The Colors Project
The Colors are characters who arrive in a place and make it more beautiful than they found it.
For years that happened on camera. It now happens literally. The set is a tree pit on Malcolm X Boulevard, and when the piece ends the block is actually cleaner and actually planted.
The work is made by volunteers, funded by its own organizers, and built almost entirely from materials that were discarded. That is not only how we can afford it — it is the argument. A neighbourhood, like a set, is made out of what people decide is still worth keeping.
Since 2006
- Manhattan Neighborhood Network
- A weekly arts programme, Thursdays at 11pm on channel 57, self-produced, written and performed. Episodes 120, 121 and 123 survive online, along with Prudenia and IFARM on The Colors Project.
- Violet to Earth, 2012
- A seventeen-minute short filmed in Central Park with a cast of twenty-eight, funded by thirty-nine public backers through Kickstarter. Violet, of the planet Prudenia, must find her way on Earth while searching for her missing friend Ultraviolet. Selected for the Queens World Film Festival. Listed on IMDb.
- LUV Army, 2007
- Twenty-nine minutes, posted 24 April 2007. David Peel is in it. Peel played Washington Square Park for decades; he appears again in Conversations with Channer. Watch.
- 1000 Days at Sea, 2007
- A tribute piece recorded for the project and posted by Harold Channer in April 2007 — the earliest footage of the work that is still online. Thirty-three minutes.
- Harlem, now
- Short works staged and filmed in public space, in which the action is the restoration of the place itself.
The Colors
Violet, of the planet Prudenia, is sent by Mayor Green to find the missing Ultraviolet and Baby Azure — Blue’s wife and child. Ultraviolet is pictured; Baby Azure and Mayor Green are not.
On the street
492 tree pits are mapped along Lenox Avenue between 125th and 133rd. Eighty-seven of them are empty. You can see every one at intertween.com/trees.
The next clean-up is Tuesday 20 October, 11am–2pm, meeting at 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard. Clean a pit, name the tree. Just show up.
It is an It’s My Park event, run with Partnerships for Parks and the West 132nd Street Community Garden. Download the flyer (PDF).