PROJECTS
Staying Power
Creator & Lead Artist
2019 - 2023
Amplifying a people’s history of public housing through print and digital publishing
For decades, media coverage and political discourse have framed public housing primarily through crisis: deteriorating buildings, deferred maintenance, and government failure. While these conditions are real and consequential, such narratives often obscure the deliberate policies of disinvestment that produced them. They also erase the histories, relationships, and forms of collective care that have sustained public housing communities for generations. In doing so, they help legitimize ongoing efforts to privatize, downsize, and dismantle public housing nationwide.
KEY CHALLENGE
How might we challenge dominant narratives of public housing as a failed intervention and instead position it as a vital public good worth preserving, investing in, and learning from?
How might residents be recognized not simply as subjects of policy debates, but as historians, cultural producers, and experts on the communities they have built?
THE SOLUTION
Over several years, I collaborated with NYCHA residents across generations to collect oral histories, photographs, neighborhood memories, and reflections on everyday life in public housing. Together, we produced a body of work that was translated into a range of public-facing formats, including limited-edition posters, zines, booklets, community activations, and an interactive digital archive at stayingpower.zone.
Rather than treating public housing solely as a site of crisis, Staying Power documents it as a site of culture, political struggle, kinship, and belonging. The project surfaces the knowledge embedded within public housing communities while preserving stories that are too often excluded from official histories. In doing so, it offers a resident-led account of public housing’s past, present, and future—one that challenges dominant narratives of decline and expands public understanding of what public housing makes possible.