Rising. Curtains.

“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 1901-2000. 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.

The Art of Letter Writing to Get out the Vote

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.

Community Beading

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.

New York City’s Culture Plan

On July 19, 2017, the City of New York released CreateNYC, New York City’s first-ever cultural plan. To shape the plan design, the city worked with dozens of local organizations, which helped gather feedback from nearly 200,000 residents. Among those many partners was the Asian American Arts Alliance (A4), which was committed to ensuring that the voices of NYC artists & residents in the AAPI community were included in the planning process.

In February 2017, I worked with the amazing Andrea Louie, Anjali Goyal, and Ariel Estrada of A4 to create an interactive workshop and online survey infused with a social practice artist’s spirit, to delve into what A4’s community believed was and wasn’t working when it came to arts and culture in New York City. About 50 people attended the workshop at Elmhurst Library in Queens, and 70 additional people participated in the online survey.

Over and over again, we heard that city’s arts & culture needs, challenges, and plans must be intrinsically connected to the other critical challenges facing the city, including affordable housing, arts education, and fostering a more compassionate and equitable culture. As sharers moved fluidly between social issues, economic issues, and recommendations specific to makers and arts & culture institutions, they emphasized that mindset shifts were needed, not just completing a set of tactics.

“Help us control the out-of-control rents in New York City,” shared one survey respondent. “It is choking everyone on all levels. The biggest expense for artists, especially performing artists, is space. When artists cannot afford space, no art will be created. For communities, the struggle to afford rent has a hugely negative impact on our quality of life, our ability to progress in our career endeavors, and how we spend our time and money… The arts are leaving New York City because it is simply impossible to survive here.”

If we want to protect the future vibrancy of the city, then we must see the arts as integral to health and development, supporting STEAM from the beginning of education; if we want arts and culture planning and funding to be equitable and inclusive, then city employees must first deeply understand and acknowledge the manifestations of bias before they can build processes that will be successful.

Many participants in the workshop expressed appreciation for the opportunity to voice their concerns and contribute their creativity. What we recognized in planning for feedback, however, was that there are no common definitions or understanding of what ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ are– let alone what they should be. To understand what’s missing and needed requires ongoing engagement, listening, and time.

A4 ultimately encouraged the Department of Cultural Affairs to integrate ongoing engagement and feedback loops into the ten-year plan itself, particularly if DCA is committed to equity and seeks to build relationships with communities that are currently not included in dialogue.

Click here for the full report I wrote and designed, including background materials for facilitators and participants.

Collab

Circlefor

Circlefor is a new home for collaboration between me and the brilliant and wondrous poet, Purvi Shah. Our purpose is to foster space where art emerges through connection, participation, and listening. Our Etsy shop is a home for affordable, community engaged artwork, featuring digital drawings and poetry inspired by vital community stories.

Learn more at our shared project site, circlefor.com.

Make Justice Normal

Grateful to be a co-founder of Make Justice Normal, a growing collective fiscally sponsored by Moore Impact. Our mission is to foster just relationships and collective action among people working to make justice normal. We started MJN to open space for people working to move capital— a proxy for structural power—towards justice. 

To foster relationships, we’re building processes of decision-making that reflect our values and a collective approach. To support collective action, MJN shares of our collective time and/or resources to develop or host projects by collective members. These projects may seem unrelated, and may become independent entities.

Ready to Heal / Ready to Grieve

Ready to Heal / Ready to Grieve was an interactive installation, by me and Purvi Shah at Queens Theatre, on October 17, 23, & 24, 2021. Throughout the day, participants collectively mapped and memorialized on the installation how they encounter and have encountered healing and grief, alongside their stories of future healing. In the space, participants could connect with themselves and with one another, after a year of isolations changed the shapes of grief and healing in all our lives.

Pink reflected healing; silver reflected grief. Semi-circles reflected “I”; crescents reflected “we.” The paths of healing and grief were many; one person’s path to healing was another person’s path to grief; family was a source of both healing and grief in one person’s heart. Climate change and cheating lay heavy on many souls.

Purvi and I were among 3,000 New York City-based artists to receive a grant through the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented and launched by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment (MOME) and Queens Theatre. Thank you to Dominic, Jay, Gabriel, and Norma of Queens Theatre for arranging multiple days of events in just a few short months! Thank you to Cindy Trinh for taking most of these photos!

