Community Art as a verb
The community art projects I give rise to go beyond rudimentary arts integration; they activate storylines that shift dominant narratives and redistribute power; engaging in a prefiguration that delineates future realities as if they were to already exist. Abolition and the building of new worlds is possible only if we imagine it; community art—public dialogue aided by creative expression and freedom—is a key method in nurturing these ideals and forging the liberation we yearn for.
Desert Questions Series
Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Book Of Questions, placed around the cities of Phoenix and Tempe, AZ, with the support of Arizona Commission on the Arts’ Artist Opportunity Grant. Done in the hopes of inspiring the public to ask and ponder the unanswerable questions of life.
Under a New Sun
Featured in The Freedom & Captivity Coalition’s Art on Abolition exhibition; an initiative aimed at reflecting and inspiring the abolitionist imagination — art that helps community reimagine freedom; fight surveillance, racism, and stereotypes; support youth, parents, and families impacted by the carceral system; and build inclusive communities of care. “Under a New Sun” was made using plywood from the Plywood Protection Project, which aimed to recycle plywood that was posted up by storefronts in the face of the Summer 2020 uprisings. The chalkboards bear prompts inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s quote, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns,” which compels us to imagine more radically caring and more just futures. The chalk sits waiting for community members to engage and write in what they imagine to exist ‘under a new sun.’
Believe in the Poetry
A project born of community asset mapping, storytelling, and youth arts education and engagement, “Believe in the Poetry” aims to get first-generation, English-language-learning, South Bronx students’ words out of the classroom and into community. After working with high schoolers across the Bronx for several months, introducing them to poetry and the value of storytelling, and helping them craft poems under the themes of identity, liberation, and home, I was awarded a NYFA City Artist Corps Grant in order to print the students’ poems and post them up all over the neighborhood they know and love. This was done with the goal of affirming the importance of storytelling for these students, and the power they hold to forge community through art when they use their own voice. By having their poems take up physical space in the streets they walk daily, the project also provides a sense of permanence in a quickly-gentrifying neighborhood, and combats displacement.
A Delicate Cycle: Laundromat Poetry
In collaboration with Timothy Prolific Edwaujonte, and thanks in part to the Laundromat Project’s Creative Action Fund, “A Delicate Cycle: Laundromat Poetry” is a radical poetry workshop series offered in laundromats throughout South Bronx and Brooklyn, meant to re-instill and reclaim access to the oral tradition for our communities that oftentimes, for whom storytelling and storysharing come naturally and traditionally, but who are too busy working long hours to put food at the table, running from school to grocery store and back, navigating societal barriers and structural racism in their daily lives, and trying to find brief moments of rest, to ever sit and grant themselves the time to write and record their poetic musings and stories. Photos not taken to protect participants’ privacy.