From the Ground Up

Join us to celebrate the unveiling of After the Fire, a participatory mural project led by artists Nanibah Chacon, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and Layqa Nuna Yawar on the walls of MoMA PS1’s Courtyard. Taking place in the public plaza outside PS1’s main entrance, the mural’s unveiling will be marked by free food and drink provided by local street vendors, in collaboration with the Street Vendor Project. Guests will also be treated to an “abolitionist tea party” led by artist jackie sumell and interns from the Lower Eastside Girls Club, which accompanies their installation Growing Abolition. Located in PS1’s Courtyard, Growing Abolition, like After the Fire, proposes visions of a brighter future that might emerge from the ground up.

After the Fire brings an experimental, participatory, and collaborative approach to the entire process of mural-making. The project began with a series of workshops with three local Queens community groups: Transform America, Make the Road, and members of the Shinnecock, Unkechaug, and Matinecock Nations. These workshops sought not only to share ideas, but to break bread and build connections between community members, inviting collaboration at every stage of the process.

Artist jackie sumell’s “abolitionist tea party” accompanies Growing Abolition, an ongoing collaboration between sumell and The Lower Eastside Girls Club unfolding around a greenhouse installed in the side Courtyard of PS1. A mobile “apothecart” designed by sumell—housing various herbs, teas, and plants—will occupy the public plaza outside of PS1’s main entrance. In conversation with sumell and girls from the Lower East Side Girls Club, visitors are invited to circle up, taste, feel, and smell different plants, many of which are considered “weeds.” Plants, as healers and storytellers, have historically been key to forms of resistance—used, for example, to map significant places along the underground railroad. An abolitionist’s tea party will ask: how does the natural world endorse abolition as a strategy for liberation?