DELHI - On May 6, 1977, in New York City, rush-hour commuters had their morning routine disrupted by an unusual, yet stunning sight: seven mysterious figures in bright jumpsuits, representing the colors of the rainbow, ascended the city’s major bridges by climbing up their cable wires, making the top of each bridge their stage before setting off vibrant yellow smoke flares to draw the attention of onlookers below.
The coordinated action wasn’t designed to sow terror—though some might have initially thought so, given the rash of bombings, hijackings and other incidents that peppered newscasts of the era. It was a guerilla public artwork, meant to spread joy, creating a spectacle that would force the news media to pay attention. That was the goal of John DiLeva-Halpern, the man who directed the event - he also personally donned a red jumpsuit and scaled the Verrazano. He will tell the story at a live presentation at Bushel May 8.
DiLeva-Halpern lives in Delhi in a cottage-style home with a stone patio surrounded by farmland and not much more. During a midday interview with The Reporter, he was joined by a small black and white dog with a propensity for licking hands and begging for attention. DiLeva-Halpern is a polite host, offering tea and chocolate to his guests. As one might expect from an artist who’s spent half a century creating challenging conceptual works, he’s eccentric, but deeply thoughtful. Though the ideas behind his work might be hard to grasp for those not on his frequency, their impact is aimed at a general audience. The goal: to lead us to see society in a new way and hopefully improve it.
DiLeva-Halpern’s performance pieces often include elements of social activism.
For Smokesculpture, 1,000 people sent bags filled with cigarette smoke to cigarette manufacturers; Fresh Air invited visitors, who ultimately numbered 200,000 to breathe in the oxygen produced by plants contained within a glass sculpture. He’s also made numerous films, including Touch The Sky, an experimental feature on French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, and several projects exploring Buddhism.
The goal of Bridging, as the 1977 work is called, was to offer the news media an irresistible story that might serve as an antidote to the tales of tragedy, crime and discord that consumed the city at the time. The Vietnam War had left the country sharply divided. Political violence was commonplace. Serial killers like Son of Sam were on the loose. And the city was on the brink of bankruptcy. It was then that DiLeva-Halpern and his partner Emily Marie Harris, who now teaches art at SUNY Delhi, co-founded the Institute for Cultural Activism International, which has been organizing projects like Bridging for the last 50 years. It sounds official, but the name was itself a bit of cultural subversion; why can’t a handful of recent college grads (John went to SUNY Purchase) just create “institute” out of thin air? The idea, he said, was to elevate art to the level of something with real social power. The Institute would be dedicated to “learning how to use cultural materials to transform society,” he said, and to take “control of our own narratives.”
DiLeva-Halpern stressed the importance of community and bringing people together to reshape things in a positive way.
“I was driving around in my truck with my friend Greg,” he recalls, “and we were thinking: all this negativity is going to impact the mind at large and eventually erode the social fabric. How do we create good news that the news media can’t resist?”
And so, he assembled his own community to do just that. A group of about 100 artists met for several months to plan the elaborate action. The ground crew alone numbered 30 people. John and the other climbers practiced at night to make sure they could pull off the stunt. Still, they knew it was risky: they could be arrested, injured, maybe even shot.
“We were all pretty young people,” he recollects. “I was 22 at the time. We kind of put everything on the line.” But the goal - “to hijack the news system and repurpose the way it’s used,” as he put it—seemed worth it.
It worked. The story “was on the front pages of every newspaper, every major TV station,” DiLeva-Halpern recalls. A few months later, ABC-TV named Bridging “1977’s Best News of the Year.”
Community-building is still central to John’s work. It’s one of the reasons he’s drawn to BUSHEL, a central hub bringing together local artists and those, like John and Emily, who spent much of their careers in the city.
“The idea [of BUSHEL] is to have a kind of space - an art space. Not like the kind of art market where you have to go and buy something and the industry tells you how much it’s worth and what is or isn’t art. BUSHEL is a place that completely blows that out the window.”
Forty-nine years later, the news is again pretty depressing. It seems like the perfect time to relive the story of a bunch of creative kids who, one crazy morning, captivated a city.
Bridging 1977/2026 will be presented at BUSHEL on May 8 at 7 p.m.
More information at bushelcollective.org
This article was published in partnership with SUNY Delhi’s Intro to Journalism class.
