By Ernest Verrett & Anjali Deshmukh, with Street Works/Make Justice Normal. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2025. 2025 Street Works Earth, Travers Park, Queens. With support from Benjamin Kim and Maria Fernanda Pulido-Velosa. Photos by Derrick Seymore, Felix Masi, and Brentton Wilson.
In 2024, “Rising. Curtains.” invited passersby to join in the locally loved craft of community beading, an ancient, global tradition to reflect on the story of climate change and collectively design the unwritten future. The “original” of the curtain tells the story of time as we know it, in the form of a glittering curtain made of over 12,000 glass and stone beads mapping global surface temperatures in comparison to the average from 1890-present.
In 2025, Mean. Equity. became a second curtain made of 12,000 beads weaves in the story of wealth inequality over the same time period, thanks to the amazing help of Stella Muti from the World Inequality Database. With the addition of Mean. Equity. participants can walk between the curtains into a small room. From the inside and outside, “front” and “back,” time moves in different directions.
This work is not finished without the audience. Interspersed throughout are camouflaged words, sequenced in vertical and horizontal poems that participants use throughout the day to add to the installation, and make a bead bracelet to take with them. No word is repeated. (Ask us if you want to know what the poems were!)
We’ve organized community beading on the streets of Queens since 2023. Across age, people have told us it’s calming, brings focus, and sparks creativity and community connection. As a part of rituals of continuity, community beading is also simple form of fashion that is affordable and often starts a flow gift giving, within families and among strangers.
Our goal overtime is to collectively create the curtain, reuse the same beads to create different patterns, and collectively design the beads themselves in a growing bead library that helps us and our communities adorn themselves in the art we make together.
Photos
By Felix Masi, Derrick Seymore, and Brentton Wilson
Anjali Deshmukh & Ernest Verrett. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2025. 2025 Street Works Earth, Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Photos by AMONET.
“Rising. Curtains.” by Anjali Deshmukh and Ernest Verrett, was first shown in 2024 as part of Street Works Earth. In 2025, we remade and modified it thanks to a grant from Department of Transportation as part of Car-Free Earth Day.
“Rising. Curtains.” invited passersby to join in the locally loved craft of community beading, an ancient, global tradition to reflect on the story of climate change and collectively design the unwritten future. The “front” of the curtain tells the story of time as we know it, in the form of a glittering curtain made of over 13,000 glass and stone beads mapping global surface temperatures in comparison to the average from 1890-present. It also continues carrying forward years into the future. Overtime, as new data becomes available and the future becomes the past, we hope amend the years that were once filled with possibility and extend further and further into the future.
Interspersed are camouflaged words, sequenced in vertical and horizontal poems. No word is repeated. (Ask us if you want to know what the poems were!) The “back” shows us time in reverse — or maybe our future. Learn more here.
By Ernest Verrett & Anjali Deshmukh, with Street Works/Make Justice Normal. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2024. 2024 Street Works Earth, 34 Avenue, Queens. With support from Regina Gathing, Wesley Madhere, Marilyn Pandakaralam, and LaTrice Verrett. Photos by Derrick Seymore, Brentton Wilson, and Cindy Trinh.
“Rising. Curtains.” by Anjali Deshmukh and Ernest Verrett, took place as part of 2024 Street Works on 34 Avenue’s open street in Jackson Heights. Ernest and I co-founded Street Works to make room for social practice artists who center co-creation, public space, relationship, and social action. Check out all of the amazing projects here.
“Rising. Curtains.” invited passersby to join in the locally loved craft of community beading, an ancient, global tradition to reflect on the story of climate change and collectively design the unwritten future. The “front” of the curtain tells the story of time as we know it, in the form of a glittering curtain made of over 12,000 glass and stone beads mapping global surface temperatures in comparison to the average from 1890-present. Interspersed are camouflaged words, sequenced in vertical and horizontal poems. No word is repeated. (Ask us if you want to know what the poems were!) The “back” shows us time in reverse — or maybe our future.
