Moira Williams in her studio

Visiting Moira Williams’ studio requires flexibility. Her studio being, as with increasing numbers of artists, a dispersed site. It, her studio, does have a small geographical presence in a pink-painted room in Bushwick NY, but thereafter the studio trails across her computer’s hard drive, the Milky Way, walks through Brooklyn, Bogota and Barcelona and urban farming projects.

Williams is engaged by local experience and local history as a way of thinking about broader social and political pictures. Research drives the work and thus in her distinct neck of Bushwick she discovers, for example, the particular strains of tomatoes brought from Italy by the immigrant groups of the 1800s. This coming summer, as part of a community garden she is working to organize, seeds of said tomatoes will be distributed to participating residents.  A partner project is to rescue injured pigeons in local streets as a piece of rescuing the history of pigeon and dove keeping in the neighborhood. A rebuilt dovecot and a film about the history of roof top bird keeping in Brooklyn will follow.

In tandem with this deeper history a project addressing more recent histories is taking place along Halsey Street. Williams has brought together a number of graffiti stars from Brooklyn’s recent past and a block of Halsey is being transformed into a community mural come good-weather meeting house. http://blog.artsinbushwick.org/

These sedimented layers of Brooklyn, in Williams’ work, frequently emerge as a consequence of her perambulations through the neighborhood. Walking is itself a central piece of her work. Williams uses the act of walking as both prompt and practice for her work as an artist. In this respect she is a founding member of the Brooklyn Walk Exchange (http://walkexchange.org/) How to dress for, or after, a work is often a crucial corollary of such work. In one recent piece Williams built a hat from megaphone and bleached newspapers which when worn, allows her to recount the experience of trying to learn beekeeping while in Bogota, Columbia. In another, her hat resembles a beekeeper’s again, though this time there are no bees, and the hat has added piping of iridescent duct tape to protect the walker for nighttime promenades.  This last piece is part of a series of mutual walks Williams carries out with a group in Barcelona Spain. While they are ambling under the Iberian Sun, Williams, to make it mutual, parades through the Brooklyn night in her safety suit, come hat. Williams has also traveled to Port au Prince, Haiti where she and compatriots produced handmade paper from trash found in the street. Upon that paper they made monotone prints, pulled from inked up discarded trash also found on the same walks.

A current project, in collaboration with astronomy and dance, finds Williams on nighttime excursions to Inwood Hill Park Co-leading group efforts at temporal and body dislocations. Part hard science, part community ritual the groups will spend the night gazing at the stars and rifling through disparate but flirtatiously connected ruminations upon the heavens. Oh, and the Milky Way?  Yes, Williams has engaged in a many-years-long project, lower tech than NASA or SETI, to communicate with extra terrestrials. She mails weekly letters to the Milky Way. Many are returned by the United States Postal Service — many, but not all.