Reclaiming Narratives

I’m an emerging Trenton-based multimedia artist that’s received broad recognition in the region for my innovative engagement with difficult social issues. My prior work includes the Corner Boys Song project, in which I worked with young men participating in the informal economy on Hermitage Avenue to create poetry and video about their lived experiences; “Art of Becoming” photo-collage mural in East Trenton that combines historic and present-day images of the neighborhood assembled from community members and a group of teen photographers; and facilitating discussions at Artworks Trenton and Princeton University around segregation, violence, and the arts in the aftermath of the Art All Night shooting.

This project’s materials will be assembled into multimedia collages and shared on an interactive, mobile-friendly platform. The team will design a series of installations or markers at the physical locations where the stories took place, which directs community members to the site. We aim to assemble story collages for 10 locations between two neighborhoods, and expect approximately 2-5 stories, voices, or sets of multimedia pieces to emerge from each location. The interactive tool and physical installations in the neighborhood will launch, with a public event that includes facilitated discussion of trauma and its impacts. Once launched, the interactive platform will continue the conversation by allowing community members to add more stories and artwork. The project concludes with walking tours and conversations at the featured spaces, encouraging additional community members to use the platform, adding stories and ideas, and working with partners to rollout the platform to other neighborhoods and, cities.

In 2018, a shooting at the 24-hour arts and music festival Art All Night (AAN) brought the themes of creative placemaking, mental health, violence, trauma, and equitable reinvestment in Trenton together into a difficult conversation. The identified primary shooter, Tahaij Wells, was a young Black man from one of Trenton’s most heavily-disinvested neighborhoods, where median income is a quarter of New Jersey state’s average, over half the properties on some blocks are abandoned, and stable pathways in the formal economy are few. He’d recently been released from prison, where he’d spent almost all of his adult life, and much of his incarceration in solitary confinement. AAN is Trenton’s largest arts event, attracting 30,000 people each year since 2009. It’s often viewed as a harbinger of what’s possible in a revitalized Trenton, once disinvestment and violence are replaced by redevelopment and well-used social places as the key drivers of news about the city. The shooting brought the type of violence that residents of many Trenton neighborhoods live with daily to AAN forced the Trenton community to reckon, under a national spotlight, with the ways trauma, creative redevelopment, and a legacy of inequity and exclusion intersect with our physical and social space.

Building on conversations sparked by the AAN shooting and related efforts to foster equitable, healing-centered community development and services, and with the knowledge that Trenton residents are facing serious and disparate impacts of the pandemic—including violence during the lockdown—to lead Trenton’s first large-scale, multi-sector effort to reclaim public spaces and the narratives about them by using art, creative placemaking, and resident engagement as a means to overcome trauma. 

I’ll assemble a team of six community liaisons from the focus neighborhoods, selected for their connections within the neighborhood - particularly connections to young men who are active parts of the cycle of gangs and violence. This team will work with neighborhood residents to tell their place-related stories of trauma and healing, including stories related to experiencing the current pandemic, through a collaborative process of creating and assembling photographs, video, original poetry, and other media. While the intent is to include a broad spectrum of community members and experiences, an explicit aim of this work is to engage with individuals whose voices are typically excluded from the city’s mainstream conversations, and to bring out stories of the cycle of violence, trauma, unhealthy coping mechanisms, memory, and healing. 

With Trenton Health Team (THT) providing administrative project management, including linking this project to related projects across the city and across sectors, and I serving as creative lead, the project will focus on two neighborhoods that face a high concentration of violence, have underlying characteristics making them likely to suffer intensified impacts from the pandemic, and are experiencing significant reinvestment and economic development efforts that will be informed through this project: 

• The area around Hermitage and Stuyvesant Avenues in the West Ward, and 

• The Old Trenton / Creek to Canal Creative District in downtown Trenton. 

Both of these neighborhoods are low-income communities of color. Both are also implementing community-led redevelopment plans under the New Jersey Neighborhood Revitalization Tax Credit (NRTC) program. Our project partner, Isles, administers the NRTC funds and place-based projects for both of these areas.  The project will also align with a new effort - Mayor Gusciora’s Resilient Trenton Task Force - led by the City of Trenton’s Department of Health and Human Services and supported by THT to make trauma-informed/healing-centered practices the norm within the local community development, social service, and public health sectors by 2025. 

In addition to lived stories of community members, the interactive platform includes data/archival materials that contextualizes these stories in light of broader forces shaping the neighborhoods/city. We will include archival research like the redlining maps of the city and materials assembled by a team at Princeton University that examine the media narratives of violence about the 1968 civil uprising in Trenton, and how memories/perceptions of violence still impact perceptions of Trenton today. Additional interactive maps will show more recent information, such as health data and medical facilities, crime data, data on vacant properties, and time-lapse representations of disinvestment illustrating that.

