Charlie Todd

My roots are in unauthorized projects, and when I see an opportunity to create a bit of whimsical street art, I take it. I tend to work with abandoned or broken public infrastructure and often remix outdoor advertising, which I generally view as unwanted visual pollution in our cities that is not worth the paltry revenue it generates. Here are some of my favorite unauthorized installations.

When my local Citi Bike dock was covered in ads for a Perry Ellis cologne, I ordered $20 worth of googly eyes in three different sizes and placed them over each of the 132 ads. The eyes stayed up for about a week, and a random neighbor’s video of the installation got millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. I made my own video once I was ready to reveal myself, and the model in the ad (famed Mexican actor Erick Elías) found it and left a very nice comment. 264 googly eyes were used in total.

Some new traffic barriers in my neighborhood looked like faces to me, so I thought it would be funny to add some smiles. Die cut stickers on Yodock water barrier.

A LinkNYC structure on 10th Avenue displayed the same advertisement for a (now canceled) HBO Max show for nearly a year. The ads are supposed to rotate every 15 seconds and also include helpful community event notices, but something broke and it got stuck on an ad for season two of “Made For Love.” After walking by it for several months, I decided to fix the display myself. Swipe for before and after.

Thanks to Cody Lindquist for her help in the execution and for serving as my lookout.

When pay phones were removed from our neighborhood, the ugly metal bollards that protected them were often left behind. For Christmas I decided to decorate one of them. Thanks to my co-conspirator, Cody Lindquist.

There are a few new buildings in my neighborhood that have a row of pipes protruding out at sidewalk level. I thought it would be funny to add some stickers to make them look like soda fountain dispensers. I ordered some stickers off eBay and installed them on two buildings. They stayed up for several weeks. My son helped out, so thanks to him!

A collaboration with Art in Ad Places, an awesome organization that, without authorization, replaces phone booth ads with art. I came up with the idea for this one, and street artist Abe Lincoln Jr did the design. Photos by Luna Park. Be sure to zoom in to read the fine print! My artist’s statement:

“Outdoor advertising is a blight on our city streets. The decaying phone booth has long been the most egregious example of this visual pollution. These almost always out-of-order structures offer no benefit to our streets and exist only to display advertising. For Art in Ad Places, I chose to replace a Powerball advertisement both because the lottery is a regressive tax on the poor, and because I thought it would be fun to mess with the digital display. As the Powerball jackpot grows over time, the number will get closer and closer to displaying the actual odds of winning: 1 in 292 million. I’m happy to see that the pay phones are finally starting to come down in the city, though I’m not sure the LinkNYC replacements, with their even brighter ads and their sketchy surveillance technology, will be much better.”

This Improv Everywhere project was a collaboration with Deanna Director, Maggie McClurken and Jordan Seiler. We turned a pair of phone booths on 6th Avenue into coworking spaces. Real New Yorkers were invited to try out the new “WeWork Street” service and learn about the many benefits of outdoor coworking. Full story and credits on Improv Everywhere’s site: Phone Booth Coworking.

On March 30, 2011, Jordan Seiler and some local Madrid-based volunteers disrupted bus-shelter advertisements throughout Madrid for PublicAdCampaign‘s advertising takeover, MaSAT (Madrid Street Advertising Takeover). I contributed to the project by supplying text which was then printed on a poster that Jordan and his crew installed.

This Improv Everywhere project was a collaboration with Jeff Greenspan. We created separate walking lanes for tourists and New Yorkers on a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. The stencils, made with chalk, stayed up for several days and created a bit of a media stir. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was about it and said it was a “nice thing to do” and that he thought it was “very cute.”

Full story and credits on Improv Everywhere’s site: The Tourist Lane

While there are others who are professionals at this type of thing, most notably the legendary Poster Boy, I enjoy doing a bit of remixing when I’m stuck on a subway platform late at night heading home from a night in Brooklyn.