FORWARD: Issue #8: Civic Health
Public Art Now
Leading Voices Sharing Public Art of the Moment
For most of my life, when I heard the term civic engagement I often thought of voting for a political candidate that I barely knew anything about. I thought about my local government and about attending town halls and meetings in a City Hall room with harsh fluorescent lighting. However, while I was in graduate school for urban planning at the University of New Orleans, I began to expand my understanding of civic engagement.
I began to understand that civic engagement—much like public art—invites the exchange of ideas, empowers people to take an active role in their communities, and creates social connections. In graduate school, I looked back on my 10 years of being an artist-organizer and DJ in Washington, DC, and understood that I had often led an unrecognized form of civic engagement by bringing people together and creating spaces with communities instead of a top-down approach of creating for communities. Having recently moved back to my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I've begun to look at place-based creativity and art through that same lens.
My connection to each artist is fueled by great respect for how they honor each site’s context. Each of the artworks is uniquely situated in a space—whether physical or virtual—that is in conversation with the neighborhood’s and the city’s history. The lens of creating with community is at the core of each of the following public artworks.
—Ebony Dumas
Image: Curry Hackett’s The Gilded Block builds a virtual public artwork of inflatable porches and stoops.
In this FORWARD conversation, Public Art Now guest curator Ebony Dumas (Director of Planning + Engagement at Forecast Public Art) sits down with artists Ashley Teamer and Monique Verdin to discuss their respective artworks, Tambourine Cypress and Nanih Bvlbancha, and the neighborhood, historical, and urban design context, both in Public Art Now.
Join us to explore how these public artists consider context in their work and create spaces alongside community.
Register to attend. This event will be held via Zoom on September 25, 2025, at 11:30 am CT.
Please consider a donation to help make events like this possible.
01: Nanih Bvlbancha
Photo by Melissa Cardona.
The Stewards of Nanih Bvlbancha, a group of Louisiana Indigenous artists and creative practitioners, including Ida Aronson, Dr. Tammy Greer, Jenna Mae, Ozone 504, and Monique Verdin
New Orleans, Louisiana
2024
This artwork was built by the Stewards of Nanih Bvlbancha with support from community members between January and March 2024. According to the project website, the creators and participants “haul[ed] soil, clay, oyster shells, bagasse, and driftwood to the site, shoveling and stomping to compress the earthen materials into a mound shape. Intertribal community members embedded prayers, gifts, offerings, dances, and even a Houma language dictionary into its layers.”
In January 2024, I remember being stuck inside during the cold DC winter, with COVID-19 spikes keeping many local community and art spaces inaccessible. I was captivated by the Nanih Bvlbancha Instagram page that showcased people gathering outside to help build this earthen mound as part of Prospect New Orleans’ Artists of Public Memory initiative. This impressive structure on New Orleans’ Lafitte Greenway has also become a public gathering space for educational and community-building events.
Photo by Ebony Dumas.
Photo by Ebony Dumas.
Photo by Alex Marks.
Photos by Melissa Cardona.
02: Tambourine Cypress
Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
Ashley Teamer
New Orleans, Louisiana
2024
About 1,500 feet northwest along the Lafitte Greenway from Nanih Bvlbancha, you’ll find this music-making tree sculpture that also serves as a community gathering space. Arts New Orleans, which commissioned the artwork with Prospect New Orleans, explains how tambourines are important instruments in community gatherings: “The tambourine’s shimmering sounds connect us to Black Masking Indian traditions, gospel rhythms, jazz accents, and a full spectrum of music brought to life through this interactive sculpture.”
Located in the Tremé, which is considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the U.S., Tambourine Cypress is a landmark that further cements the longstanding culture into a neighborhood where demographics continue to shift rapidly. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2025, Teamer and Aaron Washington of Guardians of the Flame Maroon Society, a New Orleans Black Masking Indian tribe and cultural preservation group, led a tambourine chorus at the sculpture.
Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in 2025, Guardians of the Flame Maroon Society—a New Orleans Black Masking Indian tribe and cultural preservation group—led a tambourine chorus. Photo by Ebony Dumas.
Two phrases written in Louisiana Creole are inscribed within the sculpture's base: Di-mò ki vou linmé, é m’a di vou ki vou yê ("Tell me whom you love, and I’ll tell you who you are"), and Dolo toujou kouri larivyè ("Water always runs to the river"). Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
Photo by Dru Bui, courtesy Arts New Orleans.
