The Paintress: Aila Oldenburg's Unconventional Showgirl Career
- petit mort productions
- Jul 4
- 6 min read
INTERVIEW and PHOTOS of AILA OLDENBURG by LEO BROOKLYN
Regularly dancing and live-painting scenes from NYC nightlife at infamous clubs like The Box and The Stranger, Aila Oldenburg is a Swedish-American artist and showgirl living in New York City.
PETIT MORT (LEO BROOKLYN)
You’ve got to tell me how you landed this gig as a regular performer at The Box. I wanna hear how you came to New York, too.
AILIA
I moved to NYC six years ago for college. I grew up in Minneapolis and honestly wanted to move to Europe— I was like, "Fuck the United States." But then my uncle took me to New York to look at schools, and I fell in love with the city. I applied to Parsons and got in— though I wasn’t even studying painting. I was studying for a business degree in art because I knew I wanted to be my own boss in the creative field.
Then the pandemic hit, and I didn’t want to do online classes, so I took a year off. During that time, I worked as a waitress and painted a lot. Eventually, I returned to school and switched to studying interior design. But I didn’t like that either, so I considered switching to painting. The painting major was already full, though, so I decided to take another gap year. At this point, I had already taken two gap years, and there was no way I was paying all that money for online classes. I just took more shifts at the restaurant and painted on the streets during the day, in places like Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and the West Village.
