Narratives: Project Ideation

Narrative: History of Bowery

There is a rich history in the East Village, but I’m particularly interested in the history of Bowery. Bowery has gone from being occupied by freed slaves, to the most elegant street in Manhattan lined with theatres and high-fashion shops, to the turf of one of America’s earliest street gangs, to Skid Row, to the birthplace of Punk music, to a location full of artists that still has threads of all of these pieces of history running through it.

1.     Augmented Reality – Bowery

I would be interested to create an augmented reality experience that allows the public to walk down the street and view it through the lens of what it used to be many years ago and experience the history of Bowery in a visual, tangible, realistic way, as a way to educate people to its history, to share stories, to archive, to compare the current experience of Bowery to past experiences of Bowery, and to generate community conversation.

2.     Mural Proposal – Houston/Bowery Wall

Another option would be to design and propose a mural depicting this history by visualizing what the evolution of Bowery looked like.

Narrative: Kindness

While I was walking the streets of the East Village, I was really drawn to the street art and random stickers. There were many different stickers and street art with a range of different themes/content, but what I noticed was how many revolved around spreading kindness. So many random people anonymously left a message for other random strangers to find, and out of all the messages they could’ve left, they chose to leave one that cultivated kindness and reminded people to be kind.

1.     Kindness through Portraiture

An idea I had for creating a project around spreading kindness would be to do so by collecting people’s stories then sharing that narrative in some way. When portraits are done of people, it’s because the commissioner of the portrait or the artist themselves considers that person to be important, and often when you see portraits installed publicly, they depict people who were famous, rich, or publicly prominent in some way. I would like to depict people who are “normal,” who aren’t famous, who are just people like you and me and share their story, whatever that might be. I would like to depict many different types of people to spotlight the diversity in New York City, but also to cultivate empathy in our commonalities. Humans are humans, and I’d like to do a project that reminds everyone of that, especially right now. Maybe it would juxtapose their reputation with their personal identity – how people see them versus how they see themselves.

2.     Kindness through Communication

It’s often a struggle to find public seating in New York City, so I was also considering designing an installation of public seating that would create a space to cultivate conversation among people looking to spend time with other people.

Narrative: Overlooked Stories in the East Village

There are so many diverse individuals in New York City, and I would love to do a project that spotlights that diversity in attempt to cultivate compassion, empathy, and understanding for diversity.  

1.     Portraiture

This could be done through portraiture, either abstracted or realistic. I think it would be really interesting to engage businesses in the community by using window fronts of shops, restaurants, etc. to display art pieces and create a sort of public gallery.

This project could also work on a larger scale and ultimately become a proposal to MTA or an alternative wall space.