PHOTOS: Brownsville's Langston Hughes Houses Get Vibrant Outdoor Art Installation

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN — In front of the Brownsville public housing complex of Langston Hughes Houses, there now stands an 8-foot-tall, 300-foot-long outdoor art exhibit, popping with color and artistic statement. The massive gallery, officially unveiled to the public last week, features works of 11 East New York-area artists, each of which tell distinct stories about the artist's relationship with the surrounding community and culture.

The outdoor gallery along Belmont Avenue called Brownsville Matters arose out of a partnership with New York Public Housing Authority (NYCHA), the Brownsville Community Justice Center, the Municipal Art Society of New York and ArtBridge, an organization that transforms dilapidated areas into artistic spaces.

"This project fit really well with the goal of NYCHA, which is connecting public housing with the fabric of the rest of the city," said Rasmia Kirmani-Frye, Director of NYCHA's office of public and private partnerships. "Residents participated in every step of the process. Property management at Langston Hughes was excited to take an area that didn’t have a lot of beauty, quite frankly, and activate the exhibit."

Stephen Pierson, executive director of ArtBridge, said ArtBridge focuses not only on beautifying streets but on building communities through its large-scale art exhibits. "From my perspective, Brownsville is generally only covered by the media when bad things happen," Pierson said. "It's also important to look at the vibrant culture and neighborhood, and we crafted an exhibition around promoting those narratives."

Dominique Davenport, one of the artists featured in the exhibit, said the project hit close to home for her. Davenport grew up in a NYCHA complex in East New York. The 25-year-old began drawing as early as elementary school on her book projects, when her teachers didn't believe her when she said she was the artist. Her parents paid for art classes "with what little they had," she said, when she was in middle school, and they enrolled her in an arts high school. Then she went on the study art at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

"There wasn’t much inspiration art around at the time when I was a kid growing up, so I thought this was an awesome experience to actually have in the location I lived," Davenport told Patch. Her piece is called "Representation."

"With this particular painting, I wanted to highlight women in general of different ethnicities, but focus primarily on women of color, so that people in these communities will see that there are paintings and art of women that look just like them," she said.

ArtBridge and NYCHA put out an open call to anyone living in the Brownsville area or had a strong connection to the neighborhood to submit their art, Pierson said. They received 150 submissions, had two local curators from the Brooklyn Museum and Brooklyn Arts Council narrow the submissions down to 60 and then they had a community meeting where residents could voice their opinions and vote on the 11 winners.

At the neighborhood voting meeting in December, over 80 people with strong, personal opinions attended, Pierson said. "People loved being empowered. Everyone had a strong feeling about something."

Pierson added that at the meeting, he met at least a dozen kids under the age of 14 who told him they'd never been to a museum or art gallery before.

Now that the outdoor exhibit is up, the organization will host a series of local community activities surrounding it every six weeks, Pierson said. Last week, they had one of the artists lead an art workshop with local children.

Davenport and Kirmani-Frye are excited about the idea that women of color are artistically represented on a public street with heavy foot traffic, they said.

"We're living in a very media-based society, and we don't often see many portraits of women of color in general," Davenport said. "I would love to see a lot more art geared towards us. It just shows that we matter."

Kirmani-Frye chimed in. "Speaking now as a woman of color, it's one thing to see a representation of yourself in your home, but another thing entirely to see a representation of yourself in media or in your community."

Here are some more works at the exhibit:

For other artists featured in the exhibit and more information about them, visit ArtBridge's site.

You can see the outdoor art installation in person on Belmont Avenue between Mother Gaston Blvd. and Rockaway Avenue.

Lead photo via ArtBridge