Field Day | Living Legacy: 20 Years of The LP

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Elements of Change: Reimagining the Future of Bedford-Stuyvesant

The Create Change Fellows Activations are rooted in the belief that artists and community partners are essential contributors to community transformation. Grounded in The Laundromat Project’s Bed-Stuy Community Needs Assessment, this year’s projects respond to four interconnected needs: Health Equity, Displacement Prevention, Economic Justice, and Climate Justice. We know that the well-being of a community depends on the health of all its systems: Housing affects health. Economic opportunity affects environmental resilience. Climate impacts shape public health and displacement. Each group of LP fellows has also embraced one of the elements – Water, Air, Earth, Fire – as a metaphor and a method for understanding change. These projects invite us to consider what’s possible when communities have the resources, power, and support needed not only to survive but to flourish.

Activations

Time Travel Through Your Mental Health

Fellows: Sally Chen, Sylvia Riveros, Shireen Mathews

In collaboration with The Young Doctors Project, we are exploring health equity through the lens of mental health, and seeing the ways in which time (past, present, and future) will impact you, your community, and neighborhood. Join us in writing, drawing, and wishing through postcards to people in your life.

Care Is the Commons: Walking, Seeding and Rooting Black land stewardship in Bed-Stuy

Fellows: Valkyrie Yao, Reynaldo Piniella, Nasrah Omar

Rooting participants in the past, present and future of Herbert Von King Park, this activation invites community members to become land stewards. Guided walks trace Bed-Stuy’s layered histories through movement and seed paper making, and zines on GrowHouse, deed theft and land trusts offer tangible tools for land justice.

Penny for Your Thoughts: Community Conversations around Economics

Fellows: Tosin Omojola, Aida Sherif, Vic Liu

By providing people with prompts that they can respond to through writing, drawing, and voice recording, we hope to build a practice of destigmatizing conversations about money and how it affects our day-to-day lives, communities, and relationships. We also hope to invite new ways of thinking about money through sharing information about cooperative economics in collaboration with Brooklyn Co op. We’ll compile the writings/drawings/recordings into a zine and podcast to share back to the community as an archive of collective story sharing.

Tranquility Farm Plants Memory

Fellows: Tajah Ellis, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Mars Scott

Plant memories with Bedstuy Matriarchs Ena, Yvonne, Mona & Ruth by supporting the next generation of land stewards at Tranquility Farm. A verdant hammock of edible plants, medicinal knowledge, and ecological memory, Bedstuy’s backyard botany is seeded & sown by neighborhood volunteers in an upcoming workshop open to the public.

Participants print plant memories by stamping their hands on a 5×7 postcard as a commitment to civic labor rituals at an intergenerational planting, building, and farm maintenance workshop at Tranquility Farm. Workshop attendees learn planting practices, chicken care, and farm bed & arbor construction techniques while building bonds with neighbors in a restful hammock.

Tending the Body: Somatic Practice and Plant Medicine for Grief and Joy

This offering weaves somatic practice and herbal medicine making into a shared field of reflection and care. With gentle, intuitive guidance from Adaku Utah of Harriet’s Apothecary, participants are invited to explore grief and joy as interwoven experiences through sensory awareness, ritual, and embodied making. Through embodied practice and hands-on making, plants are encountered as kin and companions in grounding, emotional release, and reconnection.

Create Change Alum: Adaku Utah (2015 Create Change Fellow)

Partner Org: Harriet’s Apothecary

Heat Islands: The Body and the Neighborhood

Grounded in the understanding that we are interdependent (humans, more-than-humans, and the environment we inhabit), this activation uses art-making and collective mapping to learn and reflect on practices of self, community, and environmental care in our neighborhood to mitigate extreme heat and its effects.

Create Change Alum: Lizania Cruz (2017 Create Change Artist-in-Residence)

The Free Black Women’s Library Outdoor Literary Salon

Join in an outdoor activation offered by The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project featuring a collection of more than 5,000 books by Black women and Black nonbinary writers. The Free Black Women’s Library also has a free store, a period pantry, a virtual Reading Club, a weekly book swap, and a wide array of workshops and free public programs.

Create Change Alum: OlaRonke Akinmowo (2015 Create Change Fellow; 2017 Create Change Commissioned Artist)

Alumni Archives Booth

Part archival display and part gathering space, the Alumni Archives Booth offers an opportunity to move through twenty years of The Laundromat Project’s history alongside the artists who have helped create it. Through photographs, ephemera, stories, and conversation, visitors are invited to experience the archive as a living practice of remembering together. Featuring artists and projects from four generations of Create Change, the booth is a place to stop and reflect on what art has made possible—and all that it still might.

The Laundromat Project is proud to partner with the following organizations for Field Day:

Bridge Street Development Corporation

Brooklyn COOP

Brooklyn Movement Center

Brooklyn Tea

Building Beats

Center for Brooklyn History

Free Black Woman’s Library

Harriet’s Apothecary

Kinfolk Tech Foundation

The Laundromat Project is grateful for the partnership of Councilman Chi Ossé’s office in presenting Field Day. 

Field Day has been generously supported by NYS Senator Jabari Brisport (D25).

At the heart of our work is our artist community, whose wisdom, leadership, and solidarity are an enduring source of strength and vision for all that we do.