Past Events
OPENING RECEPTION
Date: March 9, 2022, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Event Description:
1. Gathering (3:00 pm – 3:30 pm)
2. Opening Remarks (3:30 pm – 4:00 pm)
From the Curators: Thomas Mintz, Jason Legget, Maureen Connor, and Midori Yamamura
3. “Students Who Need Help”: Hattie Elmore
4. Keynote Speech (4:00 pm – 4:45 pm)
“The Right to Housing ‘Overcoming Homelessness– a Social Issue vs an Individual Problem”
Rob Robinson, Housing Activist
5. Participatory Art (5:00 pm – 7:00 pm)
THE POWER OF YOUNG PEOPLE: STUDENT ADVOCACY FOR BASIC NEEDS
Lisa Nishimura, Young Invincibles
Date: March 15, 2022, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Public Event
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/Mh45579kTovqdAUnHiwF_pLDeEZUoSzU8D5PkUOoA2zbbQ65Cq5yqO3sqWWizGgf.laNOKtmu4dVwJ-9Z
(Access Passcode: 24fPUy0?)
Event Description: For the past several years, the New York YI regional office has mainly focused on issues around higher education access–lack of access to NY college students’ basic needs (i.e. food insecurity, homelessness, mental health resources). Currently, YI, along with its partner organizations, is working on legislation to create campus liaisons for students experiencing homelessness so that they can receive the necessary supports they need.
This talk will introduce some of YI NY’s policy advocacy issues and how young people between the ages 18 and 34 can get involved in the fight to ensure all college students’ basic needs are being met, and ultimately transform our society for future generations to come. Learn how to influence policy change in New York State and City today!
For more information about our work in YI New York’s office, please click here.
About Young Invincibles (YI):
Young Invincibles (YI) is a national non-profit organization that is dedicated to amplifying young adult voices in the political process and expanding economic opportunities for our generation. YI primarily works on three main issue areas, including higher education access, expanding healthcare, and workforce development.
UPCYCLE, UPLIFT
Sachigusa Yasuda
Date: March 16, 2022 2:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Location: Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Upcycle, Uplift proposes a utopian solution to the current housing crisis by developing a line of recycled clothing created in workshops and remodeled based on the needs of homeless people. The participatory project invites the public to engage in deep listenings with homeless people, opening themselves up to the complex issues that drive people to the street beyond the stereotypical assumptions. By designing and creating clothes that meet the needs of unhoused people, Upcycle, Uplift helps to restore dignity to those living on the street. Yasuda further tries to establish Upcycle, Uplift as a clothing brand and discusses with college students and faculty members concepts for an alternative economic system that can distribute profits in more egalitarian ways.
About Sachigusa Yasuda: Born and raised in Japan, Yasuda moved to New York City in 2009 and has been creating artworks from the worldview of a woman and an ethnic minority.
WHAT IS HOME?
Willie Baronet
Date: March 17, 2022, 10:00 am – 11:00 am
Public Event
In Person
Location: Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Film screening and director’s talk.
Signs of Humanity is a documentary film that explores interrelated themes of home, homelessness, compassion, and humanity. Willie Baronet has purchased more than 2,000 homeless signs over the past twenty-seven years. He uses this collection to create installations to raise awareness about homelessness. During the month of July 2014, Willie and three filmmakers drove across the country, interviewing more than 100 people on the streets and purchasing over 280 signs. Signs of Humanity is a film about that trip.
HOME IS A JOURNEY
Willie Baronet
Date: March 17, 2022, 3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Location: Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Artist talk and signage-making workshop.
Event Description: In this event, each participant will create their own sign of what the meaning of home is.
About Willie Baronet: After a prolific career in advertising design, Willie Baronet began creating art out of homeless signs to raise public awareness on housing insecurity. Since 1993, he has purchased more than 2,000 signs from the homeless as part of a long-term art project titled, We Are All Homeless.
Art / Activism / Context / Surveillance
Bill Beirne
Date: March 24, 2022, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Public Event
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/HycwEu9og8cuMwbKx70LGLP4DcXvV2Fzep09IxLsf4DhDgl1sNvq8mnfg1Io_w2s.t68pAp32nuRytA0h
(Access Passcode: @.wrUx?3)
Event Description: This lecture traces the development of Beirne’s activist art and performance practice in relation to some precedents in modern art history.
The artist will present selections from his work since the early ’70s that address political and sociological concerns. Also, Beirne will discuss the genesis and implementation of Priority Seating, his participatory work created for the UnHomeless NYC exhibition, with special attention to surveillance.
