In New York, Mindscapes cultural partners coproduced projects about how communities mobilise urban space for mental health and collective wellbeing. Some of the principles that guided New York projects included: learning how communities define their own mental health needs today, possibly outside of clinical definitions and current programs as they exist, amplifying successful community strategies for well-being by asking broad, open questions that aren’t limited by current institutional frameworks, and making connections between physical infrastructure, civic space, and well being. The cultural projects centred the experiences of low-income youth, LGBTQ+ youth, undocumented residents, cancer survivors, wheelchair users, formerly incarcerated people with mental health needs and senior citizens, and took place through paid youth work–study programmes, collaborations with advocacy organisations, and intergenerational story circles that amplifed community determined solutions. Key topics included intergenerational trauma, collective recovery, embodied healing practices, disability justice and radical joy. Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, PhD, was the cultural lead for Mindscapes in New York, with support from cultural consultant Lauraberth Lima.
In New York, Mindscapes cultural partners coproduced projects about how communities mobilise urban space for mental health and collective wellbeing. Some of the principles that guided New York projects included: learning how communities define their own mental health needs today, possibly outside of clinical definitions and current programs as they exist, amplifying successful community strategies for well-being by asking broad, open questions that aren’t limited by current institutional frameworks, and making connections between physical infrastructure, civic space, and well being. The cultural projects centred the experiences of low-income youth, LGBTQ+ youth, undocumented residents, cancer survivors, wheelchair users, formerly incarcerated people with mental health needs and senior citizens, and took place through paid youth work–study programmes, collaborations with advocacy organisations, and intergenerational story circles that amplifed community determined solutions. Key topics included intergenerational trauma, collective recovery, embodied healing practices, disability justice and radical joy. Rebecca Hayes Jacobs, PhD, was the cultural lead for Mindscapes in New York, with support from cultural consultant Lauraberth Lima.
April–September 2022, Brooklyn Museum
Drawing on the artist’s personal story of migration, illness, and recovery, Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven centered the need for care and healing, particularly for the undocumented and cancer communities of which Guadalupe Maravilla is a part. The exhibition featured new sculptures, retablo paintings, tripa chuca drawings, and sound works, as well as a Healing Room, a community space for collective care designed by teen staff.
Interviews with teens who participated in developing the healing room:
→ Read here
→ Watch here
Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven was organised by Eugenie Tsai.
Related Brooklyn learning resources were organized by Lindsay C. Harris with Rebecca Jacobs.
September 2020–Present
Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK is a GPS-enabled work of public art that uses music to illuminate the natural environment. Created by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound artist Ellen Reid, the New York SOUNDWALK was the first in a global series. The site-specific work illuminates the urban landscape in Central Park and featured musicians from the New York Philharmonic, a local jazz collective, and a youth choir. Different iterations of SOUNDWALK are currently available for the public to download and experience for free in a number of international cities
Ellen Reid Soundwalk, NY Philharmonic. Photo: Erin Baiano
Isometric Studio at Grounds for Sculpture
October 2023 – Ongoing
Cloud Swing, designed by Isometric Studio, is an accessible swing set that is a powerful statement of inclusion and childlike wonder. Five swings are suspended from a curvilinear cloud, and two of the swings are especially fabricated with foldable ramps for wheelchair users. Cloud Swing is designed to inspire a world where public art and play invite and include people of all abilities. Cloud Swing was designed by Isometric Studio and fabricated by Serett Metalworks. It opened to the public at Grounds for Sculpture in October 2023.
Isometric Studio is a Brooklyn-based design studio. Through design, they aim to advance an ethos of inclusion, equity, and justice, centering the lived experiences of marginalised people.
July 2022–May 2023
Urban Omnibus, a publication of The Architectural League of New York
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY
At the library, at the park, at the clubhouse... how do communities mobilise and create spaces that foster collective power and peace of mind? The series Well-Placed, guest edited by graduate students Asma Neblett, Helena Najm, Jessica Fletcher, Nawal Muradwij and Mindscapes New York cultural lead Rebecca Jacobs looked at citymaking strategies that promote mental health and wellbeing, especially those for whom the city does not already work well. The animating question of the series was, In the face of exclusion and displacement, how do communities mobilise urban space for mental health and collective wellbeing? The five pieces “Clinical Trials”, “Staying the Distance”, “Teenage Dream”, “On the Up and Up” and “Minding the Gaps” all explored this question, using relevant case studies from New York’s past and present.
2022, Center for Urban Pedagogy
Due to discrimination, in the U.S. many formerly incarcerated people struggle with financial stability. It’s even harder if they have a mental or physical health condition that prevents them from working. The Center for Urban Pedagogy teamed up with The Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center and design team 13 milliseconds to create a booklet in English and Spanish for formerly incarcerated people that explains how to apply for two social security programs, SSI and SSDI. With this information, formerly incarcerated people with disabilities can more easily access financial stability, which plays an important role in disrupting cycles of hospitalisation, homelessness, and incarceration.
Project collaborators:
CUP Staff, Genea Foster, Agustín Cepeda
Community partner:
The Mental Health Project of the Urban Justice Center
with Ann Biddle, Zuly Alvarado
Designers:
13 milliseconds, Sharon Bach, François Huyghe
Special thanks:
Dennis Adams, Gregory Melton, Marco Barrios (community members) and to the team of translators at Translingua Associates Inc.
