Thoughts on Trespass…

TRESPASSPARADE restored my faith in art.
- Scott Benzel

Padding down the center of Broadway, some poetical slogan stretched across my shirt courtesy of Lisa Anne Auerbach, my daughter bouncing on my shoulders, I heard the dulcet tones of Vaginal Davis and looking around me, I caught a guitarist peeking out of a passing window playing along with Arto below, an electric duet puncturing the long, tall facades. I felt a part of something strange and special, a unique march of artists for artists, a movement, a unity, a unique and incredible nexus.
- Andrew Berardini

I found the parade to be a fabulous forerunner to the Occupy movement–Loved the marching & surprises. One man on the sidewalk asked to take a photo of me–I guess he liked my shirt!
- Nancy Buchanan

Trespass Parade happened! The streets of LA closed down for a concert by Vaginal Davis–need I say more?
- Alex Israel

It was exhilarating to see so much noncommercial and political speech marching on the cavernous streets of downtown Los Angeles. In my slogan I loved calling forth my own history and matching it with today’s same messed up issues of class warfare.
- Suzanne Lacy

The souls of the abandoned became alive as we marched through Broadway. The ghosts have joined us.
- Milena Muzquiz

For LA-based artists, Trespass was a chance to experience and interact with public space in the city from a new perspective: the middle of the street! Usually, this is exclusively the domain of cars, but for a few hours, it was occupied by expressive bodies in an improvised carnival/protest. The Trespass Parade was an opportunity to build new collaborations across art groups. Jade Gordon and I have been working together for a decade in our group, My Barbarian. For Trespass we decided to each create new collective works with students from the classes we teach, in both cases addressing the concept of identity: Jade made a masked entourage of performers from the Maskwork class she teaches at Stella Adler Acting Academy. I worked with my students at USC, in a class called Art in the Public Realm, to make a human checkpoint that stopped the parade and demanded “identification.” The students were exposed to public art and performance in a very real, hands-on, and exciting way. We also saw these projects blend and interact with the other groups, such as Body City and Human Resources, offering new possibilities for art-making and collaboration. It was a rewarding experience for the students, who expressed their excitement and amazement at having been in the center of this artistic maelstrom, and a chance for us, as art-workers in collectives, to work with new people in an improvisatory and vital way.
- Alex Segade

When Ann asked me to join her in the parade I instantly volunteered to drive my “carzy royale” customized golf cart which is all ready for a parade including the attached hair dryer “throne” that I thought would be perfect for Ann to regally sit in while we pulled her. When we got to the site we drove it into the middle of glorious broadway ahead of the rest and we found ourselves alone in the middle of the giant avenue and had a surrealistic experience driving in circles in the middle of downtowns broadway with it’s amazing buildings and finally we could hear the amazing sounds from Artos band coming up behind us. The sounds filled the air and we knew this was something special! I Love a Parade!
- Kenny Scharf