WHEN: Thursday, October 20, 2016, 6 - 8 PM
WHERE: Knox Hall, 606 W. 122nd Street, Room 509
How do we talk about, argue about, and even laugh and cry about gentrification? In this session, urbanist and artist Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani will discuss her most recent public art and dialogue project in Brooklyn, Intersection | Prospect Heights, in which exhibitions were curated at the supermarket and photographs and oral histories of a diner spurred much-needed conversation on this radically changing city.
In the aftermath of rapid and extensive displacement and development in the small neighborhood of Prospect Heights, this new project re-introduces stories and photographs from Bendiner-Viani’s neighborhood research of the early 2000s, to lift the veil of anonymity surrounding conversations on gentrification by grounding them in individual articulations of the value of places.
Embedding these stories throughout the neighborhood through a series of neighborhood “guidebooks” displayed in pop-up exhibitions at supermarkets, libraries, bars and dry cleaners, while also leading performative guided tours, hosting community “Place Conversations” and panel discussions with politicians and planners, and creating an ongoing oral history program at Brooklyn Public Library, the project created new prompts, and new spaces, for neighborhood conversation. In this session Bendiner-Viani will discuss the creation of the project, its ongoing life, and her approach to using art, design and oral history research to create space for dialogue in contested city spaces.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is an urbanist and artist pioneering arts-based, and oral history, research for urban community engagement. Her most recent project is Intersection | Prospect Heights - a work that engaged thousands of Brooklyn residents and was featured in Brooklyn Magazine, Brownstoner and Untapped Cities.
She is principal of Buscada, a design, photography, and critical research studio focused on place and civic dialogue. She is also a professor of urban studies and public art at the New School in New York. She was previously Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Urban Community Research at Goldsmiths, University of London and she holds a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Her work has been shown at institutions including MIT, Brooklyn Public Library, the Center for Architecture, and the Sheila Johnson Design Center, and her work on cities, culture and photography have appeared in journals including Visual Studies, Space and Culture, Society & Space, Shelterforce and Urban Omnibus. She is currently working on a book on oral history, exhibitions and contested space for the University of Iowa’s Humanities in Public Life series.
INFORMATION: For more information, please email Amy Starecheski at aas39@columbia.edu.
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.
NO REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED, BUT RSVPS ON THE EVENT FACEBOOK PAGE ARE APPRECIATED TO GAUGE ATTENDANCE.