I am the creative director and originator of this project and a Trenton-based poet, multimedia artist, and activist born and raised on Hermitage Avenue in Trenton’s West Ward, and was the last scheduled performer on the main stage at AAN 2018 before my set was cancelled in the events leading up to the shooting. This concept grew out of the conversations after the incident and my experiences with the cycle of violence in my own neighborhood, which profoundly affects not just residents’ individual wellbeing, but their interaction with physical space. For instance, one of my neighbors avoids a corner store frequented for lunch by his co-workers because his friend was murdered there (“but the cheesesteak is still good”), and a memorial made up of over one hundred empty alcohol bottles appears on Google Maps (see Attached). Building on my prior work of using poetry and art to facilitate marginalized community members’ engagement with their own narratives of trauma, I will train and work with a team of community liaisons to capture individual stories like this and assemble them into multimedia collages tied to specific places, as discussed in more detail below.

Since the inception, I’ve had everyone of my students and friends in mind who were most “at risk” when creating this project. In the three years of conception, I’ve lost 3 close friends(Cameron, Rayshawn, and Daquan), 2 dynamic students (Jahday and Covvie), and over 15 people with whom I’ve crossed paths, exchanged smiles, and grew up in same neighborhood, to gun violence. Those preventable and senseless deaths caused a pain so poignantly disheartening, that I’ve grown numb, in attempts to detach myself from that expectation of our community—a keen familiarity to many residents. And while being numb isn’t the most cynical resort, it is the most concerting and concerning. I’ve led my life knowing that art and listening hearts were the two most instrumental sources to escaping while growing up in this community. I intimately know the hurt that makes one want to kill off the thing or person responsible—but instead, I was able to resort to positive influences that circumvented those thoughts and validated my potential and leadership. Though the issue can’t be completely mitigated, it is my hope and passion that art serves as the bridge to help my community and communities alike heal.

This project requires a unique skill set. My experience and education in film and visual arts, my ability to connect with people and support them in telling their stories using a variety of mediums, my relationships with the people in my community whom I seek to serve, and the inroads I have cultivated with organizations and individuals willing to collaborate are all important aspects of this endeavor. However, I think the most significant and powerful skill I possess is my resolve. Much like it took my photomural project trial, travesty, and three years of fighting to the finish, this project has taken a similar course. When I first lost my house to fire, and subsequently lost my student and friend to a shooting, the only way I coped was by creating. I started sketching and brainstorming ways I could inspire conversations and involve other impacted community members. In the three years I have been attempting to actualize the vision that came from that process, I’ve gotten rejected from over 20 grant organizations.  But like the mural project, despite all obstacles, I remained steadfast, continuously believing that the work is too important to falter. As a result of that determination, this year my project was endorsed by the Kresge Foundation. This funding, and more importantly the validation that it brings, confirms that my dedication to this work is instrumental in accomplishing the mission and realizing the vision that holds such significance to me and all who will be touched by it.

In 2016, I submitted a RFP to produce the first-ever photo-mural in the city of Trenton. Against the traditional aerosol spray-paint mural style, this choice was both a controversial and skeptical undertaking from the community, despite my stern beliefs. While the graffiti community I’d grown up admiring maintained a unanimous dissonance, I filtered the opposing idea by remaining steadfast in my vision to procure a mural that involved and engaged young people’s perspectives, including them in the history making of our city. Throughout the process, I worked with neighborhood teens as they assumed a variety of roles–photographers, researchers, subjects, and/or muses that would appear in the photomural.

There were several hiccups during the installation, including my partners inability to properly install the mural from printing on the wrong material, followed by his radio silence and forfeiting our contractual agreement—the community had grown rightfully impatient and mistrustful by the 2 year process. Both people’s incapability of seeing the vision because it diverged from the standard, and their disbelief to see beyond what I promised, made me want to quit. Though it took 3 years from thwarting discouragement, Trenton now has its first-ever photomural. 

As a young woman born and raised in Trenton, I’m keenly aware not just of the challenges facing our communities, but also of the transformative power they hold. For over seven years, I’ve served as the founder and Executive Director of Both Hands Artlet, an arts based organization that uses contemporary art and unconventional educational practices, including traditional African education practices, to engage underserved teens in inner-cities, Trenton most specifically. We deal frankly and openly with each other and with the hard issues the teens face—suicide, depression, body image fears, drugs/crime, the risk of pregnancy—using art to reclaim our power over them. From 2014-2016, in partnership with the College of New Jersey, Both Hands engaged its youth participants almost daily in videomaking, poetry, and multimedia creation in downtown Trenton, later expanding to fashion design and other media; the work was given a cover story in the Downtowner, and films made by the youth been screened at TCNJ, Mill Hill, Artworks, and the Trenton African American Cultural Festival. To date, I’ve worked with over 300 youth and college students, many of whom have not previously been exposed to these interdisciplinary artistic practices, and bringing their work to a regional audience.

