Building Stories

Bridget Bartolini is a socially engaged artist and educator who uses story-sharing to strengthen community connections. Bridget launched the Five Boro Story Project in 2013 to produce community storytelling events that bring New Yorkers together through sharing true stories and art inspired by our neighborhoods. In “LIC and Astoria Love Letter”, viewers are invited to listen to stories from previous events, and add to a growing collection of “love letters” written for Long Island City and Astoria.

Dani DeLade i is a Licensed Creative Art Therapist. “Where Shall We Go”s an ex-voto informed by DeLade’s experiences working with domestic violence survivors living in an emergency shelter while searching for affordable housing.

Alexander Dwinell’s “Displaced (3xx)”  is a video cityscape that simultaneously projects the news coverage of every person killed by police in their residence in the US so far this year. The installation makes clear that the legal system and those that enforce it serve to disrupt and destabilize community.

Jonathan Gardenhire is a photographer who has served as the Vice-President of the public housing development Smith House’s Resident Association Executive Board. Gardenhire is currently working on the “The Smith Houses Archive Project”, a photography series that explore the day-today lives of NYCHA Smith Houses residents in the Lower East Side. The project functions as an expanded portrait that reframes negative portrayals of public housing residents. “The Smith Houses Archive Project” incorporates images from the NYCHA archive at LaGuardia Community College in addition to images from the artists personal family collection. The text are excerpts from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, from Miguel Pinero’s A Lower East Side Poem, from Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and from a book (written in Spanish) about Puerto Rican heroes- opened to the page on Jose Celso Barbosa – the father of the Statehood for Puerto Rico movement, and the first Puerto Rican, and one of the first persons of African descent to earn a medical degree in the United States.

Aneeta Mitha’s “A Body, A Home” is a photography and audio series that represents the experiences of Brooklyn residents who are dealing with landlord abuse and the threat of displacement. Through visual compositing, the images elucidate how the loss of home, whether it is due to unsafe living conditions or being forced out unlawfully, occupies an often traumatic space within the body and mind of each neighbor.

Ilaria Ortensi’s work investigates how the construction and representation of space influence our contemporary imaginary. “The Two Cities” is a research and art project about housing, questioning how former ideals of inhabitation have been disappearing from contemporary cities. The precarity and loss of stabilized housing in the artists home neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn is represented through photography and hand-drawn maps.

Aldo Soligno and Cynthia Tobar’s “Beyond Bricks and Mortar: Stories of Community and Resilience” is a collaborative documentary video and photography project with the members of Silent Barn and the Hope Gardens Senior Center in Brooklyn. The project seeks to highlight the experiences of residents in public housing as they face the changes in their communities resulting from the conversion of diminishing affordable housing stock to market-rate condos.

Priscilla Stadler’s “Building the Movement: LIC [a.k.a. Beg, Borrow, or…]” is a site-specific installation of construction mesh from Long Island City.  The material eludes to architecture’s impermanence, its psychological and cultural ramifications, and the precarious experiences of individuals and communities in the profit-driven landscape of NYC’s development.