The Red Line Archive

historyhousingphotographyredlining
When: 2015+
With: Walis Johnson (Artist, Producer) and Aimie VonBokel (Historian, Collaborator)
Role: Collaborated with artist Walis Johnson on her projects The Red Line Archive and the Red Line Labyrinth as a photographer and website producer.
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photographywordpress

The Red Line Archive is a mobile public art project that engages New York City residents in a conversation about race and the history of the 1938 Red Line Map that helped create the segregated urban landscapes of the city. This “cabinet of curiosities” is wheeled along city streets, inviting people to freely associate about personal artifacts and documents from the artist’s family history in gentrifying Brooklyn and ephemera collected during four artist walks in and along the periphery of redlined neighbourhoods.

Red Line Labyrinth is a site-specific participatory art installation enacted in neighborhoods at the epicenter of aggressive gentrification and displacement. Labyrinths have been used throughout human history as a means to inspire personal and community reflection and renewal. The artist installed the labyrinth at Weeksville Heritage Center on October 18, 2017. Weeksville is the site of one of the first free Black communities in Brooklyn. Participants walked the Labyrinth alone or in pairs to activate reflection on the practice of redlining and it’s effects on their life and family in the past and present. Each person enacted the experience of healing and pilgrimage as they walked.

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