Participants could play several games designed to use the words on the front as prompts to add to the curtain’s wooden frame and create a new curtain on the back re-making our collective future. Plus, as always community members were welcome to gift a bead bracelet to themselves, the neighborhood, or a loved one, joining our 34 Ave beading family.
Another story: a bead curtain is only perfectly vertical if the ground is, but we knew it wouldn’t be where it was located. 2024 Street Work Earth 2024 — on 34 Ave in Jackson Heights — was on the incline of a hill going upward in elevation towards the east. Unlike many other places in New York, our higher elevation makes us less susceptible to flooding, and the bead curtain showed us that.
Beads: Complexity in media
Beads are an ancient form of art found all around the globe, from the ancient Americas, to the South Asian subcontinent, to East Asia. They are so old as an art form that we can’t be sure where they originated. Unlike newer technologies, such as oil painting, they predated modern colonialism, which has used overt, subverting, and subtle tools of wealth+power to shift narratives and erase cultures.
But it’s no surprise that beads, too, have had their meaning changed by contemporary sources of cultural power, like Taylor Swift. Should we use it or shouldn’t we? This little question is actually one inflection of the reason we started The Arisen and Street Works. In a world where it is impossible to run from the dynamics of wealth+power, we were wondering how we change the system, rather than letting its cultural power control our sense of belonging.
We don’t have a perfect answer, but community listening and ownership centering majority BIPOC neighborhoods is the path we’re walking down. That’s why we co-create as core to practice, would never sell any participatory work without a clear shared benefit structure, and now test media in simple community programs or use the medium that are already loved instead of picking it ourselves.
We were asked to help out with community beading in Queens, especially on 34th Avenue, in 2023. For two years, we heard BIPOC kids and adults express their love for this wearable art. “It calms me down,” one kid told us. “I feel so peaceful,” another said. “I loved this so much when I was young,” said an elder. “This is my favorite activity on 34 Avenue,” said one mom. Their voices are top of mind. Shout out to 34 Avenue Open Streets Coalition for creating the space for arts on the street nearly seven days a week.
Did you know that writing a letter to someone on why you vote can actually increase the odds that they will? The MJN collective designed a letter writing campaign as part of Street Works to write nonpartisan letters encouraging young voters across the country to participate in our democracy in the 2024 Federal election. We adopted 200 voters through Vote Forward; all letters were mailed in October 2024.
Facilitators
Facilitators
Satia Koroma
Benjamin Kim
Laura Pastorini
Steffi Krause
Charney Robinson-Williams
Ernest Verrett
Why write letters?
Simply put, letter writing campaigns have proven to increase voter turnout. Vote Forward has conducted multiple studies since 2017 and found that writing personal letters makes a difference. Plus, it doesn’t take a long time (just a paragraph!), you can do it on your own, and it creates space for you to practice telling your story in your own way. If you’re looking for an effective, quick action that makes a difference in our democracy, letter writing is a start.
Ernest Verrett and I have organized community beading, an ancient tradition found all over the world, in Queens since 2023. We work on 34 Avenue’s Open Street and in the Queens Botanical Garden, as a form of social practice. Across age, kids and adults tell us it’s calming, brings focus, and sparks creativity and community connection.
As a part of rituals of continuity, community beading is simple, affordable, and often starts a flow gift giving. It’s also meaningful media — recyclable, complex, and symbolic. Click here for how our work is evolving.
Visual art by Anjali Deshmukh; facilitation by Ernest Verrett. Glass Hours. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2019. In Two Minutes to Midnight, Bliss Plaza, Queens. With facilitation by Ernest Verrett, support by Jaime Faye-Bean, and funding from Sunnyside Shines and Queens Council on the Arts w/ public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership w/ City Council. Photos by Neha Gautam.
In 2018 and 2019, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced that the Doomsday Clock had reached “2 minutes to midnight.” For 70 years, the Clock has been a symbol for how close we are to a man-made disaster, where midnight is a point of no return. As our planet suffers around us, quietly and with frightening potential, are we able to make sacrifices for a future we can’t know or see? As we benefit from our privileges today, are we prepared to give up what is necessary to enable liberation for all tomorrow?
