Image: Mary Mattingly, Public Water artist-led walk in Prospect Park, 2021; image by Maria Niro.

Join More Art’s CONNECT, BUILD, AMPLIFY campaign and expand the possibility for art to activate change!

Join More Art’s CONNECT, BUILD, AMPLIFY campaign and expand the possibility for art to activate change! Our goal is to raise $10,000 in 10 days (August 10th – 21st) through small donations of $10 and up.

We believe that creativity and artists catalyze social change. More Art is the only art organization in the New York City metropolitan area that promotes public art from the ground-up; we actively promote and support underrepresented and marginalized artists whose work strives to exist beyond the white cube. 

However, enacting change is a collective effort, and it is our community of supporters–like you–that make our work possible. By connecting with more people, building our community, and amplifying socially engaged public art, we expand the possibility for art to activate change.

This campaign is about growing our community of supporters without whom we would not exist. More Art strives to empower all people to utilize art as a tool for connection, awareness, and action on critical social topics (see below) that affect our lives and communities. Our supporters, therefore, enable us to create the free public events that are vital to ensuring art is accessible to all. We invite you to engage with us by attending our public programs, participating in salon dinners, or stopping by to experience work created by our more than 70-strong network (and growing!) of artists and engaging fellows. Your presence and your financial support is crucial to the work we do.

As a non-profit structured on a collective network of artists, participants, organizers, disruptors, and others from the public, bringing public art to more people is a cornerstone of our work. To fundraise in alignment with our values of creating community around art and social change, we ask for YOUR support to extend our reach. 

How to get involved:

• Make a donation of $10 or more.
• Become a Team Leader by asking 10 people from your community to donate $10 each. We will provide you with a fundraising webpage and all the info you need.
• Spread the word to your network via email or on social media.

What our donors receive:

• Free access to socially engaged public art programs, gatherings and talks.
• Invitations to special events, including unique opportunities to meet with artists, community members and cultural enthusiasts.

About More Art:
More Art collaborates with artists across their careers to catalyze social change by producing meaningful participatory public art for a broad audience.

More Art. More Agency. More Action

• Art: More Art is known for its artistic integrity, for visually compelling work and work that is socially engaged.
• Agency: More Art supports self-determination within art. Our process is open, grounded, and flexible.
• Action: More Art provides a platform for different people to experience art, this leads to action that paves the way towards transformation and change.

Join the campaign today and help amplify our work!

With gratitude,

The More Art Team

——————

Check out some of our recent and upcoming public programs: 

WATCH: A live recording of Resistance Revival Chorus and Pennants & Poets, part of our Gates, Borders, Barriers series of public programs in connection with our latest public art installation Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds by artist Fred Wilson.

EXPLORE: The Red String, a recent public art project by Lily & Honglei, one of More Art’s Engaging Artist Residents. This project was an augmented reality (AR) art installation designed for multiple public parks in Asian American neighborhoods. Incorporating both physical and digital components reflecting on immigrant experiences, East Asian cultural heritage, and Asian American identity the artwork included a series of large banners with distinct designs inspired by patterns of Asian red strings, also called Asian knots, a type of folk art symbolizing unity & love.

PREVIEW: Get to know the work of Freya Powell, an artist whose work we will be presenting in the Fall at Green-Wood Cemetery Chapel, Brooklyn.

Learn more about what we do at moreart.org. Contact us with any questions by emailing alexandra@moreart.org.

NETWORKS OF COLLECTIVE CARE

Join us on March 11th, 2023 for Networks of Collective Care, a showcase of the work of More Art’s 2022 Engaging Artists Fellows, featuring work and conversations by María Bonomi y Lucía Cozzi, ayo Ohs, and Buena Onda Collective (Camila A. Morales & Dominika Ksel) with contributions from Tanika Williams, Yeseul Song, and Maya Simone Z.

Networks of Collective Care serves as an introduction to the evolving practices, research findings, and specific projects of More Art’s 2022 Fellows while also emphasizing the impact and importance of connection, storytelling, and contact among all living beings in order to begin to create a more just ecosystem and world. This public presentation of ongoing work exemplifies the 2022 cohort’s exploration of and attention to themes of community, empathy, and mutual support. 

Networks of Collective Care will be presented at Recess in Brooklyn, NY on March 11th, 2023 from 12-4pm. Click here to register and to learn more about this event! Follow along on social media and subscribe to our newsletter for updates and Fellow spotlights. 

