Forest Hills Artist Molds Everyday Objects Into Works Of Healing

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — The Forest Hills-based artist Yvonne Shortt has found a unique way of coping with the microaggressions she faces as a Black woman.

The moment she was with her two children, who are lighter-skinned, and someone approached her and asked if she was a babysitter. The time a stranger assumed she worked as a housekeeper. When she was out walking her dog and got asked if she was a dog walker.

The spots where those conversations took place have become the literal groundwork for a new public art piece installed this month in Elmhurst: a life-size sculpture of an afro pick.

Shortt took soil from the locations of the microagressions she's experienced, turned the soil into clay and turned the clay into art.

"I use that to make a negative space into a more positive narrative, and as a source of healing," Shortt told Patch.

Together with her team at the Rego Park-based arts nonprofit RPGA Studio, Shortt is using the clay for a set of sculptures she calls the African American Marbleization series, subtitled, "an act of disobedience," of which the newly-installed afro pick sculpture is one.

Shortt molds the clay she's harvested into the shape of everyday objects associated with people of color, then she uses marble dust to cast them.

The marble dust is a nod to the marble used in many of the sculptures that grace museums across the world, a material valued by an art community that, historically, "has left people of color very much out of the question," Shortt said.

Shortt's goal is to create public art that celebrates people of color and creates room for conversations about the collective trauma they've experienced.

"The idea is to present imagery that’s positive and that young girls of color — young people of color — can see and identify with in a positive way in a public realm," she said. "We’re feeling more empowered to take control of our destiny.”

The afro pick sculpture is crowned by the head of a girl with bantu knots and, on the side, is chiseled away — a physical manifestation of that trauma.

In the sculpture's home in the Elmhurst Sculpture Garden by Queens Center Mall, it is encircled by chairs, creating a place to sit with those thoughts.

"Sharing collective trauma and ways of turning that into positives, so we’re not the victim, we’re coming up with our own solutions, is really important," Shortt said.