The culmination of my Fellowship at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which brings together creative citizens from across the Bay Area – artists and everyday people alike – to engage in a yearlong process of inquiry, dialogue, and project generation.
Our Fellowship cohort addressed the question "What does equity look like?” At some point during the year, I began to think about equity as the ability to access to resources to create the neighborhood that you want to see. I thought that maybe equity looked like the ability to make a public bench, that it looked like access to wood and drills and hammers. Then I thought that maybe it was even simpler, and that equity looked like the ability to make the thing that makes the bench, that it looked like actually making a hammer or actually making the thing that makes the thing. That if anyone could easily make a hammer then anyone could make themselves whatever they wanted for their neighborhood.
This resulted in The Thing That Makes The Thing where participants were invited to make their own unique wooden hammer for future personal use as a tool to physically create the neighborhood and city they want to live in. This was a participatory installation that occurred at the YBCA Public Square.
