“Rising. Curtains.” invited passersby to join in the locally loved craft of community beading, an ancient, global tradition to reflect on the story of climate change and collectively design the unwritten future. The “front” of the curtain tells the story of time as we know it, in the form of a glittering curtain made of over 12,000 glass and stone beads mapping global surface temperatures in comparison to the average from 1901-2000. Interspersed are camouflaged words, sequenced in vertical and horizontal poems. No word is repeated. (Ask us if you want to know what the poems were!) The “back” shows us time in reverse — or maybe our future.

Participants could play several games designed to use the words on the front as prompts to add to the curtain’s wooden frame and create a new curtain on the back re-making our collective future. Plus, as always community members were welcome to gift a bead bracelet to themselves, the neighborhood, or a loved one, joining our 34 Ave beading family.

Another story: a bead curtain is only perfectly vertical if the ground is, but we knew it wouldn’t be where it was located. 2024 Street Work Earth 2024 — on 34 Ave in Jackson Heights — was on the incline of a hill going upward in elevation towards the east. Unlike many other places in New York, our higher elevation makes us less susceptible to flooding, and the bead curtain showed us that.

Our Day in Photos

Beads: Complexity in media

Beads are an ancient form of art found all around the globe, from the ancient Americas, to the South Asian subcontinent, to East Asia. They are so old as an art form that we can’t be sure where they originated. Unlike newer technologies, such as oil painting, they predated modern colonialism, which has used overt, subverting, and subtle tools of wealth+power to shift narratives and erase cultures.

But it’s no surprise that beads, too, have had their meaning changed by contemporary sources of cultural power, like Taylor Swift. Should we use it or shouldn’t we? This little question is actually one inflection of the reason we started The Arisen and Street Works. In a world where it is impossible to run from the dynamics of wealth+power, we were wondering how we change the system, rather than letting its cultural power control our sense of belonging.

We don’t have a perfect answer, but community listening and ownership centering majority BIPOC neighborhoods is the path we’re walking down. That’s why we co-create as core to practice, would never sell any participatory work without a clear shared benefit structure, and now test media in simple community programs or use the medium that are already loved instead of picking it ourselves.

We were asked to help out with community beading in Queens, especially on 34th Avenue, in 2023. For two years, we heard BIPOC kids and adults express their love for this wearable art. “It calms me down,” one kid told us. “I feel so peaceful,” another said. “I loved this so much when I was young,” said an elder. “This is my favorite activity on 34 Avenue,” said one mom. Their voices are top of mind. Shout out to 34 Avenue Open Streets Coalition for creating the space for arts on the street nearly seven days a week.