Who is kept safe in Washington Square?
by Penelope Gould
Penelope Gould (she/her) is a playwright and performance scholar with an expansive practice that also includes painting, zines, poetry, dioramas, and wheat pasting. Across mediums, her work often engages with the topics of fatness, queerness, and housing.
Her words have been published in Girls in Trouble and NYU Local. Her work has been presented at The Tank, Berkeley Rep, PlayGround, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, and on the streets of New York. She has also worked in the literary departments of Crowded Fire Theater, New Georges, and The Tank.
She currently engages visitors in the history of Queens, New York as a docent at Vander Ende Onderdonk House, the oldest Dutch Colonial stone house in New York City.
For our final, Isaac Silber gave us the option to: “plan and execute a performance, located in New York City.” Preceding that, I attended a wheatpasting workshop hosted by Rent Refusers Network, East Village Mutual Aid, and Tompkins Homeless Collective. I had also just read Emily Kies Folpe’s It Happened on Washington Square (2002) where she describes the history of the park. I learned that Washington Square was the site of farms given to formerly enslaved Africans by Dutch colonizers who wanted to create an area of buffer between themselves and Lenape communities. This inspired me to create some sort of project invoking this history, particularly because it is so closely connected to the question of whose safety is prioritized in our current police state. I chose the phrase for my posters to put doubt into the way safety is defined. In the last year, these posters have disappeared, been altered, and even molded over, becoming collaborations with strangers and the streets of New York.