This presentation features artwork from half of the 2022 Fellows—stay tuned for more information on the public presentations of the rest of the cohort (Maya Simone Z., Tanika Williams, and Yeseul Song), which will be featured in May 2023 as activations of Fred Wilson’s Mind Forged Manacles/Manacle Forged Minds.

LOCATION & ACCESSIBILITY

Networks of Collective Care will be presented at Recess, located at 46 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205. Click here for Google Map directions. 

By subway*: Take the G to Clinton-Washington Avs; F to York St; A/C to Jay St-MetroTech; B/D or Q/R to Dekalb Av; 2/3 or 4/5 to Nevins St. *All subway stops require a walk of at least 15 minutes or transfer to a bus line below.  

By bus: Take the B57 to Flushing Av/Waverly Av; B62 to Park Ave/Washington Av; B54 or B69 to Clinton Av/Park Ave; B67 to Market St/9th Ave.

By ferry: Take the Astoria (AST) route to Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Parking: On-street and metered parking are available on Flushing Avenue, Washington Ave, and on many of the adjacent streets. Non-metered parking is available underneath the BQE along Park Avenue. The nearest parking garage is located at 275 Park Ave. Click here for more parking options.      

——————

The presentation space is ADA accessible, though there is a small slope from the sidewalk level to the front door opening but no step. The main doors do not have automatic options, but can be locked in open position and are wide enough to accommodate walkers and wheelchairs. There is an ADA-accessible, gender-neutral restroom on the ground floor. 

A digital, screen reader-friendly program will be circulated prior to the event and will be available on the day of the event via QR code or shareable link. Visual descriptions of each artist’s presentation will also be included in this program.    

Artist’s presentations and conversations will be available to experience virtually on Zoom at this link, which will be active at the presentation times specified in the program. Closed captioning will be available on Zoom.       

Please send any additional accessibility needs and requests to info@moreart.org at least one week prior to the event. 

Allergen-friendly lunch and refreshments will be available.

Masks are recommended while not eating or drinking, though not required. Masks and hand sanitizer will be available at the entrance and throughout the space.

Featuring work by:

BUENA ONDA COLLECTIVE

We are excited to invite you to Temporalities of Atmospheric Attunement—a performance and installation that reveals the invisible circuitry, shared evolution, and future paths for interspecies unity through an interactive multi-species symphony. Unravel the mechanisms of fear by communing with our fungal counterparts during an evocative afternoon where we hope to satiate both your psyches and belly’s. Here, we will transfer bodies, energies and ideas around how humans, fungi, AI and other intelligences communicate, cooperate and find mutual structures of support and care in an ever-growing state of ecological crisis and dominator culture.

Buena Onda Collective is an eco-centered, paradigm shifting,transmedia collective that uses sculpture, installation and interactivity to playfully explore ideas around restoration, remediation and interspecies communication during the Anthropocene.

We work with media and design techniques including: 3D Modeling, Architecture, Digital and Physical Fabrication, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Sound Composition, Video, Animation and more. Our influences span interstices of science, art, architecture and consciousness. We enjoy subverting and transforming ideas around ‘sustainability’ into more intimate, transhuman experiences where the consciousness of non-human species is more deeply considered. We do this by mapping out the invisible landscapes of our interdependent, rhizomatic relationships via various community-based artworks and workshops.

We are Rockaway based educators and artists with over 10+ years in the art and architecture realm. Our eco-centered community oriented practice values process and collaboration to help facilitate more equitable and dynamic ways of integrating and communing with sentient and non-sentient life.

—

MARÍA BONOMI & LUCÍA COZZI

surfaces of contact: art towards a collective affect

In 2020, encuentros came into our lives as an artistic practice to explore contact and affect collectively. Coming together, we deepen beyond the virtual connection that we achieve daily, and we contact each other through shared sensorial languages. Encuentros, as a method for collective expansion, gives us breadth to imagine new ways of bonding and acting through support and mutual care.

Inhabiting public spaces, we gather to create collectively and we establish networks that enable us to play and reflect together in the creation of small visual worlds full of new possibilities, dreams and affect. From the inside out, we come together with others by coincidence or by mutual agreement, and we stop being one, to be collectively. Encuentros remind us that we are not alone, that united we are stronger and that there is no affective hope without collective commitment.

María Bonomi and Lucía Cozzi are a Brooklyn-based artist duo from Argentina. They came into contact in 2019 as collective members of Mil Mundos Books and began to establish a loving and collaborative bond. They see that first meeting as the starting point of a spiral that extends with each new encounter, emphasizing the spiral as a symbol of movement, transformation and growth. Their practice explores collective public art as a channel for reflection, action and affect. In their collaborative pieces, encuentros, they co-create spaces of research and dialogue using the shared surface as the conversation space. They value process over output, as it is the catalyst for collective contact, expression and generative bonds.

