At 11AM meet us at the Citibike Station at Union and Bayard (behind the McCarren Farmer’s Market).  Bring your own bike, or get your own Citibike.  We’ll set off on a bike journey to Fort Greene Park and beyond. We’re bringing handmade maps. Along the way, everyone is invited to share their favorite sights. Be prepared to take detours.  If you normally don’t feel safe riding a bike on your own, try doing it in a group!

Marie Lorenz roots her work in exploration and narrative. Since 2002, Lorenz has been traveling various urban waterways in boats she designs and builds, collecting the tidal debris that accumulates in the harbor. Find Marie’s work at Tideandcurrenttaxi.org.

Birgit Rathsmann is an artist and animator who is excited to dust off those social skills.

Please donate to the Educated Little Monsters Property Fund

Political Intimacy: a series of collaborative conversations tackling some of the most pressing issues at the citywide level aimed at demystifying the political process of running for office. Join cultural space Recess: Assembly, along with Pratt Institute students, and District 3 and 35 community members for discussions and handmade paper print dissemination.

To support the Recess: Assembly program please visit: recessart.org/assembly/

Recess: Assembly offers those caught up in the justice system an inroad to art and connections to working artists and serves as an alternative to incarceration while empowering young people to take charge of their own life story and envision a career in the arts. Once participants complete the program prosecutors may close and seal their cases, allowing youth to avoid an adult record. Participants may stay involved at Recess through paid, long-term training and arts engagement.

The Studio in Social Practice class at Pratt Institute provides the framework to bring students’ artistic practice into dialogue with critical and transformative perspectives related to civic engagement. Empowering students to get directly involved with their extended community, their projects develop through a collaborative visioning process and manifest in partnerships that creatively engage issues from policing to immigration rights, gender justice to racial equity.

The Social Practice class is facilitated by the Fellow in Civic Engagement in Fine Arts, currently Amy Khoshbin.

Zeelie makes black, queer sanctuary spaces called “soulscapes”. These spaces are refuge: refuge from forces of genocide and theft that shaped the very concept of art; refuge from hatred and ignorance that threatens to drown the land her ancestors are buried on; refuge from those whose wallets grow fat from selling black communities downriver; refuge. These soulscapes are composed of a gumbo: sound, electronic, cello performance, installation, culinary, textile, and performance art simmer together with the Alabama folk arts they learned as a child on their rural homestead to, somewhere deep within the viewer, lay down a road home.

Venmo is @Zeelie-Brown. I’m raising money toward work at the intersection of racial and environmental justice in Alabama. 

On May Day 2021 in the open field of Fort Greene Park Brooklyn, Textual Records and Brief Histories will create a space for listening to the musical sounds and scores of labor and resistance. A tent and sound system will be set up along with a limited edition of Wearable Playlist t-shirts and popsicles served from the Icey Cream bicycle wagon.

Instagram @brief_histories, briefhistories.art, Instagram @textualrecords, textualrecords.com

Brief Histories is a program of art, curatorial and publishing projects. Working in soft and malleable ways, shifting shape and adapting to our evolving social circumstances, we are dedicated to working in community, friendship, and solidarity with collaborating artists and co-producers to organize solo exhibitions, explore modes of publishing, and amplify artistic and curatorial imaginations. Brief Histories is organized by Fawz Kabra and Isak Berbic. 

Textual Records is a record label dedicated to the distribution of sound, music, and text by contemporary artists. As a form of publication, the label focuses on the simultaneity of inscription – the textual, sonic, and musical markings created within the context of art. Limited editions are produced in LP, CD, or cassette form in collaboration with the artists and other entities. Textual Records is a project of Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere.

The Moving Company and Friends (Laura Bernstein + Rebecca Pristoop) will present Miracle Tapestries, a calendar of symbols reflecting on the year 2020. After a procession through the streets of Fort Greene, swathes of hand sewn fabrics adorned with real and imagined creatures and elemental phenomena will be unfurled and hold space for a series of performances.