In reflecting on these questions, we read about the science of memory and how we think about time. The result was Glass Hours, an installation and card game exploring whether our connection, even love, of the future can grow stronger if we creatively engage with both our past and future in the same space.
Creators first picked a painted coin and were asked to share a memory that was evoked or invoked by the colors. For some, the spark was immediate, and experiences from many decades ago, or that hadn’t been recalled for decades, bubbled forth. One individual recalled a 60-year-old memory of a friend from childhood, someone who they hadn’t thought about or remembered for decades. Another remembered the color of the wall in the den of her old childhood home on a particular day. Her sister, who was by her side, then shared with us an old memory of skinny-dipping for the only time in her life. Neither sister had ever heard these stories before. Other creators noticed new details or colors in familiar memories, bonding with the paintings that evoked them.
Then, creators turned their coin over to a different painting and blended the color with a word. For example, some shared electric blue memories of heritage; or red memories of bias. Slightly different variations of the game were also made to help children engage equally. Many stories emerged, in private conversations and small groups. Some, however found it easier to engage with the words, rather than colors, making me realize that Glass Hours needs a 2.0.
Next, creators tossed their past memories into an unknown future and discovered that each future shape of the game board represented a different experience, from apocalypse, to extreme pollution, to a world of glass or colored orange. They were then asked to describe a future memory in that world and find a painting that looked like it, reversing the flow between color and memory.
We were invited by the amazing Jaime Faye-Bean to install Glass Hours at Bliss Plaza in Sunnyside, Queens, in 2019, thanks to support from Sunnyside Shines and the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Several other artists joined us, to co-imagine New York’s outdoor public spaces as hubs for creative democracy. The event, 2 Minutes to Midnight, became a free, interactive outdoor co-creation lab under the 7 train. Click here to learn more about the lab and other artists.
Installation
Card Game(s)
Image summary
Anjali Deshmukh, Artist. Glass Hours. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2019. In Two Minutes to Midnight, Bliss Plaza, Queens. With facilitation by Ernest Verrett, support by Jaime Faye-Bean, and funding from Sunnyside Shines and Queens Council on the Arts w/ public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership w/ City Council. Photos by Neha Gautam.
What does it mean for time to run out— for the things we want to do, feel, and be, and for the world we want to pass on? As our planet suffers around us, quietly and with frightening potential, Glass Hours asks: are we able to make sacrifices for a future we can’t know or see? As we benefit from our privileges today, are we prepared to give up what is necessary to enable liberation for all tomorrow?
Glass Hours was an installation and card game about how we process time, memory, and the future. Through the game, participants sparked old memories alongside fictional memories in radical future worlds and explored whether their connection, even love, of the future can grow stronger if we creatively engaged with our past and future in the same space.
Visual art by Anjali Deshmukh; facilitation by Ernest Verrett. Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2015. Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm. http://www.3d.anjalideshmukh.com/bending-the-universe/ Featuring poetry readings by Purvi Shah. Photo by Chasi Annexy.
Today, the Earth is around 13.8 billion years old. To think about how all of this happened, and the blip of human existence so far in an expansive Universal story, is sublime: awe-inspiring, frightening, beautiful, spiritual, and creative. We hoped to share that with others by working within “games” to create space for sublimeness to sink into soul, flowing on a quiet current of Earth’s fragility and well-being.
Thanks to the Queens Council on the Arts in 2015, Bending the Universe was installed on the Brooklyn Grange’s LIC rooftop farm in Queens. The game board was a timeline, chronicling and visualizing phases of Universe creation, from the Big Bang — a white circle — to hundreds of circles, leaves, squares, and black holes, branching into three timelines trillions of years into a future with many possible endings, or new beginnings.
