Bed-Stuy Artist Explores Home

BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — Artist Kira Williams feels an urgency nowadays to preserve memory. And what home means to people in the Black community.

Her project, called "Home is in the Stories" explores what home means and how stories make a home for Black communities, especially those — like in Bed-Stuy — that are being formed through and by migration and change.

With support by Community Board 3 and the Bed-Stuy Strategy Lounge, the exhibit is on view at the Hancock Community Backyard Park at 324 Hancock St. until Friday evening, but will return next Saturday, Oct. 8 from 10 a.m. until dark, with an artist talk by Williams at noon.

The project, Williams said, is very personal, even though all the portraits and conversations are with strangers.

During the pandemic, her beloved "firecracker" grandmother's dementia worsened. "She is a storyteller," Williams told Patch, "she is a huge inspiration for me."

Williams reflected on if someone doesn't take the time and care to preserve her stories, what will happen when "my grandma's stories were no longer able to be told by her," she said.

In the background of the uprisings after George Floyd's murder, Williams thought too about how "there is very little in the archive that is like a full, beautiful representation of people like me," she said.

After being laid off from a job in advertising during the pandemic, Willaims decided to attend graduate school and focus on photography, a skill she developed in her high school darkroom.

"I got into it in 2020 as part of needing to slow down after being in the grind for so long," she said. And with the background of so much grief and uprisings, Williams wanted to do something for herself and make a change. "And so I turned to photography to be a part of that."

Her response was "to celebrate blackness and its fullness," she said of her project.

"It's to take time with images of black people. It's to kind of investigate ways of caring, and of experiencing blackness in a way that sparks like care and consideration."

Williams photographed strangers she met on the street and conducted long interviews with her subject about home and how they define home themselves as residents of Bed-Stuy.

"It's sort of a fraught experience of making home and finding belonging and community and so I think centering the project around what home means for black people how how Bed-Stuy contributes to that specifically," Williams told Patch.

What Willams found from many of her interviews was how many people felt that "home for them is someplace that they can see people and be seen by people that identify with their experience," she said.

Some interviews also emphasized ownership, and how responsibility engenders a feeling of belonging in a community. One person shared with Williams that "Bed-Stuy kind of became Black because people would pull their money together and purchase homes," she said.

And as if to emphasize the point of slowing down and taking care, Williams photographed her subjects on film cameras, utilizing a 35mm Nikon F2 and the medium format Pentax 67, a hulking camera weighing in at nearly six pounds before a lens is attached.

"Film is so slow and delicious," Williams said, "I'm forced to go slower... and really just consider what's in the frame."

Most deliciously, Williams said, will be the conversations that come from viewing the work, like a group chat she found herself in after some neighbors came to view her work, talking especially about the recent destruction of the Dangler House.

"There are some interesting thoughts on gentrification," Williams said, "people weren't like 'everybody needs to leave,' it was more like, 'Okay, we know this is happening, but like, how do we not get lost in it?'"

People, she said, are "wanting to have spaces for this preservation of memory and the power and agency to keep Bed-Stuy Black."

Williams will talk more about her work next Saturday at the Hancock Community Backyard Park where you can view it until nightfall.

You can also view her work online here.

But hopefully, Williams says, her project on Home will find a more permeant home in Bed-Stuy soon.