2018 Create Change Fellow
Crown Heights | Community organizing, Multidisciplinary, Performance
BIO
Mattie Brice is a speculative ethnographer interested in applying play and design fiction to finding new cultural practices. Her current work focuses intentional relationship crafting that addresses consent and emotional labor.
What artist, curator, activist or project has influenced or inspired you?
Most recently I’ve been revisiting Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Manifesto of Maintenance Art, 1969 where she highlights how artists focus on presenting the most polished representation of their work for the public sphere but do not talk about the private daily work that maintains or conflicts with artistic practice. It’s inspiring because it speaks to some tensions in the activist art to me, how ‘what counts’ is often the public displays of protest and action and not the care work supporting cultural change. I’m interested in treating the emotional labor behind progress as art and political action in its own right.
What place in your neighborhood is personally meaningful to you and why?
The benches of Eastern Parkway were the first friends I made in the city. They are spaces of a particular public/private combo that I find comforting. Like it is acceptable to expect some thinking time to yourself or some low-key emotional bouts but you’re still just a few words away from a conversation.
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