I Am A Traffic Control Box But So Am I

I do things for no money. I dream of being rich. I live in a culture that pushes an idea that if I’m not doing something for money, I am disrespecting myself. There’s so many cultures, so many ways to be. The other day I stood for 90 minutes blending myself into a traffic control box covered in stickers on 57th and Broadway - a visual membrane representing a civil power struggle between city stewards and the general public. One is tasked to regulate the space, the other is compelled to express themselves in a meaningful way that disrupts their total anonymity.

You’ll notice a nod to Taki183 on my stomach, whose vision to put his art on stickers and paste them around for the public sparked a decades-long renaissance of sticker art sent among artists to be pasted around the world, doubling as a communications practice that brought people together and shaped a global identity of goodwill among artists. I’d collected these stickers for years from my travels and was unsure what to do with them all, until now. The iron is hot.

What is the value of a dollar?

What is the value of a life?

Are these death tolls that shake us to the core just an indistinguishable part of the very impersonal flow of consciousness and everything is alive forever all the time, but always in different states? It feels like if we can’t hug it or write a poem about it, then it doesn’t count. But see that’s why I like Mexico’s concept of offrendas.

This performance was part of a 57th Street piece called “Wish” curated by Ed Woodham of Art In Odd Places.

In other news, I’ve been podcasting with Marcella, our trademark sass challenged in the face of exhaustion and burn out, but we drag ourselves to the finish line each time to bring you these pearls of wisdom because baby it’s oyster night! These brain bites are served salty and fried, saucy and seared. Here’s what you might have missed:

Latest episodes

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This is a segment from Eva’s semi-frequent email newsletter The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch.

Sign up for updates here: http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1

TEDxLisboa Photo Essay

On March 15, 2025, I had the pleasure of meeting people from around the world at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal. The 18-speaker TEDxLisboa series was punctuated by breaks when people would come out an engage with my Nightly Noodle Monthly station, take a zine, have a chat, and add to the big writing prompts on the wall behind me on the paper that Pedro from TEDx purchased and set up for my interactive artist project centered on a zine inspired by the themes and speakers of the day. My childhood friend Allison came with and got these great shots! A special thank you to Marta Gonzaga for including me in the day’s programming, and to all the speakers for being so passionate about creating a more equitable, sustainable world to live in.

Read the zine for free at the end of this photo essay.

Nightly Noodle Monthly and TEDxLisboa issue for March 2025.

From Odetta to Overwhelm: An Artist's Struggles with Attention and Intuition

At 2 a.m. early Saturday, I woke up watching podcasts, konmari-ing my sock drawer, filming this winter’s first snowfall that so cutely happened right on the solstice and then drifted back to sleep at 5:30 a.m. for 4 more hours.

I spent the day taking apart big envelopes to put back together into even bigger envelopes with lots of packing tape after lining the paintings with bubblewrap and cardboard; grew excited with each completed package; took this picture. I love the analog world and resent my fragmented and practically shattered attention span. I could have been quietly picking a banjo and eking out a new song helping me process the complications of life, but instead i’m watching podcasts.

Which brings me to a fun musing:

Yesterday someone said, flippantly but perhaps more accurate than not, ‘I give the internet five years.” Because the internet is a commercial hellscape of popups and garbled AI. God, please be true. I don’t know how the internet is going to evolve, but I hope I evolve back into a fully analog creature, capable of full appreciative immersion with no instinct to grab my phone; free of anxiety; released from this technological loop and catapulted into a nirvana of potent reality.

I dream of paintings made without interruption for twelve hours straight, like I used to do back in 2005, playing Odetta’s music on repeat. I listened to so much Odetta while painting, even moving to Chicago on a whim in 2006 because I thought I’d find the same feeling there, the feeling of listening to her music. I make loose associations and follow them with conviction. It’s called intuition; called being an artist.

This blog post is a portion of today’s installment of my newsletter The World-Famous Art Studio Dispatch that I sent out this morning. To subscribe to fun, occasional writings my from art studio (always non-salesy, except for that one time I announced a Black Friday sale), sign up here. http://eepurl.com/dHIgT1

Studio Visit and Black Friday Sale

Join me Sunday, December 1 for a studio zoom visit starting at 3:00 p.m. EST. to see what I’m working on and for a raffle for a free mini painted portrait of yourself or someone else. Each purchase of artwork during the sale weekend is two entries into this free raffle and attending the studio visit is one entry. The sale will run Nov 29 at 12:01 a.m. through Sun Dec 1 at 11:59 p.m.

You can register on eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/studio-visit-with-eva-avenue-tickets-1093417935479?aff=oddtdtcreator

Here is the Zoom link for Dec. 1 at 3 p.m. EST. https://zoom.us/j/9879190071?omn=98690579774