Thank you so much for being a part of WE WILL CARE FOR YOU! We are moving on from this incredible project but you can still get a face mask by writing directly to our designers by clicking the link below (and David Herskovits says “I’ll still help on the delivery team”).
GET A FACE MASK
A Performative Action to Deliver 200+ Face Masks by Bicycle
221 Face Masks
200+ Miles Biked
64 Drop Offs
36 Yards of Fabric
3 Award-Winning Designers
2 Intrepid Bike Riders
1 Flat Tire
Through your donations, your requests, and your messages of encouragement, we hand-delivered face masks for the past three weeks in collaboration with designers Dina El-Aziz, Ásta Bennie Hostetter, and Normandy Sherwood. We also donated 120 face masks to Academy of Medical and Public Health Services (AMPHS) to distribute to essential workers and undocumented community members living / working in South Brooklyn.
A performative action that is also part art object and part health initiative, WE WILL CARE FOR YOU embraced Target Margin’s DIY handmade roots and old school NYC bike culture, while supporting artists and activating our immediate community of audiences / local residents in Sunset Park.
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS & PARTNERS
Dina El-Aziz has been the Costume Designer for Target Margin’s ongoing work on The 1001 Nights since 2017.
“I, like many others, began the quarantine feeling absolutely helpless. I could not provide the same support as doctors, nurses, and essential workers, and with cancelled productions, the prospect of sitting idle during a pandemic saddened me as I am used to always being active. Eventually friends and colleagues encouraged me to join the mask-making movement, and now I feel a sense of pride knowing I am using my skills to help others in a time of need.”
Dina El-Aziz is a British-Egyptian Costume Designer, currently residing in New York. A graduate of the Design for Stage and Film MFA program at NYU Tisch School for the Arts, Dina has worked on theatre productions in NYC, and regionally in the US. Her most recent productions include P*ssy C*ck Know Nothing (Target Margin), King Lear (Northern Stage) and Noura (both The Guthrie and The Old Globe), and Selling Kabul (Williamstown Theater Festival). www.dinae.me
Ásta Bennie Hostetter has worked on Target Margin productions since 2005; she last designed for TMT’s Reread Another.
“On March 11th I came home from a show that was in early previews. I was feeling mildly depressed and impotent, frozen — it didn’t even occur to me to start sewing. But then a friend for over 10 years asked me to make her one. And then I realized that my landlady, who has lived in the floor below me since 1965, did not have a mask. Being asked for help called me into being helpful, and I’m so thankful to have friends who love me enough to ask for my help.”
Ásta Bennie Hostetter is a costume designer whose recent work includes : Gnit (Theater for a New Audience), Mrs. Murrays Menagerie (Mad Ones), Usual Girls (Roundabout Underground), Dance Nation (Playwrights Horizon), Bobbie Clearly (Roundabout Underground), The Lucky Ones (Ars Nova), Miles for Mary (Playwrights Horizon), Porto (WP Theater), Wolves (Lincoln Center), John (Signature), Men on Boats (Playwrights Horizons), Regional: Goodnight Nobody (McCarter), Midsummer Night’s Dream (Cal Shakes) Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night (KCrep), El Coquí Espectacular (Two River). Member of minor theater, Target Margin Theater, The Mad Ones. She has an MFA in Theater Design from CalArts www.astabennie.com
Normandy Sherwood was a 2018 TMT Institute Fellow and has been designing for TMT’s Present Shame and Further Woe.
“As a theater goblin, I always have excess materials, but when my teaching job went remote and everything else stopped, I suddenly had a lot of excess time and excess anxiety to burn through as well. That’s why I started making masks, to do something small and practical. I had been mailing these masks on demand to friends and acquaintances and I was excited when TMT reached out with the offer to join this larger performance/service project– especially because I was so sad to have had to pause my work as costume designer of TMT’s production of Moe Yousuf’s Present Shame and Further Woe. I’m glad to be doing this mask-making work while looking forward to the future times when we resume that theater-making work.”
Normandy Sherwood makes theater. She’s a playwright, costumer, director and performer. Her shows include Madame Lynch (Archive Residency, 2019), Tiny Hornets (2017), Permanent Caterpillar (2016), and The Golden Veil (2012) among others, and they have been presented in NYC at The New Ohio Theatre, The Public Theater, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, The Brick and more. She and Craig Flanagin make no-wave music driven spectacles with their company, The Drunkard’s Wife. She was a co-Artistic Director of the OBIE-award-winning National Theater of the United States of America (2000-2017, R.I.P.). She is a current HARP artist in residence at HERE Arts and was a 2018 Fellow in the Target Margin Theater Institute. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Millay Colony and more. As a costumer she has designed for Rachel Chavkin, Young Jean Lee, Faye Driscoll (BESSIE Award, 2009) and many more, and her designs have been nominated for Henry Hewes Awards twice. She wrote two books: Animals vs. Furniture (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013– a children’s book) and A New Guide to Rhetorical Gesture and Action (53rd State Press, 2017– an “acting manual” in collaboration with James Stanley and Jesse Hawley). Also, she plays in the band God Is My Co-Pilot and teaches Expository Writing at NYU. ww.thedrunkardswife.com
The Academy of Medical and Public Health Services
The Academy of Medical & Public Health Services is a not-for-profit health service organization with a triple aim to identify barriers to health and wellness in under-served immigrant communities; coordinate truly needed primary care with social assistance; and deliver care with dignity and empathy to marginalized New Yorkers. Through its community public health interventions, AMPHS lends to the empowerment of individuals and communities to create their own local and culturally-sensitive health and wellness paradigms. www.amphsonline.org