—

AYO OHS

The Silent Unseen Audio Tour: An Embodied History of Asian America is an Audio Tour and Soundwalk tracing the history of Asian immigration through facts, stories, and somatic experience. The tour, set at the location of the Queens Museum and available later this year, will invite participants to follow narration, travel to various places throughout the museum, and relate somatically to the space and architecture—correlating place with important feelings, sensations, and historical events in Asian immigration history. On March 11th, ayo will present excerpts of the work, and invite participants to leave their own stories or recordings for future iterations of the project. To access the excerpts, please bring a smartphone and your personal headphones. 

ayo ohs is a socially engaged artist and director, working in performance, sound, movement, and healing arts. ayo is currently working on The Silent Unseen, an interdisciplinary project addressing the history and silencing of Asian women. 

ayo has presented choreography and spatialized audio compositions in venues throughout NY and San Francisco, where their work was described as “feisty, clever and poignant” by the SF Bay Guardian. 

As a close collaborator with Andrew Schneider, ayo developed the lead role in AFTER (The Public Theatre) and co-directed NERVOUS/SYSTEM (BAM Next Wave). From 2013-2018, they were an original cast member in Faye Driscoll’s Thank You for Coming series.

As an anti-racist facilitator and somatic healer, ayo is a founding member of Movement Research’s Artist of Color Council, a co-facilitator of Radical Love and Equity, and the founder of Anti-Oppression Yoga, a network of free online videos and classes.

With contributions from:

YESEUL SONG

On March 11th, Yeseul will present a sketch of her signature work that was created or presented during her time at More Art.

•  Invisible Sculptures (2018-2021): A series of non-visual sculptures that are made of sound, warmth, air, smell, and thought.
• Invisible Sculpture On Wheels (2020-2021): During the pandemic, Yeseul brought an invisible sculpture to outdoor spaces on a cart to activate public spaces.
• Two Subtle Bodies (2022): An interactive experience where two strangers wearing sensor-embedded capes get to know each other through auditory & tactile interaction.

Yeseul Song is a South Korean-born, NYC-based immigrant, artist, and educator who uses technology, interaction, and participation as art media. She uncovers creative possibilities of non-visual senses and creates new sensory languages using technology to advocate for imaginative and equitable views of the world. With the belief that art needs to be accessible to everyone, she explores and occupies non-traditional public spaces to challenge commonly held ideas about access to and accessibility of art.

Her participatory work has created surprising and delightful moments of reflection for people from all over the world. She’s worked with a wide range of arts organizations including Clayarch Museum (South Korea), Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum (D.C.), PASEO (NM), Wave Farm (NY), Brooklyn Arts Council, and Art in Odd Places (NY). Her on-going work has been shortlisted for the Creative Capital Awards.

Yeseul is an Assistant Arts Professor at New York University Tisch’s Interactive Telecommunications Program & Interactive Media Arts (NYU ITP/IMA).

—

TANIKA WILLIAMS 

“Traces of Yarrow” meanders through remnants of Downtown Brooklyn’s Underground Road, leaving gifts of yarrow as a tribute to the memory and activism of New York abolitionists. The 4-minute piece calls attention to the enduring work of everyday people advocating for freedom, liberty, and justice for all.

Tanika I. Williams (b. St. Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is an award-winning filmmaker and performance artist. She investigates women’s use of movement, mothering, and medicine to produce and pass on ancestral wisdom of ecology, spirituality, and liberation.

Williams holds a BA from Eugene Lang College, New School, and an MDiv from Union Theological Seminary. Her films have been screened in national and international festivals and broadcast on American television.

Williams has been awarded fellowships and residencies at NYU Tisch School, New York Foundation for the Arts, Hi-ARTS, Cow House Studios, MORE Art, and BRIC. Her additional awards and appearances include En Foco Media Arts Fund, 99.5 WBAI, Art in Odd Places, Creative Time, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Civic Art Lab, GreenspaceNYC, Let Us Eat Local, Just Food, and Performa.

—

MAYA SIMONE Z.

On March 11th, Maya Simone will present a rotating series of images documenting their past projects and collaborations, including “Give It A Go” (2022, dir. Lisa Fagan), “Waters of Oblivion” (2021 & 2022, dir. Cinthia Chen), and other recent works – such as “state of water: brooklyn waterfronts” (current, created by Maya Simone Z.).

