If you could envision endless possibilities of freedom through art, what would it be like? What could freedom look like? Sound like? Feel like? This season, The Laundromat Project (LP) is highlighting artists who use immersive communal art to imagine freedom through art, futurity, and play. We perceive creative portals to freedom as the antidote to the cultural erasure of Black communities. Whether it’s oppositional Black aesthetics produced by the Black Arts Movement of the 1960’s, or contemporary surrealist art produced by Black Quantum Futurist artists, we harness the universal language of art to reimagine ourselves in a free world full of abundant outcomes.
At The LP, art is our playground, where we unlock new ways of existing beyond censorship and confinement. We ground our work in the joy and mutual connections we find in making through fun, intentional, creative gatherings at The LP Storefront. With free meals, live music, accessible crafts, and inspiring dialogues, we strive to connect POC voices now and for the future, starting with our own talented roster of artist alumni.
To ignite joy, connection, and a collective sense of power and possibility, The LP invites Mz. Icar to lead our Liberation Series, a monthly, artist-led, community-building gathering hosted in our Bed-Stuy storefront. Mz. Icar is an anonymous, Black woman–led interdisciplinary art collective exploring radical Black futurity, play, memory, and autonomy. Their mixed media art pieces challenge the world we see with liberatory visions that exist beyond the tangible “here” and “now.” Mz. Icar invites community to embrace art, futurity, and play to remix our current world and reimagine our lineages, dreams, and collective livelihoods as interconnected, continuous, and limitless.
Delve into our interview with Mz. Icar to learn how they are building new worlds, visually and sonically, that reverberate from The LP Storefront across Bed-Stuy.
THE INTERVIEW
Who is Mz. Icar Collective?
Mz. Icar: The Mz. Icar Collective is an anonymous collective. We’re a group of creatives who have gotten together to do storytelling in visual form. We’re all about taking up space, particularly for the global majority, in audacious ways, and telling stories of autonomy, joy, play, and creating environments where people feel reflected, seen, and create space for imaginative futures.
Mz. Icar is a play off of “racism.” So it’s “racism” backwards. When we were structuring the collective, we didn’t have a name. A lot of people who were coming together in the group were coming from commercial storytelling…Photography and the commercial world, set design, graphic design, things like that. We are all “expert storytellers” to some degree in various fields. What does it look like when you apply that to things that are centered around your own experience?
We’re mostly women, mostly Black women, in the collective, and we love the idea of reversing racism with the name, and we replace the “s” with a “z.” And we also love that it started with “Ms.,” like, the idea of putting that title in there, which means a lot, I think, for black women, being able to claim a title as well. It kind of set the precedent of what the collective would be.
Program Peek: Create & Reflect
Each year, our Create & Reflect program invites community artists to develop 2D visual works that celebrate our local community of neighbors and small businesses. In alignment with this year’s programmatic theme, we are interested in using the storefront window to explore interpretations of Black Quantum Futurism—a framework grounded in the work of Moor Mother and Rasheedah Phillips that merges Afrocentric understandings of time, space, and reality with the urgency of liberatory action. Mz. Icar’s window installation is called “Legendary,” inspired by Sonics of the Ancestors— highlighting migration and rhythm as representations of remix culture.
How does Mz. Icar’s window installation explore Black Quantum Futurism?
Mz. Icar: Our work is called “Legendary,” the piece that we have up. It features the profile of a child in a futuristic way. On the top of the head, you can tell that it’s a young person. You see young people going through a type of ritualism, like looking forward. There are also elements of space travel. The helmet represents the protection of thought and being able to hold your ideas moving through. And overlaid throughout the whole thing is an older map of Brooklyn that has redacted words. It says “legend” there, and we shifted that to “Legendary” and took out a lot of the wording so it says, “us” and “we.” We’re concentrating on this idea of doing things together. The Quantum Futurism that exists within it is this idea of past, present, future, as all one with various outcomes, opportunities, and paths of fractures. This is the idea of the present being extremely pivotal at any given moment, all the time. Our piece reflects that in the way that we’re looking at the past, moving through the future, and also mapping out what the path looks like, particularly with Bed Stuy, with Brooklyn. With us, with people. [It’s] how we want to tell our stories and what we hope for the future as we manifest moving forward.
AR Activation Of Mz.Icar’s ‘Youngest Elder’
What artists, scholars, or movements anchor Mz. Icar work?
