Performance Georgia Gardner Gray: Cookie

Georgia Gardner Gray works across painting, performance, and theater. Her vivid canvases depict exaggerated figures in social spaces—bars, apartments, rehearsal rooms, city streets—each imbued with the comedy, absurdity, instability, and contradiction inherent in our modern lives. As an accomplished playwright, Gray captures the tension between intimacy and display, self-awareness and satire.

For her High Line Performance commission, Gray presents Cookie. The play follows the traditional picaresque format, a literary style developed during the height of Spain’s Golden Age in which a clever but poor hero, a pícaro, uses their wits and tricks to survive in a corrupt and crumbling society. Drawing inspiration from 16th-century picaresque novellas like Lazarillo de Tormes and Francisco de Quevedo’s The Swindler, Cookie is a story of desperation disguised as elite ambition. At its center is Gunnar Churchwell, a sleazy yet charismatic suit salesman who arrives in Madrid, only to be recruited by the egomaniacal ringleader of a grifting crew of makeshift “tailors.” Their baseline rule for survival is simple: “never let them know you are hungry.”

Staged in the parking lot of the Meatpacking District’s former final meat purveyor, the performance unfolds around The Lair, a twisted aluminum sculpture resembling a street scaffold. The performance critiques societal decay, and highlights anti-heroes who maneuver through the cracks of a glittering superpower purely to secure their next meal.