The Center of Culture

Brooklyn is the center of culture. At least in relationship with Manhattan, a borough structured around financial power, order, and institutional influence. My experiences working across New York City have further shaped this perspective. As a teacher in outreach programs throughout Brooklyn’s neighborhoods, I have engaged with the borough’s diverse communities, witnessing firsthand its spirit of reinvention and resistance. At the same time, I have designed and remodeled apartments for wealthy communities throughout Manhattan which has provided me insight into the mechanisms of exclusivity and capital that define the city’s power structures. These dual perspectives have grounded my understanding of the larger dynamics at play—how Brooklyn exists in a constant negotiation with the financial and political forces emanating from across the river.

The contrast between Manhattan’s rigid structures of capital and the fluid, adaptive nature of Brooklyn’s creative and communal spaces mirrors my own artistic interrogation of language, meaning, and disruption. Brooklyn thrives on flux. Its layered visual language—graffiti-covered walls, independent storefronts, and spontaneous street interactions—offers a counterpoint to Manhattan’s polished, commercialized narratives of power. My work engages with this tension, exposing how systems of authority, communication, and knowledge shape the everyday, and how moments of the surreal and absurd can disrupt those structures.

By reimagining the mundane and playing with the instability of language, my practice reflects Brooklyn’s evolving identity—caught between its working-class roots, artistic experimentation, and the encroaching forces of gentrification and commodification. Much like the borough itself, my work seeks to challenge the hierarchies imposed by capital, offering new ways of seeing and engaging with the structures that define urban life.