Calling Home

Winter/Spring 2022 Community Art Project with Artist-in-Residence Krystle Brown

March 2 - May 4 | Final Celebration: June 18, 2022

 
 
 

“Calling Home” is a Community Art Project (CAP) led by Artist-in-Residence Krystle Brown exploring autobiographical storytelling, intergenerational exchange, installation art, and sound. Together we will consider the roles of community, empathy, and reflection in addressing the crises of housing insecurity, gentrification, and displacement in Boston, and find collective healing and empowerment to voice the stories that live within us.

Focus Areas:

  • Housing justice: Boston has become financially untenable and continues to rank among the top U.S. cities with the highest cost of living and greatest income inequality. The housing crisis combined with rising inequality has locked out many average and low-income Bostonians from owning a home, a pathway to financial stability. Stable housing creates strong families and communities.

  • Community advocacy: Stable housing creates strong families. Strong families create well-connected communities that can better advocate for tangible improvements. Healthy and well-connected communities preserve culture(s), the arts, and can serve as leaders in creating change in their city.

  • Collective healing: Through the telling of personal narratives, we can find commonalities in our community members and those who would be otherwise strangers. When we gain insight into the lives, experiences, and struggles of our neighbors, we can connections and support systems that can lead towards collective healing and envisioning.

Project Details:

Over a ten-week period of in-person sessions, we will give each other space to share our experiences of living in Boston through writing, photo-journaling, voice recording, and other means of expression. We will draw inspiration from artists and activists engaging in housing justice, and invite local leaders to share their hyperlocal work and impact with us. On walking tours in neighborhoods across Boston, we will learn about the histories and impact of redlining and other forms of inequality in real-time.

In the end, we will collaborate to create a digitally-interactive, public art installation at a defunct phone booth in Boston, featuring the audio-recorded voices and stories of participants and community members. An accompanying “phone book” publication will share other artwork created over the course of the project: bilingual (English and Spanish) transcripts of audio recordings, written reflections, photography, and more.