Over three award cycles, artists received $5,000 grants to engage New Yorkers in Summer and Fall 2021. The program was funded by the $25 million New York City Artist Corps recovery initiative announced by Mayor de Blasio and DCLA in early 2021. Grants supported NYC artists who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. 

Circlefor: Anjali Deshmukh, Artist; Purvi Shah, Poet.
Ready to Heal / Ready to Grieve.
Installation. 2021. In Queens Theatre.
https://circlefor.com/heal-grieve
With support and facilitation by Ernest Verrett and Troy Woodley.
Photo by Cindy Trinh.

Weave&Woven

Weave&Woven was a collaboration with the extraordinary Purvi Shah at NurtureArt in 2017. Over a short, two-week residency, we wanted to find a way to test out new ways of collaborating in space and reflect with others on how we inhabit the sacred, in a time of heightened surveillance and criminalization of immigrants and communities of color. The result was a community-engaged activity in partnership with NurtureArt and Sadhana.

2 Minutes to Midnight

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. What is two minutes to midnight for New Yorkers? And what can we do about it? 

With several other artists, we explored 2 minutes to midnight as a free, interactive outdoor co-creation lab under the 7 train. Glass Hours and 2 Minutes to Midnight was supported by 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.

Featuring these amazing artists and thinkers:

  • CATHIE WRIGHT-LEWIS: cathiewrightlewis.com
  • MONICA JAHAN BOSE: monicajahanbose.com
  • CHEYENNE “ANGEL” LEWIS
  • PURVI SHAH: purvipoets.net
  • MELISSA LIU: https://www.teachingartistproject.org/single-post/2019/05/17/melissa-liu-visual-artist
  • LATRICE VERRETT: https://www.discogs.com/artist/81811-Latrice-Verrett
  • JAIME-FAYE BEAN: sunnysideshines.com
  • JENA PINCOTT: deepthinkdecks.com
  • Queens Writers Resist, ft. Pam Reyes and Kay Ottinger

Cathie Wright-Lewis, Novelist & Educator.
Power in the Pen. Workshop. 2019.
In Two Minutes to Midnight, Bliss Plaza, Queens.
With 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.
cathiewrightlewis.com; https://powerinthepenww.org/

In 2014, Cathie met with Miriam Robertson, curator of The Brownsville Heritage House to propose her dream to begin a community writing workshop for the residents of Brownsville. From that dream, the Power in the Pen Writer’s Workshop has emerged into an inspiring incubator for authors.

Monica Jahan Bose, Artist & Activist.
Two Minutes/Two Degrees.
Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2019.
In Two Minutes to Midnight, Bliss Plaza, Queens.
With 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.
monicajahanbose.com

Monica created a space of resilience, learning, and healing with handwoven saris from Bangladesh. She create da multilingual collaborative sari with participants’ promises, hopes, and fears about climate change as we work together to cool down our planet and keep the global temperature increase below 2° celsius.

Melissa Liu, Artist.
Reimagining Beyond Nuclear Families.
Mixed Media, Pervasive Installation. 2019.
In Two Minutes to Midnight, Bliss Plaza, Queens.
With 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.
https://www.3d.anjalideshmukh.com/2-minutes-midnight/

Participants were invited to reconsider the roles and expectations tied to the concept of “family.” Together, in intimate conversation, groups reimagined what a group of people might look like in a post-apocalyptic future where we are collectively facing scarcity and instability due to the destruction of Earth. Pulling from collective wisdom, the dialogue shaped a temporary sculpture that provide imaginations of how might we rebuild human society to be accountable to each other for our own survival.

Glass Cards

What does it mean to forget? What makes the future feel urgent, in need of care? These questions were part of Glass Hours, an installation 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. They were also the foundation for a simple card game of memory and color.

When I tried this game at home with my husband, memories silent for decades bubbled up. We also remembered details in them that we hadn’t ever noticed. Our recollection of certain colors was more vivid. There are also many things we don’t want to remember. But that didn’t mean we shouldn’t have.

There are 2 groups of cards in a deck, each broken into 2 subgroups. There were 4 variations on the game, and not all games use the whole deck.

Digital