Miracle Tapestries: A Stage for Imagination and Invention in a New Age, is a meditation on our current moment of climate crisis, the wonder, disbelief and inability to fully comprehend the scale and speed of catastrophes. Conceived and materialized by Laura Bernstein and presented in collaboration with Rebecca Pristoop and The Moving Company and Friends, Miracle Tapestries has become a calendar of symbols, reflecting on the year 2020. The swathes of hand sewn fabrics adorned with dragons, comets, wildfires, bears and other real and imagined creatures and elemental phenomena, will be explored through movement by a group of artists, collaborators, friends and performers as they make a procession down Willoughby Ave from Carlton Ave to Fort Greene Park. Once within Fort Greene Park the tapestries will be unfurled creating a container for miracles. It will act as the loci for various offerings, rituals, poetry readings, movement experiments and games, to help alleviate the grief and solitude experienced collectively and independently over the past year. 

Collaborators include: ESHÉ All Day Hues, Nathan Albright, Georgina Arroyo, Krysta Brayer, Joey De Jesus, Shaun Ellison, Matt Evans, Adam Fitzgerald, Amanda Friedman, Lexy Ho-Tai, Maia Karo, Simone Kearney, Gabriel Kruis, Jemila MacEwan, Annabel Paran, Rachel Rabhan, Emily Reilly, David Sherman, Andrea Solstad, Leah Wishnia

Laura Bernstein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn exploring climate change through confusing the relationship between human and animal behavior using mythology and pseudoscience. Rebecca Pristoop is a New York-based curator, performance artist, and collaborator who works from a space of embodiment to illuminate individual and communal relationships in support of social justice. Both Bernstein and Pristoop have been collaborating with The Moving Company since the early twenty-teens and have shepherded the collective into its current iteration, The Moving Company and Friends – a platform for artists, performers, and healers to create social spaces and temporary communities where people can interact and connect to one another on an immediate human level.

Support via venmo: @rarabernstein @Rebecca-Pristoop

Readings of Selected Pieces from: ÉPÏKÂNÕVÀ  

(The New, Definitely Post/Transnational, Positively Polylingual, Palpably Ethereal, and Mostly Portable Open Epic, as Rendered by The Elastic Circus of the Revolution) 

ÉPÏKÂNÕVÀ  is an evolving plurilingual literary epic that unfolds over time on various platforms, in multiple arenas and spaces (private and public) and through various scriptural strategies–from the traditional (handwritten sheets, bound volumes) to the new (digital, web). Narrative conventions are challenged, and poetic, stylistic and performative operations exploit possibilities unique to different languages, mediums and sites. The overall experience is orchestrated through the creation of lasting artifacts as well as ephemeral events and monumental constructs. A theoretical apparatus and a critical project engaged with the history and forms of literature and the reading phenomenon, the work also challenges traditional modalities of publication, exhibition, commodification, dissemination and interaction.

Amir Parsa’s uncategorizable body of work–written directly in English, French, Farsi, Spanish and various hybrids–constitutes a radical polyponic enterprise that puts into question national, cultural and aesthetic attachments while fashioning innovative genres, forms and species of literary artifacts. He has published and/or performed in the U.S., France, Italy, India, Spain and Mexico among others.

Free Books for All will disseminate FREE BOOKS !Free Books for All is an initiative aimed at making literature more accessible to communities in need across Brooklyn.

FBFA centers BIPOC voices with a goal of emphasizing books authored by BIPOC authors featuring diverse BIPOC characters and narratives. Through free book fairs, free library boxes, and a future full of more ways to disseminate FREE books, Free Books for All hopes to get books in the hands of marginalized communities. 

I am a Brooklyn based writer and comedian who is a bibliophile but in a FUN way. In the summer of 2020, I organized a FREE book fair in Grand Army Plaza in hopes to engage the Brooklyn community in redistributing books to those who could not otherwise afford it. Since that book fair, I formed Free Books for All as a way to manage donations and help fund free little libraries as well as future ways to continue distributing books to those who wouldn’t be able to afford them otherwise. Free Books for All is just facilitated by me but is community mobilized- there have been and continue to be an influx of volunteers and organizers who have lent their time, money, and ideas to the project so here’s hoping this spring continues to bloom this mutual aid.

