In what neighborhood do you live?
Crown Heights
How did you first become connected to The LP, or hear about The LP?
In 2021, my “Art Money” professor at the time, Amy Whitaker, recommended I look up The LP because I was interested in community-centric fundraising and co-owning artworks with my community.
Do you have your own creative practice? If so, tell us more
Yes! I have multi-medium and installation practices, confronting the memories of Black women residing in the body and home. I often think about W. E. B. Du Bois’ “twoness” (The Souls of Black Folk), and I meditate on “home-ness” to crack open the embodied simultaneity of Black home and displacement. I work with aqueous-mundane materials and scenes to explore everyday opportunities to journey inward, backward, and forward as the feeling-body remembers, sheds, and regenerates. In collaboration with Black and domestic objects such as West African Black Soap, cotton rags, Epsom salt, and Kool-Aid, I hope to make pieces that invite more space for my subjects to imagine beyond and through engaging with everyday multiplicities.
Can you tell us about an artist or project that has inspired you?
I am currently inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s use of paper pulp in works such as The Sticks (2016). But I often find inspiration in slang words and phrases collectively defined and archived in places like Urban Dictionary. I also frequently return to the song “These Walls” by Kendrick Lamar.
What is your favorite… film? …album? …food?
One of my favorite albums is MAGDALENE by FKA Twigs
Where do you do your laundry?
In a laundromat right up the block from me.
In your opinion, why does art matter?*
Art helps us to remember and connect. Jessica Fern, a psychotherapist, public speaker, and trauma and relationship expert, explains that “trauma can be simply defined as any experience of a broken connection”. The process of creating art involves a cycle of seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, and following where those senses lead, ultimately bringing back what you discovered as a creation to share. For healing BIPOC community members affected by traumatic systems, I believe creativity plays a crucial role in reconnecting us back home to each other and ourselves.
What LP value do you most related to and why?
As an artist from a low-income household in Brooklyn, I am moved by The LP’s Value: Nurture Creativity as someone interested in how we could use “creativity as a rich and renewable resource that turns strangers into a community of strong and resilient neighbors. ” Working here as the Development Associate orients me to continue exploring ways to practice and think creatively about sustainable and equitable resource redistribution amongst our neighbors and supporters.
You can view our values here: https://laundromatproject.org/about/
Please share your short bio below. 100 words or less is a good length for our website.
Melonie Knight (b. Brooklyn, NY) is the Development Associate at The Laundromat Project, providing critical administrative support to a dynamic development department. Before joining The LP, she was a Development Intern at the Studio Museum in Harlem and a Program Intern at VIA Art Fund. She holds a BFA from New York University in Studio Art and a Minor in Business of Entertainment, Media, and Technology (BEMT). She believes that creativity is an impelling energy that advocates for our existence and helps us honor and activate our ever-abundant resources, stories, and connections. She’s invested in creative and fundraising work to encourage generosity and collective stewardship of resources. As an artist herself, she collaborates with sensuous, domestic objects such as West African Black Soap, cotton rags, and Epsom salt, to create artworks that reveal everyday opportunities to re-member one another and regenerate into rich futures.