GALLERY OF THE STREETS is an evolving network of artists, activists, organizers, scholars, cultural workers, and community supporters formed around ideas of “engaging everyday spaces as sites of resistance.” We aim to examine the radical possibilities within what Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods call, “black geographies and the politics of place.”
Our signature program, Visual Opera, fuses public art and social change organizing to generate new ideas, reconfigure the familiar, and resist the oppression of existing conditions. Using Black Feminist Theory as a point of departure, our approach includes convenings, education, and experiential engagement. We use critical dialogue, group and individual accountability, improvisation, and evaluation to create temporary site-specific installations in everyday public and private locations.
Gallery of the Streets exists at the intersections of art, education, geography, history, activism, and movement-building. Our social practice installations and performances are rooted in community collaboration and democratic processes. Communities who are directly impacted by policies and practices of structural oppression work together to conceptualize and produce visual opera projects that interweave painting, sculpture, found objects, sound, movement, ritual and narrative.