Broadcasts S1 Ep3: Care

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the third episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Care. This episode focuses on different projects that are rooted in care and mutual aid through the lens of the city’s ground floor, and how practices that strengthen bonds of affection can transform and reshape our immediate environment.

Participants in this episode include the following: An experimental choral performance read by Natalia Boumatar and Zara Zulfiqar, created for a class at Cooper Union titled “Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure.” This project is by Anders Kristensen, Natalia Boumatar, Ralph Karam and Zara Zulfiqar. It engages fragments of texts about settler colonialism through collective oral readings. Red Canary Song introduces us to their advocacy around Asian and migrant massage parlor workers through their short film, “Fly in Power”. Curator Diya Vij, writer and organizer Ted Kerr, and artist Zacarías González have a conversation about the 90s Chicago-based art collective titled Haha, and their project Flood, which was a hydroponic garden in a storefront that grew vegetables and herbs for people with HIV. Curator Eric Booker reads some archival texts from Smokehouse Associates, the artist collective that transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures during the late 1960s. Writer Lam Thuy Vo reads from an article she wrote on Pearl River Mart for Documented NY. Artist Cudelice Brazelton talks to Senior frieze editor Terence Trouillot about his recent exhibition at Wschod Gallery in the Lower East Side and how his work relates to intimate micro practices of care. We learn from OlaRonke Akinmowo how the Free Black Women’s Library is fueled by tenants of Black Feminism, and the transformative power of both reading and creating. Huda Tayob discusses her research on Architectures of Care. Scholar Adam Anabosi performs a poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad written to the Palestinian people in their different places of refuge. Interspersed throughout the episode are clips and archival sounds from professors and writers Premilla Nadasen, Carlos Sanabria, Sharon Zukin and artist Jenna Bliss’s documentary “The People’s Detox.”

Adam Anabosi is a Ph.D student at Princeton. He possesses a keen interest in the modern middle east studies and the cultural, political and historical approach associated with it. Adam is deeply fascinated by Arabic culture and its rich oral heritage. On occasion, he indulges in writing poetry in the spoken Shami dialect and in colloquial Arabic. And every now and then, he contributed to online cultural magazines articles related to the political, cultural and social history of Palestine and Bilad al-Sham.

Carlos Sanabria is author of the book The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios: (The Justo Marti Collection). He is former associate professor in Caribbean studies at The City University of New York.

Cudelice Brazelton IV is an artist who lives and works in Frankfurt. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and currently studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Selected solo and duo exhibitions include Friend of a Friend Warsaw, Wschód and Emanuel Layr, Warsaw (2021); Bronzed from Silver, Sans titre (2016), Paris (2021); Recoil (with Dozie Kanu), International Waters, New York (2020); Violent Groom, Wschód (2020); Prune (with Nicholas Grafia), Shoot the Lobster, New York (2019); and Bounty, Jeffrey Stark, New York (2017).

Diya Vij is the Curator at Creative Time and is committed to critically investigating the evolving role of public art in politics and civic life. Over the past decade, she has held programming, curatorial, and communications positions at major New York City Institutions. She currently serves on the Board of the Laundromat Project and as the Co-Chair of the Board of A Blade of Grass. She recently was part of the Curatorial Ensemble for the Counterpublic 2023 public art triennial in St. Louis.

Eric Booker is a curator and writer. His work makes space for artists and narratives that challenge dominant histories. Booker is former Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he worked on a range of exhibitions, performances, public art, and site-specific installations. Booker is currently Associate Curator at Storm King Art Center.

Haha was an art collective—originally including Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof—that formed in Chicago in 1988 and continued to work together until 2008.

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and architectural theorist. She is currently a lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester, and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centered on the African continent and global south.. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is currently a reporter with The Markup and an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a journalist at BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money.

OlaRonke Akinmowo is an interdisciplinary artist that scecializes in collage, papermaking, printmaking, stop motion animation and interactive installation. She also works as a set decorator, yoga teacher, cultural worker, and mom. In 2015 she started The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project that features a collection of over 4000 books written by Black women. This particular work is fueled by the tenants of Black Feminism, Community Care, and the transformative power of both reading and creating.

Premilla Nadasen is professor of history at Barnard College and president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color have fought for social justice.

Red Canary Song’s (RCS) work centers on mutual aid, community care, and decriminalization of labor.

In November 2017, RCS formed in response to the death of Yang Song, a migrant Chinese massage worker who fell to her death from a fourth-floor window during a police raid. RCS rallied to protest the police, provide mutual aid to the family of Yang Song and other Asian massage and sex workers, and to advocate for decriminalization of unlicensed massage work and sex work.

Sharon Zukin is professor emerita of sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center but is still working with PhD students and will occasionally teach courses. Her new book, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy, examines the shaping of the tech ecosystem in New York.  Zukin has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Western Sydney, and Tongji University; and a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Smokehouse Associates was an artist collective formed in 1968 by William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose. Through developing community-oriented public art projects in Harlem, the collective sought to transform space through vibrant, geometric abstract murals and sculptures. Initially spanning three generations of artists, the Smokehouse collective eventually grew to encompass a diverse range of creative practitioners, all of whom united around the transformative potential of public art.

Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in New York, USA.

Theodore Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer, organizer and artist whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS, community, and culture. Kerr’s writing has appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The New Inquiry, BOMB, CBC (Canada), Lambda Literary, POZ Magazine, The Advocate, Cineaste, The St. Louis American, IndieWire, HyperAllergic, and other publications. In 2016, he won the Best Journalism award from POZ Magazine for his HyperAllergic article on race, HIV, and art. In 2015, Kerr was the editor for an AIDS-focused issue of the We Who Feel Differently journal.

Zacarías González is a queer artist with a background as a commercial art director turned chef and sommelier. They founded ediciones projects in 2020, a creative studio focused on collaborative projects that intersect and explore food, wine, hospitality, media, consulting, and design specifically through a queer-centric lens as a Cuban-American.