The Village People at Gotham Bowery

​Across two of Gotham NYC’s locations, the works within The Village People grapple with who and what makes a city a city? Included artists interrogate the systems that shape urban environments - city planning and architecture, policing and surveillance, community and commerce.  

​Although marijuana decriminalization and legalization in NYC is still the stuff of recent history, the city’s landscape has transformed immensely with the advent of both legal and illegal smoke shops and dispensaries, creating much needed discourse around cannabis consumption, criminality and gentrification. What are the implications of drug deals going corporate parallel to a burgeoning housing crisis, over-policing and declining public health?  In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs gets into the minutiae of how cities are ideated, the biases and value systems inherent to urban development, and who determined the efficacy and “success” of major urban centers over the mid-twentieth century. Both before and since Jacobs’ field study, crime and safety are consistently at the forefront of conversations around city living - the perceived danger of living in proximity to abject poverty, drug sale and use, and the crime that is “intrinsic” to those conditions. Safety, as Jacob’s posits, is however less often a product of law enforcement efforts, but more a social practice of individuals upholding environments devoid of harm. Artists featured in The Village People probe the means by which cities like New York - and the people within them - endure shifting social, ideological, political climates.