Maya Simone Z. is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and educator from the South. Having come up dancing in church, their movement-based practice centers queer, Black diasporic emotional and spiritual connections between the brain, body and spirit. Their work interweaves movement, writing, sound, installation, video, and performance. They have worked with Sydnie L. Mosley, Jasmine Hearn, Lisa Fagan and Cinthia Chen. Maya has developed and performed in works presented at Green Space, Corkscrew Theater Festival, Theater Mitu and more.

Maya Simone has completed residencies with MODArts Dance Collective (NYC), Hambidge Center (GA), Mudhouse Art (Crete, Greece), and GALLIM (NYC). They are currently an Engaging Artists (EA) Fellow with More Art and 2022 artist-in-residence with the FloodNet Deluge program at NYU Tandon. With support from More Art and the FloodNet Deluge program, they are currently developing an oral history collection and archiving project titled state of water: brooklyn waterfronts, centering experiences of NYC residents in relationship to water, city infrastructure, and flooding.

ABOUT ENGAGING ARTISTS

More Art’s year-long Engaging Artists Fellowship is designed to help emerging NYC artists and community organizers develop and sustain a socially engaged and public art practice. The Fellowship program curriculum includes mentorship, peer networking, access to programming opportunities in New York City, and workshops and artist talks tailored to the interests/needs of the cohort. The infrastructure and laboratory provided by More Art allow selected emerging and underrepresented artists to gain a deeper understanding of the history and vitality of public and socially engaged art and encourage artists to expand and develop social practice.

We are thrilled to announce More Art’s 2023 Commission Artist: Immanuel Oni!

More Art’s Engaging Artists Commission* is an opportunity for early career artists focused on the incubation and commissioning of a public art project and carries an $8000 award to realize the project, plus curatorial, conceptual, budgetary, and logistical mentorship. The infrastructure and laboratory provided by More Art allow one selected early career and underrepresented artist (or collective) to gain a deeper understanding of the history and vitality of public and socially engaged art. Click here for more info on the Engaging Artists program. *Formerly known as the EA Residency

Meet Immanuel Oni

Immanuel Oni is a first-generation Nigerian-American artist and spatial designer living in New York City. He believes art is not about what he is making, but who he is making it for. His work explores loss and its deep connection with space. His canvas consists of repurposing existing public space infrastructure such as light posts, fencing, underutilized green areas or mobile spaces to prompt community dialogue and connection. He has led and participated in international art and urbanism workshops in Venice, Hong Kong, and Lagos. He has been a Fellow for the Design Trust for Public Space, Culture Push, New York for Culture and Arts, and received awards from Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts NY, Youth Design Center, Architectural League of New York, and the New York State Council of the Arts. He is a former Director of Community Design at the New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice and Adjunct Professor at Parsons the New School for Design. He is the co-founder and Creative Director of Liminal, a non-profit that works at the intersection of art, unity, and space.

Follow us on social media and subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates on this project!

We are excited to announce our 2023 Engaging Artist Fellows: Carrie Sijia Wang, Chava DiMaio, Danielle Cowan, Jessica Angima, Mei Ling Yu, Nava Derakhshani, and Ray Jordan Achan.

More Art’s year-long Engaging Artists Fellowship is designed to help emerging NYC artists and community organizers develop and sustain a socially engaged and public art practice. The Fellowship program curriculum includes mentorship, peer networking, access to programming opportunities in New York City, and workshops and artist talks tailored to the interests/needs of the cohort. The infrastructure and laboratory provided by More Art allow selected emerging and underrepresented artists to gain a deeper understanding of the history and vitality of public and socially engaged art and encourage artists to expand and develop social practice. Click here for more info on the Engaging Artists program.

Meet our 2023 Fellows

Carrie Sijia Wang

Carrie Sijia Wang (she/her) is an artist and educator based in New York. Combining art, technology, and research, she makes performances, videos, and participatory experiences to explore the humanization of machines and the mechanization of humans. 

Wang is a Year 8 member of NEW INC, 2021 Pioneer Works resident, and 2020 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient. She has shown and presented work with venues including Rhizome, New Museum, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Onassis Foundation, ACM SIGGRAPH, and A.I.R. Gallery. Her work has been featured in publications including the Business Insider, Slate, and Computerworld. She teaches Interactive Media Arts at NYU. www.carriesijiawang.com

Chava DiMaio

Chava DiMaio (he/they) is a trans-masc Filipino/Brazilian storyteller, who possesses the worst memory imaginable. 