You can venmo @artiparty but label it FREE BOOKS FOR ALL

A performance that reconsiders absence, safe enough/to tell is a work recognizing what is both named and imagined by way of collected earth, something continuous, and nearly missed connections. Witness Govinda by the water at dawn in a shared moment of stirring silence, for as brief as a minute or a long as an hour. Join her at the bank of Prospect Park Lake.

Govinda is a Midwestern transplant who decided to drive east and take a chance. Living near, next to, and around silence, loss, women’s issues, mental health, her deaf dog, and unparalleled collaborator/husband, Punith, keep her sane in an impossible world. Iowa heart-home Brooklyn-based ARTi/mposter/ST: Renae Govinda.

Still figuring it all out. 

Link to location on map.

After Ski NYC will help document an outdoor yoga class led by Jyll Hubbard-Salk of Urban Asanas. Jyll, founder of Urban Asanas in Crown Heights Brooklyn, brings community together- her work goes far beyond wellness practice. Bring your own mat if you have one! 

“Located in Crown Heights Brooklyn, Urban Asanas is a community yoga studio. The first of its kind in the neighborhood; we offer the benefits of yoga- health, light, spirituality- while maintaining the strength and diversity of the people we serve. Our focus is on movement through music, collaboration and heart. Urban Asanas welcomes yoga practitioners of all levels and from all socio-economic backgrounds.”  Jyll Hubbard-Salk says that the first time she stepped on the yoga mat 30 years ago, “it felt like home”. Since then, Jyll has trained in Hatha, Thai, Lyenger, Kula yoga among other traditions, receiving multiple certifications along the way. In 2009 she opened Urban Asanas in Crown Heights. She wanted to build a studio that would represent her diverse training and personal style: “I’m not conventional and neither is how I teach. It’s influenced by many master teachers across a spectrum of yoga traditions.” She also wanted to create a haven for the underrepresented: “Many Black Women I spoke to didn’t feel accepted in traditional yoga studios and I wanted to create a space that was diverse for everyone” 

After Ski NYC is a fashion as community action collective of artists, designers and stylists  that sought to unite people outdoors this winter by changing New Yorker’s attitudes towards cold weather. Masking up, suiting up and showing up for each other in vintage (suitable fashion) urban ski gear was our winter mission! We were promoting the idea that by showing up warmly dressed- we could support small business’s, artists, activist and the general well-being of each other by safely and warmly getting outdoors. No bad weather, just bad clothes.  Find us on Instagram @afterskinyc

Open Borders Books is a bookstore cooperative in the world’s most diverse neighborhood, Jackson Heights, Queens. Half of our proceeds benefit a different aid organization doing important work in our community every month, and the other half is going towards opening a brick and mortar in our neighborhood. We sell new and used books in our neighborhood and on Instagram.

We are a collective of booksellers, publishing workers, teachers, authors, and book reviewers all working together to bring a bookstore and community space to Jackson Heights, Queens. We are currently a mobile bookshop that offers delivery in our neighborhood and will mail elsewhere! We sell books with an international focus, including fiction, translations, poetry, nonfiction, and some books in languages that aren’t English. Find us on Instagram @openbordersbooks to browse our currently available titles (we post only a fraction of what we have!) via #obbavailable

Venmo: @open-borders-books

PayPal: goodneighbor@openbordersbooks.com

CashApp: $openbordersbooks

https://www.openbordersbooks.org/

Magic Brian will be performing his family friendly, off-beat comedy-magic show. It’s a show he’s taken around the world performing in 18 countries. The show is guaranteed to make you laugh and smile and scratch your head wondering: how does he do it… why does he do it?

Magic Brian has performed around the world for the last 19 years. He’s toured with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, performed at the Edinburgh, and Adelaide International Fringe Festivals, The Melbourne International Comedy Festival, as well as having been invited to international street theater festivals throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He’s performed in variety shows, on cruise ships and even made an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman. He’s very excited to finally be able to share his comedy and magic with a live audience again!

