A community-engaged public art & dialogue project – creating unique interventions to spur nuanced conversations on gentrification and lived experience of neighborhood
Like many other communities in New York City, urban development pressure in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights has intensified in the last two decades, resulting in major changes to the neighborhood’s built environment and the displacement of long-term residents.
Intersection | Prospect Heights presented a series of pop-up exhibitions, public conversations, participatory walks, and “guidebooks” showing neighborhood places through the eyes of local residents in the early 2000s. Exposing change through individual stories, it fostered complex, humane, conversations on development, displacement, and sustainability in this critical moment for the city.
The Intersection guidebooks are “little jewels that meld map and memoir.”
Brooklyn Magazine
People are saying:
Brooklyn Magazine “Consisting of photographs, oral histories, “guidebooks” based on the six residents’ lives, and in-person tours of the places they mention, this project functions as a means for people to understand a place before, and as, it is radically transformed.”
Urban Omnibus “Intersection | Prospect Heights serves to lift the veil of anonymity surrounding conversations on gentrification by grounding them in individual articulations of the value of places that have been or could be lost.”
Emerging City This project has built a bridge to learn about someone’s experience and therefore better understand your own through shared stories and conversations… igniting a richer, more inclusive internal dialogue. This important initiative should be repeated in neighborhoods worldwide.”
Brownstoner “A new interdisciplinary project — popping up in businesses throughout Prospect Heights — explores the effects of the neighborhood’s recent dramatic changes in an effort to inform the future of Brooklyn development.”
DNAinfo “Photographer Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani wants to know what Prospect Heights means to you.”
Atlantic Yards Report “The project conveys a sense of loss, from African- and Caribbean-American residents especially, as Prospect Heights transitioned to a whiter, more affluent neighborhood.”
Intersection pop-up exhibition & guide books at Met Food Supermarket in Prospect Heights