What Grows? (Prelude to After the Fire)

What Grows? (Prelude to After the Fire). . , Nani Chacon , (Dinè and Chicana, b. 1980) , Tatyana Fazlalizadeh , (Persian and Black American, b. 1985) , Layqa Nuna Yawar , (Runakuna, Ecuadorian, North American, b. 1984), What Grows? (Prelude to After the Fire) 2022 , Acrylic paint on concrete, Courtesy the artists, What Grows? is the first piece of a long-term participatory mural project, titled After the Fire, initiated in 2020 by MoMA PS1 with artists Nanibah Cacon, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and Layqa Nuna Yawar. It emerges from collaboration with three local Queens community groups: Transform America, Make the Road, and members of the Shinnecock, Unkechaug, and Matinecock Nations. The artists led participants in workshops, discussing elements of society that they would leave behind in service of imagining a more just world, asking: What does freedom and well-being look like? How do we nurture safety for everyone? How are Black, Brown, and Indigenous community members already engaged in building safer communities? These conversations directly informed this mural, which imagines rebirth following rupture, and will inform all other aspects of the project. Its depiction of a Shinnecock Nation woman emerging from flames suggests the ways in which the pandemic laid bare existing racial, environmental, and economic disparities across Queens and the greater United States. From the cast shadow grows a morning glory, a flowering vine that is often considered a weed, and blooms in the presence of water., After the Fire is presented as part of PS1 COURTYARD: an experiment in creative ecologies.