Find Brian at Theconjurerofcomedy.com

A  tent for topic-driven direct conversations between philosophers and public

talkPOPc stands for Philosophers’ Ontological Party club, and it is devoted to my idea that both philosophy and art are, in truth, conversations between people. This is a topic-driven project, and the topics begin with both artwork and philosophical writings that I, Dena Shottenkirk, have done on that respective topic; there have been three – Nominalism, Censorship, and currently Art as Cognition. After my “input” on the topic, the public part then happens and we ask others “what do you think about this topic?’: We set up our golden tent, we invite others to come inside and have a conversation with a talkPOPc philosopher, and – together – we Build Thought.

The philosophers for the day will be Carolina Flores, Philosophy PhD Candidate, Rutgers and Ian Olasov Philosophy PhD candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Brooklyn College and Dr. Dena Shottenkirk. 

Sign up here for 20 minute conversation slots with our Resident Philosophers on talkPOPc Topic #3: “Art as Cognition”. Check us out at talkPOPc.org.

Three benches. Three parks. Three people. 

Daniel Bozhkov, Victor Skersis, and a third person – a passerby who chooses to become a participant – collaborate for this project. The participant is invited to sit on a piece of paper and trace the outline of their seat – the point of contact between their body and the bench – using a silver birch graphite stick.

This will be repeated with another participant, on another bench, in another park.

An Echo is symmetry in time.

A Picture is symmetry in space.

Thus 

A Picture is an Echo frozen in Time. 

Daniel Bozhkov is an artist based in New York City. He employs a variety of media, from fresco to performance and video, and works with professionals from different fields to activate the public space. He enters the worlds of genetic science, department mega-stores, world famous tourist sites as an amateur intruder/visitor who functions as a producer of new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems. Link: www.danielbozhkovart.com

Victor Skersis is an artist, theoretician, and philosopher of art interested in the construction of models of art. He is an active member of several collective art groups. He lives and works in Moscow, Russia and Bethlehem, PA, USA.

Link: Analytical Conceptualism – Journal #77 November 2016 – e-flux (e-flux.com)

Interspecies meet up.

A gathering  with our plant, fungi, moss, animal & insect neighbors to celebrate the wild living things around us and share stories and medicinal & traditional ecosystem functions. Gather with our plant, fungi, moss, animal & insect neighbors in the habitat of Coffey Park. We will name and celebrate the wild living things throughout the park and share stories of their travels, origins, medicinal & traditional ecosystem functions. Meet at the tree stump in the center of the park for a walk & talk. Afterwards if you’d like, you can share stories of your new kin with others by participating in the 2021 City Nature Challenge.

Marisa Prefer works as invisible labor, drawing from deep observation and ancestral wisdom to engage in tactile experiments that cultivate care among multi-species communities. Marisa currently stewards unceded Canarsie and Munsee Lenape lands (Brooklyn, NY) and is the Manager of Sustainability and Environmental Engagement at Pioneer Works.

Trees hold space for us and offer respite, care and oxygen. A temporary seating arrangement under the great American Hornbeam tree in Prospect Park will be set up to receive brief stories or loving details about loved ones who have passed away. I will offer to record your story (up to 3 minutes) and share it with you if so desired. Audio collection optional.Please consider giving to Prospect Park and learn about its great trees here. 

Barrio Collective takes over a section of Prospect Park and sets up a community oriented event full of music, food, creativity and friends. We create a space for people to get together with enough room to socially distance. Find out more about Bario Collective here: https://adrianishungry.com/salsa-al-parque-brooklyn

venmo them @barrioprint

DJ Stylus will wrap up the event with an outdoor dance party under the trees in Prospect Park – Funk, soul, disco, and rare grooves – bring your mask and your dancing shoes. Gabriel Willow is an urban naturalist, DJ, and artist. He has DJ’d at such notable venues as APT, The House of Yes, Sleep No More, and others

On venmo: @gabriel-willow