What does Liberty or Justice mean for our community?
Saturday the 17th we planned to bring back portraits and some generic silhouettes for folks to create collages about liberty, justice, and how we are viewed in our community. It was a solid plan but one that we ended up totally scrapping. Instead, we played some basketball, painted panels to hold all kinds of artworks and contributions from the community, colored in coloring pages, played with some farty slime, and made giant abstract paintings on rolls of paper. We also had really good reflective conversations about the idea of Liberty and Justice. What does it mean to make work about Liberty or Justice in light of the very real targeted acts of violence against BIPOC communities? What does it mean when that happens in the name of Liberty or Justice? Who is Liberty and/or Justice for? Through the conversation with many neighbors and children we settled on amending the sketch to include more children, we generated a list of all the flowers that should be present, and we talked about how we can make this mural and this representation of women of color as Liberty and Justice something truly for us and by us. Rather than representing Liberty and Justice as it is now, we are envisioning what Liberty and Justice can and should be. Salina and Eleazar are working on creating a final sketch based on these conversation and using the likeness of two amazing neighbors who have volunteered to stand in for Ladies Liberty and Justice!
We also talked about what we can do with our budget to make semi-permanent fixtures as we await the ground breaking for the new park. We talked about what it means to keep cleaning up a lot that has been promised to be a park over and over with no new infrastructural changes. So, we’re shifting our focus from Q&A style activities (since we’re actually really good at just jumping in with both feet and having those conversations!) to actually building some simple, colorful benches for families and neighbors to use. We will also have a new sketch to look at this Saturday the 24th from 1pm-4pm. We’ll plan to be out if it doesn’t rain. If it does, we’ll be back next weekend and the weekend after that and so on!
