“New York has seen a lot of different versions of myself. And what can be more home than that?”

You're not a real New Yorker until this city has seen you cry, yell, fall in love, fall on your ass, and fall asleep on the train at 2 a.m. Tatyana Fazladah takes us on a walk through Bed Stuy, Brooklyn to show us the block that has SEEN her.

Tatyana collaborated with Nanibah Chacon and Layqa Nuna Yawar on a participatory mural project, After the Fire, which comes to life on our Courtyard walls in just a few weeks!

Cecilia Vicuña sat down with Jody Graf, curator of Life Between Buildings, to talk about her Sidewalk Forests—small, site-specific performance installations she made in easily-overlooked interstitial spaces of the city. She saw these works, in which bits of thread and dashes of chalk highlight weeds bursting through the pavement, as “small altars on the streets of New York, air vents for the earth, pasture born in the gutters.”

These ephemeral actions exist today in photographs and an accompanying poem that Vicuña wrote on the back of one, which translates to, “the earth breathes through the pavement’s cracks.” Drawing on Indigenous knowledge and her ecofeminist thought, Sidewalk Forests distill an awareness of the fragility and persistence of nature in the face of human intervention.