Creators first selected a ‘game piece’ with a word written on it, from “hope” to “witches” to “love” to “books,” and more. They could freely choose or be given one at random. They were asked to put their game piece down on the game board and walk along one side of the benches as they made their choice. On those benches was a long, continuous written narrative of our Universe’s timeline. To choose their spot, people explored the timeline, which detailed how Forces like gravity work and when scientists believe they came into being, when matters started to form, how Earth started to form, the emergence of life, the death of our beloved sun, and billions of journeys of matter and energy beyond. Peoples’ choices were conceptual and aesthetic as they changed the game board in their painterly ways.
When creators finished, they met one of us at the end of time. We gave them a blank milestone marker and asked them a simple question: what happened to your word at the moment in time that you chose? They reflected and wrote strange and beautiful stories, weaving in real facts about the Universe, and placed them on an alternate timeline mirroring the real one. Throughout the day, an alternate collective timeline emerged as stories accumulated, about love at the end of time, ideology at the beginning, and so much more.
Based on how they participated, they received a horoscope.
The Nature of Horoscopes
From reading hundreds of pages about the Universe to create this game, we learned 2 things:
1. From beginning to end, our Universe is a rainbow, filled with red explosion at the beginning, dreams of quiet blue in silent expansion, birthing in green majesty as galaxies and planets form, and sunsetting yellow and orange as we prepare for endings and beginnings.
2. Matter and energy, as one becomes the other, are us. We seek contraction, quiet, containment, introversion, and introspection as matter takes form by pulling into itself under the force of gravity. When we contract too far, do we absorb others? We seek expansion, explosion, dissolution, and distance as energy takes identity and stretches with the Universe. If we stretch too far, do we lose a sense of self?
These two understandings took creative form in a final step: a horoscope system that we designed. This system mapped our universe’s timeline to a spectrum or rainbow. People who wished for a horoscope tied to how they played were asked to share which moment in time they chose and whether they saw themselves as matter or energy. Based on their answer, they received a ‘horoscope,’ which predicted their life stage or their stage of mind, a mirror for the Universe. The horoscope, often eerily prophetic, framed an opportunity for participants to make a decision in their real lives. For those that chose to make a decision, I followed up one year later.
Design Prototype
A long, horizontal abstract drawing of a timeline of our universe’s history on a grey-blue background. Across the bottom is a timeline in white, from year 0 stretching trillions and trillions of years into our future. In year 0, white circle gives birth to hundreds of circles, which then morph into leaves, gray squares, and black holes until finally to branching into three separate timelines with unknown ends trillions and trillions of years into our future. This drawing was the prototype for the installation.
Horoscope System
A spectrum at the bottom mirrors the universe timeline. Along the top is a chart with two rows. The top row refers to matter; the second refers two energy. At each moment in time, or for each color, is a unique horoscope for matter and energy.
Brooklyn Grange Installation
People playing outside: reading, writing, and chatting with us and with one another. A collective fictional timeline emerges throughout the day.
Bending the Universe moved through Universe creation, from Big Bang to unknown end(s). Players selected a ‘game piece’ with a word on it, like “love” or “witches.” They added it to the installation while reading a factual narrative of our Universal story. On a mirror timeline, they then wrote a story of what happened to their word at the moment in time they chose, collaging a fictional story opposite the factual one. Participants then received a ‘horoscope’ based on a system I designed. The horoscope, eerily prophetic, invited participants to make a personal decision. I contacted participants a year later to find out how it went. Bending the Universe was woven into the Brooklyn Grange’s rooftop farm.
Ideally, social sector organizations enact interventions that will lead to a specific change that they seek. They use unbiased evidence to develop those interventions, and then they track whether the interventions are actually having the effect they want. If they’re not, organizations know that they should change what they’re doing. This can be a difficult process, especially when funding for this analysis is scarce, and so many factors shape our lives.
Nonetheless, it’s been on my mind as an artist for a decade. I wanted to better understand whether art can be an intervention, without losing the individuality and pure creativity that differentiates it from institutional enactments with narrowly defined goals. I also wondered whether art can function as a medium, where the participant decides their direction. Can art help build creative space for participants to choose their change?