Mz. Icar: We’re anchored in world-building. That’s been huge, especially now. It’s world-building in a physical way, in a mental space, in design, in the way we build environments that do support or don’t support us. A lot of our influences reflect pockets of time in which cultural groups we identify with, Black, Latinx, Caribbean, immigrant, all of these. The mush. The intersectional women, music…all these things. What are the ways in which audacity was taken? What things created major cultural shifts in the ways that people related to each other? So whether it’s Black Panther movement, whether it’s Tony Cade Bambara, whether it’s Father Divine opening up a bunch of restaurants and feeding people…
And nothing exists totally pure. Everything has its pros and cons. So, we’re thinking about Black Star, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Marcus Garvey…all of these people who get together. There are a lot of world-builders and shape-shifters that exist.
We’re looking at these audacious ways in which folks throughout history, and those we connect with, explore new ways of existing and creating. Just generally, people who are bucking the way that things are seen. We think about it a lot through a holistic lens of art, writing, and culture builders, because that shapes what we walk through and where we go with it.
Kas: I love the description of pockets of time where we create that opening through atypical means. Things that we wouldn’t necessarily expect or that wouldn’t be touted in the history books as the movements that they were, and given the gravity they deserve.
Mz. Icar: Absolutely. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with what’s going on and this general dissecting of people. But everybody has the capacity to change. When you start breaking all of these things down, the structures live in somebody’s imagination. And we are living in somebody’s imagination, somebody’s imagined world. So what happens when that gets recentered?
Program Peek: Liberation Series
As part of our community engagement programs, The LP produces Liberation Series, a monthly, artist-led, community-building gathering hosted in our Bed-Stuy storefront. From February to June 2026, the Liberation Series will encompass Mz. Icar’s “Sonic Portals,” a four-part program that filters the sonic practices, archives, and remix culture of Black diasporic movement into The LP Storefront through recordings, conversations, and digital and analog rhythms. Neighbors of all ages are invited into The LP Storefront for communal artmaking, shared meals spotlighting local vendors, friendly dialogue, and reflections on how freedom shows up in everyday life through sound.
How will Mz. Icar activate the window installation through this year’s Liberation Series, our public programming?
So there’s a lot of reference to sonics, and in this new work, even in the visuals of it.
For the public program, we want to play off of that, on communal sonic-building. We’ve been very deep into deep tonal vibrations and how they’re used across the diaspora. It exists in djembe, drums, heartbeats, hip hop, 808s, all the way through. For our workshop series, we want to weave a remix fabric culture of vocal sound bites, humming, and the sounds of Bed-Stuy in the community, helping build a stacked narrative. We want to build a workshop around that, around resampling, remixing, and building sound components.
Music and sound are such great, interactive ways to pull people together. It feels like an easy access point to get people involved and communicating with each other. That feels like a basis for moving forward.
How does remix culture manifest in the artwork and community experiences Mz. Icar creates?
Mz. Icar: We love it. Remix culture is, well, one, it’s wonderfully Black. I know everybody remixes, but like, you know, remix culture is pretty incredible. It’s a great way to hold the past and make it accessible to the present and the future. [Through remixing] you pay homage by getting a sample in a song, and then making it current to a “now” audience. Remix one: creates the opportunity to learn about the past, and two: makes it your own to follow this legacy. And we tend to do this all the time. In culture, this happens over and over, even in visuals, trends, and things like that. And it is a way to include more people in what’s going on and a form of communication across generations. Our workshop is going to be intended to channel that in a present way.
Kas: From your perspective, is remixing necessary to build movements?
Mz. Icar: Oh, absolutely. Nothing exists in a vacuum. We’re always playing off of each other. For us, particularly in some of our installation work and mural work, the works get passed through hands. We’re taking into account stories, location, placement, etc. Injecting some form of remix culture into this public space feels like a way of saying “I see you.” There’s always this feedback loop, and that’s where the ritual comes into play. It’s a call and response. In a visual capacity, in a musical capacity, when we do the installation work, it is creating a familiar aspect to pull a person in.
Join us for Mz. Icar’s Liberation Series events! Unlock the a sonic world full of possibilities right here in Bed-Stuy.
ABOUT MZ. ICAR
Mz. Icar is an anonymous, gender non-conforming Black-woman-led interdisciplinary art collective exploring radical Black futurity, play, memory, and autonomy. Their work spans murals, public installations, and speculative design, blending collage, installation, and time-based media to worlds led by Black diasporic visions of freedom.
