Overview
Artists are uniquely equipped to reflect, critique, and celebrate their nuanced, everyday experiences through their work. At The Laundromat Project’s Create Change artist program, artists receive rigorous training, guidance, and support towards building a practice that is collaborative and responsive to the many urgent needs faced by communities of color throughout NYC and beyond.
Through The LP’s original content series, ART&, we explore priority issue areas named by our artist community — surfaced through The LP’s own research and listening. These are the issues our neighbors told us matter most to the future of Bedford-Stuyvesant and beyond.
Now we’re asking you to explore with us. Learn about the research, the partners, and the artists already doing this work. Be part of our dialogue, share how creativity shows up in the issues you care about. And share with your communities, too; the more of us who understand how these issues intersect, the stronger our collective power to shift them becomes.
Cultural organizing, along with political action and civic engagement, is a core tenet of The LP’s Create Change program and curriculum. Our participants are trained to see art as a tool for organizing, advocacy, and collective power-building, and we invite you to bring that same lens to the focus areas below.
Focus Areas
ART& Technology
Art & Technology explores the impact of digital technology and its industry practices on our communities. How are community-centered artists employing innovations in tech and AI in their practices? How are they responding to the increasingly complex and immersive ways digital technology is impacting the most vulnerable communities? Whether it is the effects of surveillance capitalism, extremism on social media, the spread of mis- and disinformation, or the exploitative practices of big tech on employees and users, The LP is committed to the discourse of ART& Technology.
ART& Health Equity and Wellness
It is proven that art has a measurable impact on our individual health and well-being — engaging with art shapes physical, emotional, and mental health outcomes alike. In communities of color, including Bed-Stuy, stark health disparities — from elevated rates of asthma and hypertension to preventable hospitalizations tied to housing conditions and gaps in care — make this work urgent. The LP believes healing is a creative practice: ART& Health Equity and Wellness centers artists and neighbors in trauma-informed, holistic approaches to wellness, treating art itself as medicine for our communities.
ART& Economic Justice
Stagnant wages, rent burden, and the compounding effects of gentrification continue to shape economic life in Bed-Stuy. ART& Economic Justice invites artists to imagine and build toward collective ownership, solidarity economies, and community wealth — narrative work that helps neighbors see themselves not just as participants in the economy, but as its co-authors.
ART& Displacement Prevention
Displacement, deed theft, and speculative development threaten the stability and legacy of long-time Bed-Stuy residents, an issue that affects many multi-generational Black communities in urban areas across the nation. ART& Displacement Prevention supports artists and neighbors in reclaiming the stories of land, home, and belonging — using creative practice to fuel community land ownership, anti-displacement organizing, and housing sovereignty.
ART& Climate Justice
Climate change disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and POC communities, even as those most affected have the least access to solutions or a voice in shaping them. ART& Climate Justice draws on ancestral knowledge and intergenerational wisdom to imagine environmental futures rooted in resilience, care, and self-determination for Bed-Stuy and beyond.
