Ernest Verrett explains “Rising. Curtains.,” an interactive art installation by him and fellow Street Works co-founder Anjali Deshmukh, on the 34th Avenue Open Street in Jackson Heights, Queens. (Credit: Hannah Weaver)
“My critical loss
Her ultimate destruction
Then, my paper straw.”
So read a haiku written by an attendee of the inaugural Street Works Earth festival that took place in Jackson Heights, Queens on Sept. 22. This haiku was just one drop in a sea of co-creation, a core principle that non-profit Make Justice Normal used to guide its event.
As part of Climate Week NYC programming, the organization took a neighborly approach to imagining and creating climate solutions. From 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., on 34th Ave., dozens of organizations and artists invited passersby to take action in the form of their choosing, whether writing down their favorite bird or signing petitions.
A recent trend of climate art festivals has cropped up in Europe, with the Vienna Climate Biennale this April claiming to be “the world’s first climate-focused art festival.” In July, The Bude Climate Festival in England followed a similar format. Street Works Earth put its own spin on climate art and activism in the streets of New York City, specifically highlighting BIPOC artists and completely free programming.
One workshop, titled “Societal Composting,” invited participants to join a healing circle to reflect on what Ana Puente Flores and Nicolas Linares of the organization Mazorca Colectiva called the imminent climate “collapse.” The group, which describes itself as a group of “immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, and people of the Global South seeking to recover their ancestral memory,” asked participants to turn that reflection into art, in the form of haikus and collage.
Linares and Puente Flores said the circle is based on Indigenous traditions from their ancestors in Colombia and Mexico, who sat around the fire in collaborative, problem-solving discussions. Engaging in the practice now, they said, is a way to look forward toward climate regeneration and get back to pre-colonial reverence for the earth.
“What we need to do is what our elders did, our ancient people did, which was pull back to the roots,” Linares said, referring to ancient medicinal and agricultural technologies.
Many of the other artists and organizations at Street Works Earth also used reflection as a point of collective inspiration.
“Green Card,” a collaborative installation led by artist and poet Purvi Shah and her partner Troy Woodley, asked participants to write on adhesive leaves to form a tree of ideas about how to make Jackson Heights more “bird-friendly.”
Shah said she was pleased, but not surprised, to see how creative young participants got. After thinking of their favorite birds, like the dark-eyed junco or piping plover, they thought of ideas for having more trees, parks, and bird sanctuaries, she said.
“I think we sometimes underestimate how much people know and how much they can contribute to solution-building,” Shah said. “Art projects like this on the street are so important for us to get a sense of what is possible.”
For “Colorful World” artist Jing (Ellen) Xu, play and recycling are often at the forefront of her work. Her installation at the festival encouraged children to try and stack colored spheres — both plastic and recycled — to learn the importance of patience and balance when it comes to building a sustainable future. Xu said she and collaborator Lanxia (Summer) Xie were humbled as they watched some kids play with the spheres in new ways.
“Kids always are more creative than you,” Xie said. “They find a new way you never thought [of] at all.”
The youngest tablers at the festival proved this to be true. Veggie Nuggets, a collective of Queens high schoolers focused on community composting at a local garden and in their schools, created a canvas with statistics highlighting the power of composting and the need to reduce food waste. Participants dipped food scraps in paint to stamp patterns on the canvas.
“It was a big hit,” said sophomore Lillian Parrella, a founding member of the collective. “Who doesn’t wanna paint with corn?”
Make Justice Normal co-founder Anjali Deshmukh said that the festival’s number one goal was for participants, and especially youth, to have fun. Secondary, she said, was combining arts and advocacy to create “democracy as a joyful experience.”
“If we get better and better at showing this, the joyfulness of this, we can make smaller and smaller leaps from that to a vote, to influencing your political leaders, to mobilizing local community,” Deshmukh said. “They’re smaller leaps than we think.”
About the author(s)
Hannah Weaver is a reporter and M.S. student at Columbia Journalism School, originally from Seattle.