Finding Here

Finding Here… expresses and explores themes that are centered around the need and desire to be a part of community, and in community and to find one’s home, one’s here. As a transplant, I sometimes grapple internally with how to do this in earnest. To acknowledge the spaces that I occupy, privileges I have and to hold space for the peoples and communities who are living and breathing here right now.

As a Black person building community throughout Brooklyn, while not actually being from Brooklyn. There is a tension there that I grapple with often—to be both a part of the culture and yet also at the periphery of it. Home can be both a physical or spiritual place. As a transplant, home means creating new bonds, forming a village, tribe, or community. It also means to carry with you all of the lived experiences that will serve you while on your path to finding your Home. Finding your here. Home(Here) means to be loved and find acceptance. As any transplant, in any new place this is already difficult to do, and it becomes even more arduous a task as a Black, Brown, woman, man, straight or queer person looking to belong in a space—foreign, not quite home(Here), yet. 

The work on display is a series of street portraits that shoutouts the moments in the lives of everyday Black folk that are both known and unknown to me, and the communities that I became a part of. These images are primarily set in the Bedstuy & Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, and span the most recent years of my living within the borough, to my landing in 2015. It has been my time in Brooklyn that has stretched, challenged and shown me who I am. It is here that I've found my home. These selected images represent the documentation and preservations of that newfound home. Here, how I see it.

Not Brooklyn I was born but Brooklyn I was formed. - Jean Grea