This is the first large-scale effort in Trenton to use the arts to change narratives of violence and trauma within the most impacted neighborhoods. Designed by an artist from an affected community, this project directly builds resident agency, centers the experiences of community members, and works with them to reshape their shared narratives of trauma and healing. Based on my previous work, we expect a significant level of engagement from marginalized and difficult-to-reach people. For instance, my project, Corner Boys Song project in the Hermitage Avenue area in 2014-15 was unexpectedly successful in prompting young men to discuss their experiences on camera and in original poetry; and a public photography project I led on nearby Passaic Street directly reduced tensions and vandalism by depicting, and validating, multiple community members as active stakeholders on a block. By supporting the storytelling work with appropriate, sensitive mental health resources available to community members who choose to seek them, we will empower participants to engage differently with trauma and healing moving forward.

In addition to helping to change narratives at the individual level, the stories and ideas mobilized through this project will result in concrete, physical place-based interventions supported by the Trenton Historic Development Collaborative neighborhood plan (West Ward) and the Creek to Canal Creative District Plan (Old Trenton). The project will also support the professional development of local artists engaged in the project through technical assistance, small business support services, and public events that provide opportunities to showcase and sell their art.

As a key part of assembling and representing residents’ stories, the creative team will lead community members to imagine alternatives to what happened – alternative actions by themselves or others, alternatives to the current built environment, and alternatives to where and how they experienced the violence and coronavirus and its aftermath. THT and our project partners will identify and bring in additional resources throughout the process to support these community-generated alternatives as they emerge, including, as appropriate, connections to culturally-sensitive mental health services for those who decide to seek them, and place-based interventions that can be funded through the NRTC program or other sources.

In response to the pandemic’s disproportionate impact in Trenton as compared to the region, we have modified our project in several key ways. We have explicitly incorporated the pandemic’s impact into our storytelling, resource-sharing, and visioning work, as discussed above, and have incorporated coronavirus and related health data into our plans for data visualization. And we have modified the project timeline, now adjusted to July 2020 through June 2021. The project will begin with a preparatory phase of three months, focused on creating the web platform architecture, assembling and training (virtually, if needed) the project team in trauma-informed and healing-centered interviewing practices; and conducting initial outreach (virtual, if needed) to community members. The interviewing, story-gathering, multimedia creation, and editing/curating phase will extend for 6-7 months, and the platform will be finalized and launched over the final 2-3 months of the project. 

We are prepared to modify the methodology and timeline further if small group gatherings continue to be restricted. This project is intended to build fact-to-face relationships among residents, artists, and others, and to link people to civic and cultural activity in their neighborhoods. We are confident that, even with potential ongoing limitations due to the coronavirus, we can carry out the project and build healing and lasting relationships between people. We plan to perfect this prototype to replicate it in other cities within 5 years. 

Trenton Health Team, Inc., incorporated as a nonprofit in 2010, was established as a multi- sector collaborative in 2006 by the city’s three largest health care organizations and the City of Trenton in response to the closure of Mercer Hospital near Hermitage Avenue. This project builds on THT’s track record of convening partners across sectors to address complex public health challenges and developing new infrastructure to fill gaps in knowledge and collaboration. Their nationally-recognized work includes launching two technological platforms, the Trenton Health Information Exchange(HIE), which enables the sharing of patient data and population- level data analysis, and NowPow, which supports whole-person care by enabling patient referrals to social service agencies. We work with over 100 organizations as part of our Community Advisory Board, and serve as the backbone organization for many public health initiatives in the city, including the City of Trenton’s new Resilient TrentonTask Force. They recently worked with the citywide Trenton Food Stakeholders, a subcommittee of THT’s Community Advisory Board, to develop a concept for a healthy food co-op in the abandoned shopping center on Hermitage Avenue in one of the target neighborhoods, and have implemented multiple on-the-ground projects at the intersection of public health and community development, including a series of tactical urbanism, public art, and social media influencer campaigns under the Transforming Communities Initiative supported by Trinity Health. THT is uniquely positioned to bring together the city’s arts, mental and behavioral health, and community development sectors into Trenton’s first trauma-informed creative placemaking effort.

I’ve received funding from the following organizations:

I am Trenton Community Foundation (2020): $10,600

Kresge Foundation (2020): $150,000