandestine Errantry Trespassing Adventure Party - Part 2

…Continued  (Photos by Tod Seelie)

So you follow the rainbow down the street, around the corner, across the road, around the block, down the way, and finally up the ramp of the Williamsburg Bridge, where Agent Blu awaits. Slowly, one by one, 29 others join you at the top of the ramp where you stay until agent Blue sends you over to Agent Verde, (Nathan) who waits, posted mid-bridge across from the gates under the towers. Agent Indigo stands around the corner keeping an eye on the bridge traffic as Verde gets you over the fence to Agent Naranja. You are led to a corner just out of the view of the bridge traffic before Naranja sends you up the many flights of stairs to Agent Rojo (me). I get the privilege of welcoming you to the party. 

The room is candle-lit and enlivened with the sounds of harmonium and Indian drum. After everyone arrives to the room safely Nathan follows. The last to come up, he closes the manhole behind him. Now we are virtually undetectable. We serve chocolate covered strawberries and a special ginger concoction while people sit on the floor in silence, whispers and conversation. Indian music fills the room with a peaceful presence.

But not every one made it that night. We had five different performances that were supposed to take place up there far above the East River and each one canceled on us the day of. Out of our crowd of 30 all made it to the top except one girl who bailed upon discovering where we were going. The NY Times photographer who came along for the ride was the very last besides Nathan to go up. He waited nervously until the end, not sure if he wanted to commit.

Finally he did. He wrote this about the experience in his article about photographer Todd Seelie which came out shortly after the party.

In the windy darkness of a recent spring morning, 30 people of an arty, mostly Brooklynite persuasion gathered after midnight for an illicit get-together in a maintenance shed, high atop the Williamsburg Bridge. Billed as the “Third-Annual NYC Undercover, You-Might-Be-Arrested, Clandestine Errantry Trespassing Adventure Party,” the event attracted members of a distinct, risk-taking subset of the New York art world — heights-loving writers, courageous painters, a devil-may-care guitarist, a guy lugging bongos and the Williamsburg photographer, Tod Seelie — all of whom had been quietly invited to the late-night affair by its pseudonymous organizers, Agent Verde and Agent Rojo.

After scrambling over a 10-foot-high security fence, the partygoers climbed a steel staircase — the lights of Manhattan glimmering below — as part of a vertiginous, invigorating trip that culminated in a catwalk, a ladder and finally a narrow hatchway, leading up to a low-ceilinged room of riveted metal plates. There, for more than an hour, the group made music and unauthorized public art. Light was provided by votive candles and flashlights. Mr. Seelie, a bald man sporting tattoos and a Fu Manchu mustache, camera at his eye, stood taking pictures in the middle of the room.

“When a trip takes this much effort,” he said, “there’s usually something worthwhile at the end.”

Looking down the cables onto Delancey Street

After about an hour in the tower we reopened the manhole and instructed everyone to filter back down. Some guy from the bike path spotted our crowd descending the stairs and ran to the emergency phone mid-bridge to call the Police on us. Pulses racing, we made it down the ramp and onto Delancey street just as the police zoomed onto the bridge, lights flashing.

 ……And no one got arrested.

Check out Nathan’s new project WanderLust. Together he and his partner Ida C. Benedetto will take you places you never imagined. If you like adventure, sign up for their invites. You don’t want to miss their next one, believe me.