GOWANUS — Groundswell, a public art nonprofit, provides paid art opportunities to students in Brooklyn. As part of its Voices Her’d program, designed for femme-identifying individuals and women, students spent the summer researching and designing a mural, culminating in a public paint day.

“Fifth Avenue committee has partnered with Groundswell for over 20 years on murals and various projects,” said Michelle de la Uz, executive director of FAC. “They did the original mural at the FAC Center for Community Development when we opened the building, and the mural needed to be updated and renewed because the building is undergoing some renovations. We wanted the mural to depict our more recent work.”

On Tuesday, Aug. 13, Groundswell hosted a public paint day at FAC’s Center for Community Development at 182 Fourth Avenue. The building is home to nonprofit organizations and community programming, and FAC has big plans for the near-future. 

“These are community facility spaces, or community spaces that the community has access to in the future,” said de la Uz. “The second floor at 182 Fourth Avenue is the future home of Fifth Avenue Committee’s adult education and literacy programs, where we serve nearly 1,000 folks a year through ESOL, adult basic education, GED bridge programming and digital literacy programming.”

Other community paint days throughout August included one at a new affordable housing development on Aug. 14, also in collaboration with FAC, and at Atlantic Terminal Mall on Aug. 15 with Brooklyn Org. The locations of these murals, in Gowanus and Downtown Brooklyn respectively, are areas facing rapid gentrification; the mural programs are an opportunity for students and artists to connect residents with the neighborhood’s history. 

The public paint days are part of Groundswell’s Summer Leadership Institute, an eight-week program where students are paid to work with professional muralists, research a neighborhood and then design and paint a mural dedicated to the community. 

“It’s a whole process we go through. They learn how to do community conversations, where they get to go out and talk to the community about what they might want to see in the mural, about history,” said Claudine DeSola, communications specialist at Groundswell. “These young students, along with two of our teaching artists, come together and create the design.”

The students base each mural on interviews and guidance from local leaders; the mural at FAC’s Center for Community Development featured scenes from Gowanus history such as protests, tugboats, marshland and the canal, with some scenes directly inspired by photos or stories from community members. 

“This mural is about lifting up local leaders, the evolution of Gowanus and how the more recent change in the involvement of local grassroots leaders is helping to not only clean up the canal but make the neighborhood more inclusive in terms of the area-wide rezoning that was approved a few years ago,” said de la Uz. “Our Gowanus neighborhood Coalition for Justice had some very big wins: $200 million for NYCHA improvements at Gowanus and Wyckoff houses and funding for other community programs. We wanted to represent the grassroots leadership and movement to improve the community over time.”

Artists and students with a vision for the community

For the teaching artists, working at Groundswell is a way to pave a better future for local students through public art, and for the students it’s an opportunity to explore their creative side and learn other valuable skills along the way. Each mural allows the art groups to invest in neighborhoods and learn about local leaders, activists, policies and history.

Kristy McCarthy is the lead teaching artist who lives in Harlem and specializes in public art. McCarthy and Assistant Teaching Artist Yolande Delius led the Summer Leadership Institute students in designing and painting the Voices Her’d mural. 

“My job is to guide the youth through the research, design and fabrication of a community engaged mural. We talked about what symbols and metaphors we would use for the mural, and then we created the composition through a democratic, participatory process,” said McCarthy. “The first project I did was the Voices Her’d project. This is my third year leading Voices Her’d, and I was really drawn to it because I love working with femme people and women-identifying youth and using our voices and providing a platform for young women to amplify their voices and talk about social issues and gender issues.”

In middle school, Delius unlocked an interest in public art when she realized she could use it to create space for fellow immigrants in academic spaces where they are often discounted. After her first mural, she continued pursuing a passion for public art as a way to support neglected communities. 

“I understood that students from immigrant backgrounds don’t always know all the options presented to them for a quality education. I saw how people want to come together for art. People want pretty things,” said Delius. “I come from a quite divested community, and we didn’t have public parks and benches. We had ‘no loitering’ signs, but when I went to Downtown Orlando, there were murals, parks, and people were allowed to sit, and no one got in trouble for it. I didn’t know there was a career path for me, necessarily, but I knew I wanted to keep doing this thing where I bring the community together through artwork.”

