Eliza Mayberry
gentrification can no longer silence me
Class of: 2026
Major: Photography BFA
Medium: Public art/ graffiti/ wheatpaste / multimedia
Faculty: Aviva Maya Shulem
Prompt: Over the past months, we were given a NYC neighborhood, and in turn we must identify the issues and problems in the community and create a design to solve those problems. Bridge 4 gathers all your research and brings it together, to inform your response to the potentials and challenges at the neighborhood you dealt with. Over the entire semester you have learned skills and methods to explore and make sense of the environment around you and to respond to it as designers in an informed, thoughtful way. Your task now is to put together your findings into a final research report and present the response as a 3D model.
In this project, I discovered that in Harlem, the main issue the community was facing is gentrification. It was not only raising prices but also dismantling cultural institutions and the community as a whole. I chose to do a public art installation because gentrification can not be solved through design, we can only comfort the problem or call attention to it. My posters would be wheat-pasted along high-class storefronts in Harlem that used to house cultural institutions. My posters are in 3 categories, historical, data, quotes from locals, and finally, revolutionary. They are not for Harlem natives but for the people hurting them and taking away their lives. They are high contrast and evoke not only an educational perspective but an emotional perspective. Finally, I created a small 3D model to show how these posters would look on the street and where they would be placed.