Serendipitously, the start of my Engaging Artists fellowship coincided with the formation of Brooklyn Jail Support, which has provided immediate care and relief to folks released from Brooklyn Central Booking every Friday, from 2pm to 2am, since August 2024. Over the past several months, I’ve become increasingly involved with their efforts, to the point that it has become a weekly practice — and a transformative experience that has opened my eyes to both the state’s deliberate cruelty and the remedial power of communal care.

BKJS, as it’s colloquially known, seeks to abolish the prison-industrial complex while recognizing that jail support is only a “temporary intervention” that alleviates the harms of policing. But it begins the necessary work of transforming our social relations by practicing mutual aid, which is anti-hierarchical and “inherently collaborative, relationship-based, and community-oriented,” to quote the community agreements that volunteers recite every Friday. This recitation kicks off the weekly teach-in between 9 and 10:30pm, during which the court goes on dinner break, and volunteers convene to share knowledge and skills.

Over the course of my fellowship, I’ve asked: what might folks released from Bookings appreciate, beyond the usual offering of cigarettes, shoelaces, water, and hot food? Many of them have been traumatized and detained overnight, often for minor infractions. How might the creative energy of BKJS volunteers be channeled into tangible and thoughtful gifts for these people? I’ve tried to integrate unconventional and artistic modes of care into our regular programming.

This past January, I co-led a blockprinting workshop with my co-conspirator and fellow BKJS volunteer, Sara, at Recess. After carving fragments of police barricades that she had taken out of commission, we used them as instruments to print patterns and affirming messages on construction paper. A week later, I led a teach-in at BKJS — that is, on the sidewalk outside Kings County Criminal Court — showing volunteers how to fold the paper into flowers. The following Friday, which happened to fall on Valentine’s Day, we offered the flowers to people released from Bookings. While this activity required multiple steps, each involving different participants, it demonstrated the healing and insurgent potential of creative regeneration.

In May, I co-led another two-part workshop with Sara, inspired by the court and correction officer recruitment posters that she has been collecting from subway cars. At an Upcycling Copaganda workshop at Recess, we invited participants to cut out words and letters from the posters, which they then shredded and blended into a pulp that they molded into new sheets of paper. At a BKJS teach-in later that month, I asked volunteers to compose poems by arranging the cut-out letters on the handmade paper, with the intention of offering these poems to people released from Bookings. One of them, named Chamari, helped us distribute all of the poems that evening, even insisting that folks recite their poem upon receiving one. Surprising interactions like these are engendered by the porous, collaborative, and contingent nature of socially engaged art.

More than a year ago, in my EA fellowship application, I wrote that I wanted to explore how my creative practice could become more “positive and prefigurative” — rather than merely “reactive and oppositional” — “modeling and enacting the social relations that movements are trying to achieve in the world at large.” I feel deeply fortunate to have found Brooklyn Jail Support, which every Friday practices and rehearses for a world without prisons and police, in which everyone’s basic needs are met. If we simply treat people with the care and respect that they deserve — everywhere, all of the time — such a world is possible.

Cindy Hwang is an artist and organizer for Art Against Displacement and Brooklyn Jail Support, with a day job as a tenant organizer on the Lower East Side. She is interested in tending to projects for collective liberation.

This article is also published on More Art’s Medium site.