Scores of Urban Life: Curtis Cuffie’s Street Assemblages and the Choreography of the Commons

Curtis Cuffie (b. 1955, Hartsville, South Carolina; d. 2002, New York) created a fiercely singular body of work that unfolded at the precarious intersection of artistic improvisation and urban survival, transforming the streets of 1980s–90s New York into charged sites of ephemeral resistance. This dissertation asks: How can we meaningfully engage with an artist whose practice was profoundly site-specific and often undocumented? What does it mean for a Black artist to claim public space in a city marked by racialized policing, economic precarity, and social erasure? How do Cuffie’s assemblages function as acts of presence, of performance, of placemaking—and what methodologies might do justice to a practice that actively resists institutional containment?His assemblages—crafted from found and discarded materials—emerge not as static objects, but as performative gestures that claim space, invite encounter, and dissolve boundaries between art and life. Operating from the social and architectural margins, Cuffie enacted a radical form of urban authorship, one that foregrounds vulnerability as both aesthetic strategy and political agency. His interventions resist commodification, aligning with Fred Moten’s notion of fugitivity and bell hooks’ theorization of the margin as a site of radical openness. The works refuse fixity, leaning into transience and decay, where trash becomes a vessel of memory, humor, and sacredness. Through exuberant layering and theatricality, Cuffie’s practice channels a queer aesthetics of Camp, disrupting dominant norms of value, authorship, and permanence. His art speaks to the city’s contested spatial politics, exposing the violence of gentrification while reclaiming public space for Black expression and communal presence. These assemblages are anti-monuments: tender, volatile, and insistently alive. In the absence of the artist, what remains are images, stories, and echoes—fragments through which we encounter a life lived artfully and uncontained.