Communal Resolutions

1998 | Newark, NJ

PROJECT PARTNERS:

Collective intention-setting into a new year in the Newark community

Communal Resolutions came from Cook’s idea to have a more interactive relationship with viewers of his public works. After being contacted by the Newark First Night event organizers to do a project to commemorate New Year’s Eve, he met with oral historian and former Newark Superintendent of Schools Alma Flag and came up with an interview sheet. The sheet included questions for local interviewees about the history, inhabitants, and landmarks of their community, and asked interviewees their resolutions for their community and their roles in making those resolutions happen in the coming year.

In collaboration with Newark’s Do Something, a local affiliate of a nationwide youth volunteer program, students were sent with the interview sheets to the five wards of Newark to interview and learn about persons of their choice. The students took Polaroid photos of each of the people they interviewed.

After reviewing the many completed interview sheets and photographs, Cook selected two participants from each of the five wards of Newark, met with each of them himself, and took additional photographs of them. From those images, he painted ten portraits framed like Polaroids, approximately 8-by-8 feet each. Each image was surrounded by quotes from the painted personas, telling about their thoughts, hopes, concerns, or intentions for the New Year for their community.

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

Communal Resolutions

During the First Night activities on New Year’s Eve, volunteers with Polaroids took pictures of passers-by. Those people were then given clear sheets of polyester film to write their own thoughts, hopes, concerns, and intentions for the New Year, onto which the Polaroids were affixed, and the entire piece mounted anywhere on the paintings of the people from the five wards.

After First Night, the paintings were disassembled and mounted in various locations within the five wards of the participants.

BRETT COOK

Communal Resolutions

1998 | Newark, NJ

PROJECT PARTNERS:

MoMA PS1

Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Arts (MoCADA)

apexart