Yesterday afternoon, after a few email exchanges, Olek, the Brooklyn artist behind yesterday’s “yarn-bombing” of the Albert Einsten Memorial, invited me to the opening of the Renwick Gallery’s “40 Under 40” exhibition, in which she is a featured artist.
I accepted, and raced over to the Pennsylvania Avenue NW gallery to meet with Olek shortly after 6 p.m., giving me enough time to chat her up, see the remount of her show “Knitting Is for Pus****” and then hop on my bike and head over to Landmark E Street Cinema for a screening of The Dark Knight Rises at 7. Simple enough, right?
Olek kept me waiting, but I’m not begrudging that. She needed time to wrap up the human performers who play a part in her exhibit, which depicts a one-room apartment covered entirely in crocheted yarn. Stitching up five live bodies probably takes a while, so Olek wasn’t available to talk until about 6:40, giving me a narrow window of time to conduct an interview and then hustle over to the movie theater.
This post was supposed to be a standard question-and-answer interview about Olek’s Albert Einstein stunt and the rebel nature of her yarn-bombs. I recorded the interview on my iPhone, as I often do, and figured I’d transcribe it in the morning.
Unfortunately, as I left the movie theater, the skies opened up and unleashed a torrential downpour. On bike, I was left to the elements, with my phone protected by nothing more than the denim of my left front pocket. My phone, while still mostly functional, has been on the fritz since then. Among the damages: the recording of my interview with Olek. It is gone. And all attempts to recover the audio file have failed.
With what notes I took, here are some of the highlights of my chat with the artist that were, at least, not lost to memory.
I meet Olek on a ramp descending the 17th street side of the Renwick Gallery, where she was enjoying a much-needed smoking break. Even for contemporary craft artists, Olek is conspicuous. Her wavy blonde hair was teased ridiculously, and she was wearing an almost-see-through black top with a pastel dress with too many ruffles to count. Her body was smeared with blue and silver glitter, and her eyes were circled in deep black makeup.
As she took drags on hand-rolled cigarettes, she talked about why her art is the way it is. For one thing, she said she prefers to think of it as “yarn-storming,” not “yarn-bombing.” Less violent, I suppose. But it also jibes with the objects she targets—the charging bull statue on Wall Street or the statue of Einstein, to name a few.
She agreed with what many readers and commenters said about the Einstein stunt—that the great physicist, something of a merry prankster himself, would have enjoyed it were he alive to see it. When Olek was out early yesterday morning dressing the statue, groundskeepers on the National Mall and early arrivals to the adjacent National Academy of Sciences cheered her on as she draped her pink and purple tapestry on the bronze figure.
The fabric used yesterday was taken from scraps from previous yarn-stormings; it would take far too long to cover up a statue from scratch, Olek said. I wondered if she had any other targets while she’s in D.C. She’s wasn’t sure, as she’ll be heading back to Brooklyn this weekend.
Finally, I returned to the exhibit inside, I asked Olek what it’s like to be wrapped in yarn like the people inside her crocheted apartment.
“You should ask them,” she said. I told her that I thought her performers might have trouble speaking, being covered head-to-toe in thick ropes of yarn.
The rest was lost to the rainstorm.