A student from East Flatbush, Ashanti Benons joined Groundswell in high school. The program helped her develop artistic skills while learning about different communities throughout the borough. Benons has worked on murals in Bushwick, Cypress Hills and Gowanus.

“I first heard about Groundswell from my high school art teacher when I was in 11th grade. I heard about their different programs, like printmaking, and they also had the mural program you could do over the summer,” said Benons. “My first time being involved with a mural was two years ago. I’ve always loved art, and I thought that making a mural is such an amazing opportunity to improve my skills and do something that can have an impact on the community. It’s definitely taught me a lot about different neighborhoods in New York City.” 

Benons described taking a walking tour of Gowanus and the canal, and said guidance from community members and representatives from FAC led to the decision to include certain scenes in the mural. It was important for the mural to represent Gowanus’s historical resilience despite rapid urbanization, industrialization and gentrification.

“We painted a swamp scene. There also are these abstract red lines that we did, because Fifth Avenue Committee has a redlining exhibit that we visited, and we wanted to include that in the mural,” said Benons. “There is a protest scene based on a photo that one of the members of Fifth Avenue gave us; also the tugboat.”

For McCarthy, the key to inclusivity and empowerment is creating representation both in the mural as well as in the process of making the mural. Ensuring that women and marginalized groups are represented in art, McCarthy emphasized that “research is key.”

“After we do the design, we present the design to the community, and we tweak the design and do revisions according to their feedback,” said McCarthy. “This is the other element, the paint day. Everybody in the community is invited to come and put hands on the wall and paint with us. This is a great time for anybody who wasn’t able to make it to the design, or maybe they didn’t want to be a part of the design, but they really wanted to be a part of the fabrication. That way, after the mural is installed, hopefully everybody will have a part of the mural they can look at and say, either ‘I helped think of this,’ ‘I conceptualized that,’ or ‘I painted that myself.’” 

Brandon Bendter, a former student at Brooklyn High School of the Arts who participated in Groundswell’s programs eight years ago, now works for Groundswell as the studio programs and mural operations coordinator. He installs the murals, orders and delivers materials, maintains facilities and engages with students. 

“Groundswell provided me with a space that I didn’t have, and it’s necessary to preserve that space and to improve upon it,” said Bendter. “I want to give back to the community that gave so much to me. Groundswell is an open and safe space where folks can come together to break bread, make art and talk about how we can make a change in our communities.”

Nol Ramos is a student artist who has participated in Groundswell programs for three years.

“Groundswell was such a big opening to me — this is probably going to be the best job I’ll have in my whole life,” said Ramos. “I learned how to communicate with others. I did not have very good communication skills at first, and after working with Groundswell for three years, it’s very easy to talk to others, ask for help, communicate and express my ideas.”

A history of Groundswell and its partners

Groundswell started in 1996 by a group of Brooklyn artists, educators and activists. Based in Gowanus, Groundswell has over 600 unique murals throughout New York. The organization partners with local activists, nonprofits and educational institutions to provide paid art opportunities to local students and informed, educational art to local communities. 

“Coming to Groundswell and being able to see students grow through what we can offer as a school outside of the school is really powerful, because very often young people can feel trapped and don’t have any way to express themselves,” said Delius. 

The events on Aug. 13 and 14 were in collaboration with Fifth Avenue Committee, whose mission is to advance social and economic justice in South Brooklyn. It develops and manages affordable housing, creates employment and education opportunities, and organizes residents and workers to combat displacement caused by gentrification. 

On Thursday, Aug. 15, Groundswell collaborated with Brooklyn Org, originally named Brooklyn Community Foundation when it was founded in 2009. It partners with Brooklyn residents to annually invest $5 million to advance racial justice, and has directed over $120 million to nonprofits through its Donor Advised Funds program.