Mean. Equity.
All Day, Ernest Verrett & Anjali Deshmukh/Street Works/MJN
In 2024, “Rising. Curtains.” invited passersby to join in the locally loved craft of community beading, an ancient, global tradition to reflect on the story of climate change and collectively design the unwritten future.
The “front” of the curtain tells the story of time as we know it, in the form of a glittering curtain made of over 12,000 glass and stone beads mapping global surface temperatures in comparison to the average from 1890-2000. Interspersed are camouflaged words, sequenced in vertical and horizontal poems. No word is repeated. (Ask us if you want to know what the poems were!) The “back” shows us time in reverse — or maybe our future.
In 2025, we’re re-using and expanding on the curtain to weave in the story of wealth inequality over the same time period, with the amazing help of Stella Muti from the World Inequality Database.
We’ve organized community beading in Queens since 2023. Across age, people have told us it’s calming, brings focus, and sparks creativity and community connection.
As a part of rituals of continuity, community beading is also simple form of fashion that is affordable and often starts a flow gift giving, within families and among strangers.
Our goal overtime is to reuse the same beads to create different patterns, in a growing bead library that helps us use the same materials over and over to make different things.
