Sunset Park Gazette: Overcoming Overcrowded Schools

The Sunset Park Gazette is a collaborative research and design project between graduate students at the MS Design and Urban Ecologies program at Parsons School of Design and community organizations in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The focus is on issues of overcrowded schools in the neighborhood.

We took a broad research approach to identify other connections, histories, and storylines through primary and secondary research, participatory mapping, and an arts intervention with Dutch artist, Jeanne van Heeswijk called a public faculty. The second component of the gazette is a series of design proposals to support existing activism around the issue.

The Gazette was recently included in an exhibition Places in Relation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which can be read about here.

For this project, I specifically worked on the content, layout, and graphics for the housing research pages and the design proposal for a community land bank. I also worked as a text and design editor, coordinating between the different research and design groups, the translators, community partners, and finalizing design for print. A digital version of the full gazette is available online here.

Collaborators: Andrew Strong, Angelica Jackson, Burak Sancakdar, Caroline Macfarlane, Dongyao Li, Eduarda Aun, Emily Sloss, Jason Azar, Lyric Kelkar, Maha Aslam, Sarath Ramanan, Selamawit Yemeru, Zara Farooq, Gabriela Rendón

+ Featured in "Places In Relation" Exhibition at George Pompidou Centre. Paris, January 2018. 

+ Featured in "Art As Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art" book by Gregory Sholette and Chloë Bass.