Co-Curator with Matthew Bremer

CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC presents three visions of making, feeling, and being at home in the city, foregrounding stories of three communities central to urban life in New York City who have continuously grappled with the marginalization of their ways of life. This year's three residents, Kholisile Dhliwayo, A L. Hu, and Karla Andrea Pérez, selected from over 50 applicants, bring their unique insights based on research and co-creation with partners from their own communities and those they engage.

Home is a place we associate with familiarity, safety, and love; it's a place of origin, and a return destination. Home is where we spend over 50% of our waking time, inscribing both our most intimate and public notions of self. And home in New York City, always fraught with unique spatial and economic challenges, has become even more challenging since the global pandemic.

The concept of home is deeply intersectional, traversing everything from the ways in which we organize gender roles, race relations, and other embodied forms of social and political interaction, to the ways in which we divide territories according to class, status, and nationality. Whether or not embodied in a contained physical space, home often evokes a sense of and desire for belonging across communities and cultures. To "feel at home" is to share claims to a place as a terrain of memory and as a site to ensure the continuation of collective life. In New York City, the presence of multiple diasporas and the simultaneous erasure of indigenous communities shapes and haunts efforts for all. Home is deeply ambivalent — at once a refuge and an oasis of freedom, it may also be a zone of containment and restriction.

In this iteration of CFA Lab, we focused on home in New York City, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the full and permanent effects of which we are still just beginning to measure. Lockdowns brought about the phrase "work from home," undercutting the norm that home should be a separate space away from waged labor. The collapse of external and internal, public and private, has reiterated the connections between home, self, well-being, commerce and work for the city as a whole. This sense of home as the porous threshold between public and private, personal and political, has outsized ramifications on marginalized communities.

What does it mean to experience home for the communities at the forefront of this exhibition? How does one create spaces in which to live and thrive even as one's ways of life, habits, customs, and traditions are constantly called out for being out of place, deviant, and threatening? CFA Lab: Seeking Refuge and Making Home in NYC presents ways in which groups and communities have created rich experiences and dreamworlds that go beyond shelter in a city that is both welcoming and hostile. In the exhibited work conceived and presented by the three residents of the CFA Lab, we encounter the extension of the idea of "being at home" into practices of claiming public space, creating community, and safeguarding the right to shelter and refuge.