This was where my games began, as site-specific installations that ask viewers to creatively confront their way of looking at the world, slowly walking a road from audience to maker. While every game is different, here’s how one of them works: You pick a “gamepiece” that has a unique meaning. But you don’t yet know what it means. You put it on a “game board,” carefully selecting an event from thousands laid out in front of you like a whirlwind of human experience. You’re surrounded by people, collectively making choices together. At the end, you find out that your game piece stands for an emotion. You’re asked to write a work of microfiction, combining the emotion and event.
A simple game generated a dramatic spectrum of experiences. Some picked an event reflecting their lived histories; others, their hopes; others, pure fiction. Some discovered that the emotion they picked was exactly what they felt; others, the exact opposite; others, a hidden layer of truth; others, pure conjecture shaping their story.
The reactions were personal, emotional, creative, and generative. People working in local businesses told their customers to come play. One participant told me that the game changed her life. Another shared with me, a complete stranger, a secret that was causing her intense guilt.
What they reminded me was that meaningful, and sometimes uncomfortable, rules can unlock creativity in people that even they didn’t realize was possible.
By developing longer connections with participant-creators, I believe that art can foster, and possibly cause, life change. To test this, I designed a horoscope system around an installation on the past and future of our Universe. Creators received a “fortune” based on how they expressed themselves. Sometimes, their fortunes were eerily prophetic. From there, they decided on a life change they wanted to make. I offered to contact them a year later to find out if they followed through. And on August 29th, 2016, I did.
What I found out from people who wrote back is that an artwork can manifest or move along change that was in-the-making, helping people turn their lives into art, like a micro-movement of soul. But life-change takes time, and sometimes it needs to gather momentum through different and complementary reinforcements, like a snowball rolling down a hill.
The more time people have with art, the less fleeting their artistic experiences, and the more makers listen to the people we make for & with, the deeper we can understand and support movements, of souls and communities.
Visual art by Anjali Deshmukh; facilitation by Ernest Verrett Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2014. In Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY. With support from Sonia Montoya. Photo by Chasi Annexy.
In invitations to play, even when there are constraints, we can find ways to answer both personal and community challenges. And our solutions can be art; they can open the doors to other solutions, create moments of possibility, and defy rigidity.
In 2014, creators came across a game board installed at the intersection of a cobblestone street in Dumbo, during the Dumbo Arts Festival. The board laid out about 500 unique events and 300 unique hand drawn symbols on adhesive vinyl, scattered across the cobblestones in blue red, and silver. Some of the written events were mundane, others were fantastical, some were about family, others were about sensory experiences. Similarly, the symbols ranged far and wide, from a flying cape, to a mushroom cloud, to a roller coaster, to a rocket, and more.
At the beginning, creators picked a penny with a number on it. They knew the number stood for one of about 900 emotions, objects, or symbols, but they didn’t yet know which one. They were invited to put their penny down on an event on the game board. Some people picked events that were connected to real experiences; others related to things they wished for; others purely imaginary. Many picked symbols.
At the other end of the board, they found out which symbol, object, or emotion the number on their penny stood for and were invited to write a simple story or equation making sense of the two together. Creators then added their story to the game board using green vinyl. Over the course of the day, the game board filled up with people’s stories and became increasingly green. A kind local resident invited us to take photos from his apartment of the view from above.
People who chose to play Level 2 of Visions of the Future blind-selected a card from a deck with an unfinished sentence on it, such as: “Your feelings will change when…” or “The next step is…” They were invited to respond to a story or equation written by a creator from Level 1 or an event or symbol from the original board, contributing to a growing web of dialogue designed in creative constraint.
After playing Level 2 a few times, some creators came back and asked me for a Level 3, which I hadn’t formalized into the game rules, assuming that people wouldn’t want to stay that long on a beautiful fall day. In Level 3, creators were invited to visually connect symbols, events, and responses across the board to create the backbone of a complete short story. A handful of people did so, writing out and emailing me complete short stories, composed with time and care.
Visions of the Future was a variation on Micro-Fiction Game and Random Fortune Generators, which go into detail on the underlying purpose of play and where it came from.
