A 20-year art and advocacy working group on NYC's Lower East Side. Partnerships with people who mean to run the city.

Newest work:
(In)Visible Guides: Summer/Fall 2023.

ABOUT

WHO WE ARE
Perfect City was instigated in 2016 by playwright Aaron Landsman. Housed at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of New York City, our work includes performances, mapping exercises about belonging and avoidance, roundtable discussions, writing, and research on street harassment and gentrification. Now in our fifth year, undaunted by the pandemic, we remain committed to envisioning and enacting cities for everyone, civic engagement for the most marginalized, and reinventing public space by and for the people who live together here. 

WHY US?
People who grow up in cities are natural born urban planners. We have to be. We ride public transit before we are even born; we use creative strategies to navigate invisible and visible boundaries as we go through our days. But our needs and our narratives are not at the table when decisions are made about zoning, planning and which neighborhoods are in the crosshairs of development.

OUR PRINCIPLES
Rather than build from a specific formal aesthetic, we made principles to work by, that try to do away with some of the hierarchies that dominate art-making. Our principles include Emotional Amnesty (no one holds what you say against you), Aesthetic Amnesty (no one’s ideas about art are better than anyone else’s), Compensation for Labor (self-explanatory but bears repeating), Logistical Flexibility (you come and go when you can), and Art Grows from Necessity (we don’t know exactly what that means either).

OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
Abrons Arts Center has been part of the Lower East Side and Chinatown for 125 years. Even if you are not from here, a lot of families in the US have a history with this neighborhood. It’s like a microcosm of America: diverse, vibrant, complicated, rich in history. And it’s changing. Fast. Our neighborhood is disappearing before our eyes. Perfect City is a window into the vital mix of voices and views that are often cleaned up when the city is gentrified. 


NEWS

INVISIBLE GUIDES AUDIO TOUR OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE

August 25-September 21

Travel the neighborhood with us

(In)Visible Guides Audio Tour of the Lower East Side starts and ends at Abrons Arts Center, travels the neighborhood under the spell of voices from our project, from Henry Street Settlement and from our collaborators. Click the link to listen and journey with us! Click the map to download it.

(In)Visible Guides is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Architectural League of New York’s Independent Projects Grant, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Creative Engagement Program.

Perfect City is supported by Creative Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program, and by the amazing staff of Abrons Arts Center and Henry Street Settlement


PERFECT CITY IS SUPPORTED BY THE ARTIST’S EMPLOYMENT PROGRAM AT

CREATIVES REBUILD NEW YORK

FIND OUT MORE HERE!

CRNY is a new program funded by The Mellon Foundation, that puts artists on salary at non-profit organizations. This spring we received the amazing news that three working group members (Aaron Landsman, Jahmorei Snipes and Tiffany Zorrilla) were awarded staff positions at Abrons through this program. We are beyond grateful and look forward to sharing more of our plans and schemes soon!


OUR WORK

THE CATCALLING PROJECT – In 2017, frustrated that Perfect City’s first projects had been led by men in the group, working group members, Tiffany Zorrilla and Jahmorei Snipes began a project researching the relationship between catcalling and gentrification. What they found were rhetorical and geographic ties between the two – the way we talk about colonized bodies and colonized land bear striking and harrowing similarities. Members of the Catcalling Project have been hired this year as part of an international study on community safety and resiliency at NYU called Confident Futures.

(IN)VISIBLE GUIDES – Since 2019, Perfect City working group members have worked with women at a neighborhood family domestic violence shelter on mapping, visioning and storytelling work. We are now developing (In)visible Guides as a public art work in collaboration with local artists, advocacy for organizers, and mutual aid for shelter residents. Our goal is to imagine new ways our non-profits and cities can support vulnerable populations.

AVOIDANCE MAPPING – this exercise came out of a meeting this fall. It’s a way to identify unconscious bias, the sophisticated ways we know about where to go and who to steer clear of, and how there are many cities mapped onto one concrete location. Avoidance Mapping has been done as a workshop with the Architectural League, with students from middle school through graduate school, and in several US and foreign cities.

ARTICLES – UrbanOmnibus and Longleaf Review have published our writing. Look for new articles coming soon to a publication near you!




OUR TEAM


CONTACT