Transforming America Through Art:
A Vision for Brooklyn’s Community
Brooklyn Navy Yard, Building 92
Brooklyn, New York 2024
Courtesy Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. Image by JC Cancedda
In 2024, we had the honor of presenting Transforming America Through Art: A Vision for Brooklyn’s Community at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Building 92—an exhibition that deepened our long-standing connection to Brooklyn through community-centered art.
The Navy Yard had issued a call for its first-ever outdoor sculpture installation, open only to artists living in specific Brooklyn ZIP codes. Steven qualified, and given our extensive history in the borough through Scrollathon and other projects, we saw this as a chance to reconnect and reimagine what community-based public art could be.
At the time, we were prototyping ideas for a major commission at The Kennedy Center—an initiative spanning all 50 states, five U.S. territories, and Washington, D.C. The Brooklyn Navy Yard project became a testing ground for those ideas, rooted in a place we already knew and loved.
Our proposal focused on a series of monumental wooden pillars for the Navy Yard’s public forecourt. One side of each pillar featured photographic reproductions of collaborative scroll-based artworks. The other side featured portraits of the community members who helped create them. These pillars stood alongside others that displayed a large-scale word cloud built from community responses to the question: "What one word describes your hopes for the future of America?" These text panels captured a collective voice, powerful in its simplicity. Other pillars—what we have come to call Pillars of the Community—included photographic portraits of local residents, each paired with a QR code linking to a video of the participant sharing their story in their own words, preserving a slice of contemporary Brooklyn for future generations.
When the Navy Yard team visited our Chelsea studio, they invited us to expand the project with an indoor exhibition in Building 92. We curated a selection of maquettes, drawings, prints, scrolls, and sculptural prototypes—some from our early Scrollathon workshops and others from more recent community collaborations. Displayed together, these works traced a clear line from where our practice began to where it's headed next. We also created a major installation of our more personal artworks from the past two decades—a chance to share the quieter, more introspective parts of our practice alongside the collaborative ones.
During the exhibition, we introduced a new concept under the Scrollathon umbrella of programs—Time Capsule. For years, people have asked us for something they could bring back to their own classrooms and community groups—something that could carry the spirit of Scrollathon even when we couldn't be there in person. Time Capsule is our answer: a self-guided creative toolkit that integrates independent artmaking, collaborative group art, and a lasting artwork that remains with the community. It’s a simple, flexible way to spark creativity, connection, and storytelling anywhere. It wasn’t a full Scrollathon, but it carried the same spirit of participation and shared meaning.
Outdoors, we learned invaluable lessons about scale, materiality, and durability. Indoors, we reflected on the evolution of our work over two decades. Together, the two halves of the exhibition formed a bridge—linking the community-based roots of our practice to the ambitious, national vision ahead at The Kennedy Center and beyond.
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