Bill Beirne currently lives and works in New York City. For more than four decades, Beirne’s conceptual art has examined public space, communication, interactivity, and sociological concerns through public performances. In addition to exhibitions in the US and in Eastern and Western Europe, he was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s public art series, Madison Square Art. In his video installation and performance Madison Square Trapezoids, Beirne, as “The Vigilant Groundsman,” performed absurdist lawn maintenance tasks within the boundaries of live surveillance-monitored areas of the park.
Three Facilitated Workshops – WORKSHOP #1
BFAMFAPhD
Date: March 25, 2022, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Invite Only
...
Event Description: Participants: 10 Administrators / Staff and 10 Faculty
To register, please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com)
Indicate which workshop(s) you will be attending.
Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue, a deep listening practice that highlights similarities and fosters understanding among different groups. The third workshop will be open to the public.
BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.
THE ANTI-EVICTION MAPPING PROJECT AND OUR METHODOLOGIES
Manon Vergerio
Date: March 29, 2022, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Public Event
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/6R57v1rkBSZRUBpFkiK7BOOUNWQ9ZKVBGxxXHly4Pb_xJPQsgVLcgboCJckpTGgc.49lVv1DxfrtEGIAb
(Access Passcode: @0p**d0b)
Event Description: In this talk, critical urbanist Manon Vergerio will give a brief background on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a web-based interactive mapping project that personalizes eviction data through the evictees’ stories of struggle and resistance. She will discuss how the multimedia collective uses oral history and mapping for housing activism. Participants will listen to a few short clips from the AEMP’s oral history archive and reflect on them through a series of prompts as a way to learn about displacement, housing, and organizing.
Manon Vergerio is an organizer and a critical urbanist whose practice draws across disciplines to illuminate and organize around urban justice issues. Vergerio is a co-founder of the NYC chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP).
HOW TO BEGIN AGAIN: AN INITIATION TOWARDS UNITARY URBANISM
Miguel Robles-Durán (Cohabitation Strategies)
Date: March 31, 2022, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Public Event
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/fz52TA1sjiRLDYeqiTHcIH6io2SZdnjAITTiUuMc3tpmVfQ7GyMJaDKyowkxxyUv.UR8JavLewJ1YuW22
(Access Passcode: 6H.Gj?!j)
Event Description: CohStra’s Venice Architecture Biennale piece, How to Begin Again: An Initiation Towards Unitary Urbanism, is a response to the question curator Hashim Sarkis posed, “How will we live together” in the midst of global crises like climate change, wealth inequality, mass migrations, political polarization, and now pandemics? The current state of global, neoliberal urbanization exploits communities, cultures, and the environment. How to Begin Again is a 4-step initiation to a new awareness about alternatives for the future of urban design. It centers on the concept of unitary urbanism, which CohStra redefines as “an anti-capitalist and transdisciplinary practice that attempts to bridge popular and scientific knowledge to co-produce social and environmental justice in cities.”
In 2008, the urbanist Miguel Robles-Durán, together with his work partners Lucia Babina, Emiliano Gandolfi, and Gabriela Rendón, founded Stichting Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), an international nonprofit cooperative for socio-spatial research and development based in Rotterdam and New York City. CohStra focuses on conditions of urban decline, inequality, and segregation within the contemporary city. The group developed and designed over a dozen transdisciplinary urban projects in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America, utilizing different methodologies to structure frameworks that catalyze grassroots-led transformations.
THE ARTIST & HOMELESS COLLABORATIVE
Hope Sandrow (artist)
Discussant, Nina Felshin (editor of But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art and Activism)
Date: April 5, 2022, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Public Event
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/3suOjkjSFoVdmYZovqVxEBT9YO6_eZddte6OT1belI3mWd79evjElSdl0kYJsgjR.YHYcPRsZ1voZD1V7
(Access Passcode: *Dm.q2e&)
Event Description: Concurrent with the explosion of homelessness in the 1980s, conceptual artist Hope Sandrow began volunteering at the Catherine Street Family Shelter in Chinatown in 1987. While making art and producing a resident-written newsletter, she learned that homelessness resulted from poverty and a host of other conditions, such as job loss, domestic violence, racial and sexual discrimination, illness, and injury. Witnessing the appalling reality at the shelter, where women were often sexually violated, resonated with Sandrow’s own experience of sexual abuse. In the early 1990s, Sandrow began the Artist & Homeless Collaborative (A&HC) at the Park Avenue Armory (renamed Lenox Hill Neighborhood House in 1996), which houses women over the age of forty-five. Attempting to close the gap between art-making and social action, Sandrow visited the dormitory, invited each woman in residence individually to participate in collective art making with art professionals, and explored the transformative potential of art in public and private life. While shelter residents were often deprived of their privacy and identity, the A&HC helped to heighten self-esteem in its residents, resulting in some successfully getting out of the shelter system. By 1994, the A&HC involved a hundred or so professional artists and 2,000 shelter residents. Part of the A&HC artworks are on view at the New York Historical Society, Art for Change: The Artist and Homeless Collaborative exhibition (Dec. 3, 2021–Apr. 3, 2022).
