SELECTED PROJECTS
By exhibiting their work publicly, our students build bridges within their communities and to the world outside.
South Dakota: Boys & Girls Club
Since 2017, teaching artists from Five Corners Collective have hosted workshops at the Boys & Girls Club on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. The reservation is home to the Rosebud Tribe, or the Sicangu Oyate, a branch of the Lakota people. The tribe has a rich culture that emphasizes family and honors the natural world. Five Corners teaching artists provide Club youth with opportunities to use photography to tell stories about their lives.
New York: Queensbridge Houses
The Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest publicly funded housing complex, is located in Long Island City, New York City’s fastest-growing neighborhood. Since 2019, Five Corners Collective has worked with Queensbridge residents to make photographs and record oral histories emphasizing the community’s vibrancy, resilience and perservance.
Boys & Girls Club: Star Stories
In 2018, Five Corners and the Boys & Girls Club were invited to produce artwork for an astronomy festival at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. Working with Lakota elders, Club youth learned about Lakota folklore and cosmology. With help from Five Corners, they then created twelve photomurals that examined the relationships between their lives on earth, the natural world, and the cosmos. Club youth traveled to San Francisco to see their work on display and to participate in the festival.
Boys & Girls Club: COVID Stories
In 2020 and 2021 during the COVID pandemic, the Boys & Girls Club closed its doors as part of the Rosebud Tribe’s effort to safeguard the health of tribal members. Five Corners ran a series of virtual workshops during that period to enable interested youth to remain engaged with photography. As the resulting images show, the youth found solace in the natural world during a time of great hardship
Boys & Girls Club: OAYE Technology (Approaching Technology)
In 2021, Five Corners and the Boys & Girls Club were again invited to produce artwork for a festival - this one in New York City on technology and machine learning. Working with Lakota scholar, Suzanne Kite, and Five Corners teaching artists, Club youth created a visual representation of a Lakota kinship circle welcoming technology into its midst.
The kinship circle, which hangs from the ceiling and is 31-feet high and 10-feet wide, weaves together over 90 photographs of people, landscapes, cultural objects, and technology as it is found on the reservation. It was exhibited in New York City in November 2021 and will be exhibited again at the Dahl Art Center in Rapid City, South Dakota, in May 2024. Six Club youth traveled to New York City to attend the New York festival.
Queensbridge: We are Queensbridge
Between February and August 2019, Five Corners’ teaching artists, together with the Josephine Herrick Project and the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, offered free photography classes to all interested Queensbridge residents. Over 150 residents of all ages participated. In fall 2021, Five Corners worked to remount a smaller version of the 2019 exhibition. Seniors and youth from the Riis Center photographed members of the Queensbridge community and turned these portraits into banners that were hung on lampposts and fences along 41st Avenue, which runs through the center of the Queensbridge Houses. Entitled We Are Queensbridge, the show celebrated the community’s rich culture, warmth, resilience, and diversity.
Queensbridge: Photo Collective
In 2020, Five Corners convened the Queensbridge Photo Collective - a group of nine Queensbridge women over the age of 65. During the pandemic, the group met weekly by ZOOM. With support from Five Corners teaching artists, it developed a website, established an Instagram presence, and published a zine of made photographs, found photographs, text, and cyanotypes focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The zine was acquired by the New York Historical Society's History Responds project and featured on the website of the Newspaper Club as one of its most compelling publications of 2020. The Queens Theater created a movie about the Collective and its photography which was highlighted in a Daily News article.
Queensbridge: MoMA PS1 Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise
In winter 2022, the Queensbridge Photo Collective and Five Corners were invited to become artists in residence at MoMA PS1, an affiliate of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Despite being located less than half a mile apart in the same Queens neighborhood, a deep conceptual gulf existed between the nation's largest housing project and one of the nation's preeminent contemporary art museums. The Queensbridge Photo Collective and Five Corners challenged the museum to help bridge that gap by including the art of their neighbors within its walls.
As part of their residency, the Collective and Five Corners were asked to activate PS1’s Homeroom. With assistance from Five Corners , Queensbridge Photo Collective members undertook a number of photographic projects, including using their personal archives to create photographic timelines of their lives, recording stories about Queensbridge, making photographs of their homes, neighbors, and community, and creating a zine that shared their hopes and aspirations for the future. The Collective’s work was exhibited in PS1’s Homeroom during the summer and fall of 2022.
