Working For Jobs

by Greg Hanscom.

It was late August, and Eve Mosher was keenly aware of the
monstrous storm that was surging up the coast. Irene had roared through the
Bahamas as a category 3 hurricane, and weather forecasts showed it spinning up
the seaboard like a giant bowling ball, blasting directly into Manhattan. New
York City officials ordered almost 370,000 people to evacuate low-lying areas.

New Yorkers are not fond of Mother Nature messing with their
routines, and some dug in, refusing
to leave. But Mosher took the storm seriously. “I grew up in Texas — I
prepare for hurricanes,” she says. “They can take you out.”

Adding to Mosher’s sensitivity was the fact that four
summers prior, she set out on a public art project that charted areas of the
city that would be flooded in a serious storm surge — an increasingly likely
scenario with climate change.
Called HighWaterLine, the project saw Mosher taking a line from a map — the topographic line marking 10 feet above sea level — and
etching it onto the cityscape.

Now, with meteorologists predicting 10-foot surges along the coast, “they were evacuating the areas
below where I drew the line,” Mosher says. “I have seen everything below that
line — power stations, garbage transfer stations, communities, hospitals. Thinking
about those places was one of the biggest impacts for me. I felt like I was
bearing witness.”

In the end, there was some flooding (One Bulls Head resident
woke up to find her new SUV underwater: “I was like, ‘This hurricane isn’t cool
anymore,’ ” she told the New
York Times.) but Irene swung wide, saving most of her punches for Upstate
New York and Vermont. “We dodged the bullet,” Mosher says. But it’s only a
matter of time. “The Office of Emergency Management is saying that we’re due
for our 100-year storm.”

It is this awareness of looming environmental threats that
drove Mosher from her art studio into the streets. She had spent several years living
in San Francisco and Vermont, bastions of eco-consciousness, and had come
back to New York only to find that city residents didn’t seem
particularly concerned about the environment. (This was before Brooklyn
developed its serious Portland fetish and transportation commissioner Janette
Sadik-Khan put in some 260 miles of controversial bike lanes.)

“I suddenly felt like I had a stronger responsibility as an
artist,” Mosher says. “I’m not a lobbyist or lawyer, but I have my creative
ability.”

So she traded in her brushes and oils (she had been doing nature-inspired
abstractions) for a field chalker, like the ones used to mark ball fields, and set
out into the city. She worked on weekends for six months, hauling 200 pounds of
artistic accoutrements around on an industrial tricycle. (“It was my little
carnival of existence,” she says.)

In the East Village and Williamsburg, Mosher says she fit right
in. “People didn’t even talk to me,” she says. “They just said, ‘Whatever, it’s
New York.’”

But in other neighborhoods, such as South Brooklyn, she was
a curiosity. People came out of their houses to ask what she was doing. “Kids
followed me around like the Pied Piper.”

Some insurance companies had recently stopped selling flood insurance
in South Brooklyn, she says. The residents knew that the floodwaters were
coming. Mosher’s art project showed them how high.

“Eve really found a new way of teaching people,” says Heidi
Quante, creative coordinator with the climate action group 350.org. “Her art was
so good, she became a magnet. And when people learn by asking rather than being
told, they retain the information better.”

Quante also points to studies that show that when you drop
something unexpected into someone’s ordinary routine — a woman marching across
the street with a funny wheeled cart, leaving a blue chalk line in her wake, for example — they are apt
to remember it.

Using this same principle, Moser and 350.org recently collaborated
on a project called Insert____Here. Mosher created the project
after the HighWaterLine as a way of drawing ideas from residents about how the
city could thrive in the face of climate change. She stenciled arrows around town with the message, “Insert ________ Here,” and let the
locals fill in the blank.

Working with 350.org, Mosher revived the project, partnering
with community groups. The POINT Community Development Corporation in the Bronx now has a big
“Insert Green Roof Here” sign up. In Brooklyn, a group called 596 Acres, which has mapped undeveloped
city-owned land, is using the project to promote community gardens
and other projects.

“We want to see if we can draw attention to these projects
and help raise funds,” Mosher says. “We’re using simple artistic intervention
as a way to actually make things happen.”

Next, Mosher takes the HighWaterLine project to Dublin,
Ireland, and other cities, where she’ll work with local school kids to chart the coming floods
there. After that? It’s currently
undetermined, but Quante thinks Mosher could use her unique message to wake up
foot-dragging politicians in the nation’s capitol: “I think she should
do HighWaterLine in Washington, D.C.”

This is part of a series of stories about environment-related street
art. Next week, meet a guy who calls himself a “grime writer.”

Related Links:

Writing on the wall: Fighting climate change in the Navajo Nation

Street artists see the city as their canvas

The most beautiful anti-GMO T-shirts you’ll ever see

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