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.
