Bailey Scieszka

Bailey Scieszka (she/they) is an artist working and living in Detroit, Michigan. Their performances incorporate painting, drawing, writing, sculpture and video. After completing her BFA at the Cooper Union in New York City in 2011, Scieszka worked with the Detroit PuppetART Theater in 2013-2014 to produce “All The Brown Butterflies”, her first puppet-drama. She has since staged these performances in galleries, art fairs, dive bars, and more recently over Zoom. Scieszka has exhibited her work Atlanta Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Stems Gallery (Brussels), Rachel Uffner (New York), White Columns (New York), Maria Bernheim (Zürich), Larrie (New York), and What Pipeline (Detroit). Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, Forbes, The New York Times, Cura, and Cultured. In 2018 Scieszka published More Heart Than Brains: The Collected Plays of Bailey Scieszka with What Pipeline.

Much of Scieszka’s work emerges from the mind of her alter-ego Old Put (pronounced /po͝ot/), an alien clown. Old Put has had different gender identities, but is now Millennial-fluid. Scieszka and Old Put first appeared together in the video “Large Larges” (2011). Old Put is the protagonist of various “slams”—a format combining wrestling promos and poetry readings—and appears in all Scieszka’s serialized puppet-dramas. In 2017 Old Put worked as an art director and make-up artist with New York-based fashion house Eckhaus Latta for an editorial by Sharif Hamza for A Magazine. They have also collaborated with photographers Oto Gillen and Nicholas Calcott.