email: jody.c.wood[at]gmail[dot]com for more information
Beauty in Transition is a large-scale, city-wide artistic project partnering with various institutions to create a mobile, outdoor beauty salon serving NYC homeless shelters in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The mobile unit provides beauty services including a hair wash, cut, color and/or style service to willing participants. Through providing fa
ce-to-face dialogue in a calming recuperative salon environment, this project aims to facilitate empathetic understanding and to unravel the reductive label of homeless. HISTORY
Beauty in Transition is an ongoing project created by artist Jody Wood. The project seeded in 2006 at Lawrence Community Shelter in Lawrence, Kansas. In Summer 2013, the project was participated at RedLine’s exhibit, “Not Exactly Homeless” in Denver, Colorado, curated by Robin Gallite and Chad Kautzer. Nikki Pike and Jennifer Miller of the Denver-based bARTer Collective hosted the project and supported it's launch at St Francis Shelter. Aveda Pure Talent Salon generously volunteered to staff the project with their master stylists. CONCEPT
This project requests a space beyond legislative and socio-economic spheres and articulates what equality might look like outside of bottom-line bureaucratic functionality, wherein homeless shelters function to provide fixed services within an ongoing and largely unchanged social order. Rather than increased invisibility behind the institutional doors of a shelter, this project considers increased visibility through reclaimed authorship to one’s self-image, while breaking long-standing and pervasive social barriers of touch that stigmatize someone who has become homeless. Because homeless subjects are often entrenched in a daily struggle for survival, where a set number of basic needs are negotiated (food, shelter, clothing), I am interested in exploring how identity and agency recedes under a narrowing structure—and how this process can be resisted, or reversed. Beauty in Transition provides a cosmetic service. While this gesture may seem superfluous, providing access to something extra, something beyond necessity, is an act geared toward re-accessing parts of identity that have been pushed aside or forgotten. This ‘nonessential’ service has the potential to amplify and transform, however temporarily, people’s lives. Jody Wood is a Socially Engaged Artist Fellow with A Blade of Grass
Support for Beauty in Transition NYC is provided by A Blade of Grass and Brooklyn Arts Council