The Children’s choir New Voices performs on Monday, January 20, 2025. For the event "Calling All Tambourines," Prospect.6 artist Ashley Teamer invited New Orleans community members to join in celebrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The invitation urged participants to bring their tambourines and celebrate "the legacies of our rich, musical histories and heritages by convening for a collective tambourine chorus at sunset."
Video courtesy Ashley Teamer.
Located in the Tremé, which is considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the U.S., Tambourine Cypress is a landmark that further cements the longstanding culture into a neighborhood where demographics continue to shift rapidly.
The sculpture's plaque explains: "Tambourine Cypress honors the natural landscape, music, and people that have inhabited the land surrounding Claiborne Avenue over thousands of years. This sculpture marks the site as a space for contemplation and celebration. It is the artist's hope that one day the Claiborne Avenue Bridge will be removed and the descendants of the displaced will return. The glittering sounds of the tambourine branches are meant to connect us with the sounds of the Black Masking Indians, the rhythms of gospel music, the accents of Jazz, and the entire range of music that relies on the tambourine for an auditory twinkle. The notes played by the wind chimes are inspired by Hommage à Haute Savoie, a composition by New Orleans flautist, scholar, and composer D. Antoinette Handy." Photo by Ebony Dumas.
03: Queen Rose Art House
Photos by Brittany Bendabout, courtesy Queen Rose Art House and Tulsa Artist Fellowship.
Kalup Linzy
Tulsa, Oklahoma
2021
Kalup Linzy moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and ended up planting roots there by purchasing a home in 2021. He designed the home’s mural to include scenes and markers from his video work and early works on paper. However, the painted mural is only a snippet of the artwork engaging the public. The front yard, the porch, and parts of the inside all serve as gathering space, performance space, exhibition space, and a rotating artist-in-residence program. This mural and art space, a few blocks from my new home, has become a catalyst for connecting local artists and creatives to national and international art communities.
04: The Gilded Block
Video and stills courtesy Curry Hackett.
Curry Hackett of Wayside Studio
Virtual
2023
The front porch or stoop is one of the most recognizable components of traditional American architecture. Architect, designer, and professor Germane Barnes explored the relationship between race and architecture in Sacred Stoops: Typological Studies of Black Congregational Spaces. In it, he posits that Black communities often used porches/stoops as an epicenter of civic life when racism and segregation made other “third spaces” such as public parks, municipal buildings, or entertainment venues unsafe and inaccessible.
Through artificial intelligence programs such as Midjourney and Sora, Curry Hackett creates Afrofuturist landscapes that reenvision public spaces to center Black people, Black culture, and Black aesthetics. While public art typically exists in the tangible public realm, Hackett’s The Gilded Block builds a virtual public artwork of inflatable porches and stoops for row houses where civic life can continue to grow in a dense and urban future.
Curry Hackett creates Afrofuturist landscapes that reenvision public spaces to center Black people, Black culture, and Black aesthetics.
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Another series by the artist that centers Blackness uses AI to visualize building facades with quilted texture. Quilted images courtesy Curry Hackett.
Ebony Dumas
Photo by farrah skeiky photo.
Ebony Dumas is an urban and regional planner who enjoys building consensus among stakeholders for local and national projects in economic development, creative placemaking/keeping, and neighborhood planning. She is interested in creative and public spaces and their intersection with inclusive economic development. As Director of Planning + Engagement at Forecast Public Art, Ebony directs the planning and engagement portfolio, manages national teams of consultants and artists, and ensures that cross-sector projects align with Forecast's mission. Prior to joining Forecast, she led the innovative initiative for the DC Office of Planning to collect oral histories as qualitative data for a land use vision study, and used that content to produce a podcast miniseries, District Crossroads. The episodes are available on your favorite platforms … and are really good. Ebony was a board member for the Association for Community Design and a cofounding organizer for Girls Rock! DC. She was also a cohort member of the 2023 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Washington’s Leadership Institute for emerging built environment leaders and has served on multiple panels for the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town creative placemaking grant. Ebony’s introduction to urban planning and her analysis of the impact that a city’s infrastructure has on creative expression began taking shape in 2007 in DC as a DJ, nightclub worker, performance festival manager, and contemporary visual art gallery manager; all at venues that were central to citywide economic development strategies. This experience continues to inform her work today.
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FORWARD: Issue #8
Civic Health
© COPYRIGHT 2025 - FORECAST PUBLIC ART ISSN 2768-4113