September 2021, Center for Urban Pedagogy
In the summer of 2021, CUP, Teaching Artist Hugo Rojas, and students from the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School collaborated to investigate the relationship between poverty and mental health in the neighbourhood where their school is located in the Bronx. Students explored the issue through digital filmmaking, creating stop-motion animations, surveying community members, and interviewing stakeholders and decision makers. The group gathered what they learned and created a short documentary film that explores how poverty impacts mental health.
Project collaborators:
CUP staff, Fielding Hong, Ana Beirne-Meyer
Educational partner:
Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
Jeff Palladino, Nathan Larsen, Daniel Nohejl
Teaching artist:
Hugo Rojas
Students:
Angel Morales, Amya Wayne, Crichelle Ruiz,
Damary Rodriguez, Darrain Vives, David Solano,
Jose Hernadez, Richard Lloyd, Samoya Shannon,
Shabar Taylor, Sharelle Smith, Odalys Smith,
Tyana Cooper, Tyler Bolton, Zanera Bedell
Special thanks
Interviewees: Khadija Kone, Monxo Lopez,
Dr. Michael McRae, Dr. Michelle Morse,
Jeff Palladino, Meisha Porter, Joshua Poyer,
and Alondra Rodriguez.
Special thanks to Rebecca Jacobs and Steffie Kinglake.
Spring–Summer 2022
Founded in 2005, The Laundromat Project (The LP) is a Black-rooted and POC (People of Colour)-centered community-based arts organisation that advances artists and neighbours as change agents in their own communities. The LP’s Mindscapes programming in Bedford-Stuyvestant, Brooklyn, centered on community wellbeing and mental health through the methodology of “Collective Recovery” developed by Dr. Mindy Fullilove and her colleagues at University of Orange during the Covid-19 pandemic. It included a series of story circles, a window commission, and outdoor art-making events, providing a space for neighbors to process, connect, and build community cohesion in the wake of the pandemic. A film was also created as part of Mindscapes to document and share this programming with wider communities.
June 2022, New York Public Library
Anti-Prom, held annually at the New York Public Library (NYPL), is an a safe space for LGBTQ+ teens and any teens who desire an inclusive, teen-centered space of belonging. The Mindscapes Artist-in-Residence at Large Christine Wong Yap contributed to the 2022 Anti-Prom with an activity reimagining paper dolls for NYC teens in 2022: diverse in race, body size, gender, abilities and with garments designed by students at the Fashion High school in NYC. Anti-Prom is an annual event at the iconic Astor Room in the Main library on Fifth Ave, and the first in person since 2019, since Covid interrupted plans in 2020-2021. The activity was co-organised with and run by NYPL Teen Center volunteers.
New York Public Library. September 21, 2023
Writers whose novels and stories have crossed the intersection of climate change and mental health asked whether fiction can have a meaningful impact on how we handle the climate crisis.
The climate crisis and mental health have figured into the novels or stories of Akil Kumarasamy, Sam J. Miller, and Nathaniel Rich. Speaking with Mary Annaïse Heglar, they discussed the responsibilities that storytellers do or don’t have to center our most dire global challenge, and how they respect both the big picture narratives of climate change and the individual stories of mental and physical health within them—and what kind of change can we reasonably expect their work to help induce. (Organized by LIVE from NYPL)
For What? For Whom? An Evening of Collective Storytelling
Featuring Kamau Ware of the Black Gotham Experience
20 May 2022, CUNY Center for the Humanities
CUNY’s Center for Humanities welcomed Kamau Ware, a storyteller and founder of the Black Gotham Experience, for an event “For What? For Whom? An Evening of Collective Storytelling” at the CUNY Graduate Center. The event was organised as part of the Center’s collaboration on Mindscapes, Wellcome’s international cultural programme on mental health and well being. Over 30 attendees came together for this intimate evening of healing and community dialogue.
Organised and moderated by Nawal Muradwij,
Dunni Oduyemi, and Alexandra Rego,
with support from Rebecca Hayes Jacobs.
Kamau Ware, An Evening of Collective Storytelling, 2022. Photo: CUNY Center for the Humanities
Thursday, 14 April 2022, Brooklyn Museum
This event celebrated the exhibition Guadalupe Maravilla: Tierra Blanca Joven with the artist, who was joined by Pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz and drag artist Lady Quesa for a conversation on art, healing, and immigrant communities. Juan Carlos Ruiz is the pastor at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Bay Ridge and, during the pandemic, collaborated frequently with Maravilla on mutual aid efforts including food distribution and sound baths. Lady Quesa is a staple of the Brooklyn drag scene, and is supervisor of arts programming at youth development organisation The Door.
Organised by Danilo Machado with support from Lauraberth Lima.
17 September 2022, Brooklyn Museum
Artist Guadalupe Maravilla was joined by healers, musicians, and singers for Ceremony, a ninety-minute sound bath held within Maravilla’s special exhibition Tierra Blanca Joven, organised as part of Mindscapes. The sound baths — which involved singing and the playing of gongs, bells, and other instruments — activated the Disease Thrower sculptures in the exhibition and drew from the artist’s personal healing journey as a cancer survivor and migrant. As part of their multidisciplinary mutual aid practice centering healing, Maravilla has led sound baths for communities around New York City and across the world.
