The 36th Ave Project

When I wrote my project proposal for the SPCUNY fellowship in Spring of 2025, I had an ambitious idea to create both a narrative and documentary short that profiled the experiences and oral histories of immigrants in my Queens neighborhood. By Fall of 2025, ICE trucks roamed our streets in droves and community members such as Fei Zheng and his 6-year-old son Yuanxin, a first grader in an Astoria public school, were detained and violently separated after showing up for a routine check-in. My projects and academics ground to a halt. I struggled with the weight of helplessness: what is the point of art in a time like this?

In the Winter of 2026, our instructor Nicolás Dumit Estévez took us around the Bronx, where community stemmed from artists and activists with deep neighborhood roots. I was touched by one of our homework assignments, which was simply: “Talk to a neighbor.” I found my first spark of inspiration through meeting Bridget, an Irish elder in Astoria who had a passion for taking care of stray cats in the neighborhood. Bridget also considered it her work to pick up the trash around her block, because this was our home after all. She motivated me to do the same, starting with a run-down garden plot outside my apartment that was a consistent dumping ground. I worked with my downstairs neighbor to clean up the plot and plant flowers, which led to a number of new neighbors to stop by and make conversations. Those simple conversations soon gave way to deeper conversations about the changing demographics of the neighborhood, New York’s history of immigration, the quiet legacies of neighbors who had long preceded my four years in Astoria. I met another elder who took care of another block of stray cats; she would keep me updated on the status of her housing as she faced eviction (ultimately, she got to stay). Soon after, I met two more neighbors who were trying to put a fallen bird nest back into a tree. I started a group chat with them, where we now share updates of the mother bird and her babies.

It wasn’t until recently that I began seeing these interactions with my neighbors as part of my social art practice. I recognized how often I collect found materials directly from the neighborhood and into my art. Recently, I took home two bags of over 100 National Geographic magazines that were about to be discarded and hosted a collage workshop with neighborhood friends. My art and my neighborhood are very intertwined, and that’s where I started with my original SPCUNY project focused on Queens as a borough. After a year and learning from so many site visits in the Bronx, I have scaled down my project to focus on 36th Avenue, my immediate neighborhood street, to document the art of being a neighbor. Eventually, I want to get back to my original project idea and create a space for healing, connection, and grief to the neighbors who were impacted by traumatic events of the past year. I have seen how repeated neighborly interactions weave a stronger social fabric of community care. And it can start small, silly, incidental—it just takes talking to one neighbor.