His work is a direct defiance to that sentiment.

A guerilla approach to interdisciplinary collaging; jazz/folk melodic fusion littered with missed calls + undeniably New York soundscapes.. receipts, letters, and pressed flowers caress 35mm stop motion animations.. each frame, hand cut with love and care, in an effort to personify the present moment.

Blending the convenience of digital software + textural nostalgia of analog formats to evoke the emotional recall of shared human experiences. Love, pain, joy, despair.. change and our acceptance of the fact.. our subjective differences showcased through universally emotional similarities. 

He received his AA in Classical French Horn/Studio Recording Technology before leaving to serve as the youngest of 20 artists in the ‘2021 Stonehenge NYC’ artist residency program. He works as a freelance audio engineer at ‘moon studios’ (NY), and can be found hand roasting coffee beans at ‘Gentle Brew’ (Long Beach, NY). www.chavadimaio.com

Danielle Cowan

Danielle (she/they) is a blind, queer and Blackarican native New Yorker dabbling in organizing, performance and poetry. Her art comes from fascination with what it means for a body or place to hold multiple sometimes conflicting identities and playing with ways to write within shared histories and trauma. Her work has been published in Causeway Lit’s Revolution Issue, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change and elsewhere. She was an artistic investigator for Rattlestick Playwrights Theater’s Block by Block Project and was a spring 2022 Office Hours Poetry Workshop fellow.

Jessica Angima

Jessica Angima (she/her) is a first-generation Kenyan American organizer, meditation teacher and social practice artist. In a constant state of process, she facilitates intimate community through the exploration of art, justice, and contemplative practice.

Her identities as the daughter of Kenyan immigrants and a Black American woman deeply inform her community-based practice. Her work primarily focuses on deep vulnerability, using meditation and creative practices as methods of awakening consciousness. Jessica blends dharma, ancestral wisdom and poetics to decenter European thought frames and lead herself and others toward liberation.

With over 400 hours of meditation instruction training, she has worked with BRIC, Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Dia Art Foundation, Google, SELF Magazine, SHAPE Magazine, theSkimm, Tricycle Magazine and more. Jessica was a 2019 Create Change Fellow at The Laundromat Project and holds an MA in Arts Politics from New York University Tisch School of the Arts. She is a member of Inner Fields Collective and serves as Deputy Training Director at Arena.

Jessica lives in Brooklyn, NY on unceded Lenape territory with her cat and her books. www.jessicaangima.com

Mei Ling Yu

Mei Ling (she/they) self-identifies as a cis-gender, queer Chinese-American and Gong Fu Cha Practitioner. Born, raised and based in New York City, on unceded Lenapehoking land. Mei Ling is deeply passionate about radical healing, spirituality, and well-being. A life-long devotee of Tea, Cha, the healing arts, somatic practices and experienced in practicing Gong Fu Cha, 4 years now.

Mei Ling is a child of Toishanese immigrants, coming from an ancestry of village farmers and Chinese medicine people. Mei Ling aspires to study spiritual herbalism and farming to reconnect and deepen their practice with medicine of the East and West, integrating ancient and modern practices.

Nava Derakhshani

Nava Derakhshani (she/her) is a multimedia artist with a background in Architecture and Sustainable Development. Born to Iranian parents in eSwatini, her work explores themes of migration, identity, belonging, and gender. She is a 2020 graduate of the International Center for Photography, NYC, and works in images, as well as form and sculpture. www.navaderakhshani.com

Ray Jordan Achan

Ray Jordan Achan (he/him/his) is an Indo-Caribbean, Brooklyn based theater-maker. Ray is the Founding Artistic Director of EXILED TONGUES, a performance collective that provides financial, artistic and collaborative support to artists of the global majority who center diasporic consciousness. Ray’s performative work primarily deals with the intersection between racial and climate justice, particularly as they relate to the NYC coastline. He is the recipient of the 2022 NYSCA Individual Artist Grant for his site-specific documentary theater project, “Our Bang for Their Buck: No Pipeline for LNG”, the 2022 Creative Equations Fund from the Brooklyn Arts Council and a commissioned artist with Works on Water for his site-specific documentary theater project, “(Re)Imagining Greenpoint’s Green Waters”. Ray is a Rising Producer Fellow at the Creative & Independent Producer Alliance, and an Associated Artist at Culture Push. Ray is a graduate of Wesleyan University with a BA in Government and Theater with Honors. www.rayjordanachan.com | www.exiledtongues.com