Take a second to look at the men and women featured prominently in the picture I’ve posted below. While I cannot pretend to know with utmost certainty, if I was a betting man, I would wager these men and women have never been considered nor considered themselves to be artists in the conventional sense of the word. These are people that live in the housing projects of the South Bronx, a generally low-income area where most residents are working class or even unemployed. And yet somehow when these residents enter the alternate reality that is Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘Gramsci Monument’, they transform into highly lauded “Residents of the Day”, complete with an accompanying photograph of them standing proudly next to whatever it is they contributed to the monument personally. And make no mistake about it, as whatever the conventional sense of the word may be is irrelevant, for these people are undoubtedly artists. They may have never put a brush to a canvas, nor written a line of philosophy, but they’ve helped add life to the living, breathing piece of art that is the Gramsci Monument. 

Josh Kurman