Sandrow will discuss her project with Nina Felshin, the editor of But Is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle, WA; Bay Press, 1995).
Three Facilitated Workshops – WORKSHOP #2
BFAMFAPhD
Date: April 6, 2022, 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Location: Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Participants: 5 Administrators / Staff, 5 Faculty, ideally from workshop #1, and 10 Students
To register please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com)
Indicate which workshop(s) you will be attending.
Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue, a deep listening practice that highlights similarities and fosters understanding among different groups. The third workshop will be open to the public.
BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.
UPCYCLE, UPLIFT
Sachigusa Yasuda
Date: April 7, 2022 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Location: Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Upcycle, Uplift proposes a utopian solution to the current housing crisis by developing a line of recycled clothing created in workshops and remodeled based on the needs of homeless people. The participatory project invites the public to engage in deep listenings with homeless people, opening themselves up to the complex issues that drive people to the street beyond the stereotypical assumptions. By designing and creating clothes that meet the needs of unhoused people, Upcycle, Uplift helps to restore dignity to those living on the street. Yasuda further tries to establish Upcycle, Uplift as a clothing brand and discusses with college students and faculty members concepts for an alternative economic system that can distribute profits in more egalitarian ways.
About Sachigusa Yasuda: Born and raised in Japan, Yasuda moved to New York City in 2009 and has been creating artworks from the worldview of a woman and an ethnic minority.
CLOSING PLENARY: HOUSING JUSTICE, SOLUTIONS FOR UNHOUSED PEOPLE, AND STUDENTS’ HOUSING
ROUND TABLE WITH JESSICA KATZ, NYC’S HOUSING COMMISSIONER.
Date: April 8, 2022, 3:00 pm– 5:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Meeting Recording:
https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/a1vK3V2DNdXgw2pm8MJiZa-7XefvP8kBlVa4uUCAoEkIIKEf_gUQIcdJtVT4Ze6m.qnGAP6nJXKX4cYX_
(Access Passcode: x?^Z59?S)
Location: Mac Rotunda, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: NYC’s Chief Housing Officer Jessica Katz will speak about the current housing crisis with activists, scholars, and CUNY students. The discussion will be moderated by Tom Angotti; Professor Emeritus and former Director of CUNY Hunter College’s Center for Policy and Planning. Speakers include Jessica Katz; NYC Chief Housing Officer, Hattie Elmore; CUNY Kingsborough Academic Student Support Program Director, Jason Leggett; Kingsborough professor of Behavioral and Political Science, Shaindy Weichman; former Kingsborough Student and Rob Robinson; community organizer, housing activist, and human rights defender.
About the Speakers
Tom Angotti is Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He was the founder and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. His recent books include Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism, Zoned Out! Race, Displacement and City Planning in New York City, Urban Latin America: Inequalities and Neoliberal Reforms, The New Century of the Metropolis, New York For Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, which won the Davidoff Book Award, and Accidental Warriors and Battlefield Myths. He is an editor of progressivecity.net and Participating Editor for Latin American Perspectives and Local Environment. He is active in community and environmental issues in New York City.
Jessica Katz is New York City’s Chief Housing Officer. Katz oversees the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the New York City Housing Authority, the Housing Development Corporation, the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations, and the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. Katz most recently served as executive director of the research nonprofit Citizens Housing and Planning Council, where she led a policy and research agenda on topics ranging from basement apartment conversions to equitable code enforcement to resident decision-making at NYCHA. She previously served for over ten years at HPD, most recently as the associate commissioner for New Construction, where she oversaw the creation of affordable and special needs housing. Katz held a variety of roles at HPD, including as assistant commissioner of Special Needs Housing, senior adviser to the commissioner, and assistant commissioner for Preservation Finance. Katz holds a BA in Urban Geography from McGill University and a Masters in City Planning from MIT.
Rob Robinson is a formerly homeless community organizer and activist based in New York City. His work focuses on changing people’s fundamental relationship with land and housing. He works with social movements around the world including the Movement of People Affected by Dams in Brazil (MAB), the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (MST), Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa (the Shackdwellers movement), and the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages in Spain (the PAH). Rob is the USA-Canada Coordinator of the International Alliance of Inhabitants, an alliance of 12,000 members worldwide which supports a Zero Evictions Platform. As a longtime member of the US Human Rights Network, his work is framed in international human rights law. In the US he works with communities on several social issues including, poverty and debt, police violence against the poor, gentrification, and access to broadband. He is a regular guest lecturer at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has lectured at several US law school human rights institutes, including the University of Miami, Northeastern University Massachusetts, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard. Rob is currently an adjunct professor of Urbanism in the Design and Urban Ecology program at Parsons New School University.
Hattie Elmore, MSW, is the Program Director for the Access Resource Center and Special Programs at Kingsborough Community College. Hattie prides herself on being a “Student Advocate” while empowering students to advocate for themselves in any and all situations. Prior to coming to Kingsborough nine years ago, Hattie worked for a community-based organization where she supported historically marginalized communities in obtaining benefits as well as legal and financial support. At Kingsborough, she continues the good fight and, as a result of listening to students, has incorporated many more resources to support their academic success. Hattie works holistically when serving students or community members by meeting each person where they are and allowing them to decide what it is they want and need by being fully present and supportive throughout the process. Hattie is a proud CUNY alumna and has earned her Master’s degree in Social Work from the Hunter Silberman School of Social Work, has a Bachelor’s degree from John Jay College in criminology, and her Associate’s degree in paralegal studies from LaGuardia Community College. In 2021, Hattie became a certified holistic coach to further solidify her passion of helping people.
Jason Leggett is an Assistant Professor of Law and Society, CUNY Kingsborough. He holds a J.D. from Seattle University and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Washington. Leggett has published articles about the social construction of technology as well as participatory action research with diverse students with an emphasis on civic engagement, culturally responsive pedagogy, and equity. Leggett’s current grant-funded projects include working with students as co-researchers to integrate digital technology with action research in order to study structural displacement related to sea-level rise, housing injustice, and migration.
Shaindy Weichman is a former Kingsborough Student. Shaindy is a visual artist and a community activist, Shaindy Weichman contributed to the UnHomeless NYC website content. Shaindy grew up in a Williamsburg, Brooklyn ultra-Orthodox community. By 19 years old, she was already a wife and mother. At the start of a four-year-long custody battle, she was made homeless by a court order in which she had to leave her home. She also sought to be granted the right to enroll her son in a school that provided students with basic secular education, unlike the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva he had been attending since the age of three that did not. Despite ultimately losing the custody battle and the right to change her son’s school, today Shaindy is a strong advocate for her community’s right and access to basic secular education as a Parent Ambassador with YAFFED (Young Advocates For Fair Education) https://yaffed.org/. Shaindy is a 2020 recipient of the Armstrong and Dorothy Lim Award in Photography and a 2022 semifinalist for the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship.
IGNEA: AN EXCHANGE ABOUT NESTING TECHNOLOGIES
Bibi Calderaro
Date: April 8, 2022, 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Public Event
In Person
Location: Sculpture Garden, Kingsborough Art Museum, Kingsborough Community College
Event Description: Ignea: An Exchange About Nesting Technologies gathers audiences around a built fire to talk about possible ways to inhabit the planet, taking into account its scale, interdependencies, and temporalities. It proposes to rethink humanity’s relationship with fire, energy, and consumption.
Bibi Calderaro is an artist and educator who engages in transdisciplinary practice in order to expand her audience’s perceptual capacities to foster reciprocal, diverse, and ethical relationships among life forms. Her work aims at building ecological solidarity within and beyond humanity.
Three Facilitated Workshops – WORKSHOP #3
BFAMFAPhD
Date: April 14, 2022, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Public Event
...
Event Description:
To register please RSVP to Susan Jahoda (susan.e.jahoda@gmail.com)
Indicate which workshop(s) you will be attending.
Three Facilitated Workshops focus on the impact of food and housing precarity on the well-being of students at Kingsborough Community College. The first two workshops use Intergroup Dialogue—a deep listening practice that aims to highlight similarities and foster understanding among different groups. This final WORKSHOP #3 will be a public event on Zoom and will create a dialogue with other projects included in the UnHomeless NYC exhibition.
BFAMFAPhD is a collective that formed in 2012 to make art, reports, and teaching tools to advocate for cultural equity in the United States. The work of the collective is to bring people together to analyze and reimagine relationships of power in the arts. Among the group’s core members are Susan Jahoda, Agnes Szanyi, Vicky Virgin, and Caroline Woolard.