PBS American Portrait

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Coming out the top of the sculpture. Once I started to tell my own personal history more publicly, not only did I make a lot more space in my life for honesty, for healing, also doing that created a lot of freedom for others, for people who may have been struggling with some of the same issues. I think that we have a need to experience art in our daily lives, and I'm hoping that this will fill a need for people that maybe some folks didn't even realize they had. I started working on the street 20 years ago. Public art is something that I believe in very deeply because it's so community building. I proposed the idea of creating this sculpture, which would be like a home. It was kinda opened out in the same way that the American Portrait is this kind of intimate look into our lives. This sculpture is going to move, drive around to various locations in New York City. It's called The House Our Families Built. You start to get brought back to the sense of your own home, and your own family, and your own life, what you choose to carry forward and what you choose to let go of. My mom has passed away about five or six years ago now. She was addicted to heroin, she had times when she struggled really, really seriously with mental illness. Growing up as a child of that person brought an incredible amount of pain that I needed to heal and that I needed to let go of it. And I'm trying to create a new tradition of healing, and I'm really curious to find out from others, what are the themes in your personal history that you would like to acknowledge and to move past? And so when I saw the American Portrait project, I was so excited. We're gonna create a performance to share some of the things that people were contributing in a way that tried to pull out a narrative. The tradition I carry on is making pierogis. The tradition I carry on is fasting for Ramadan. This is a cocoa dump, which is a dumpling that has sweetened coconuts in it. I remember as a kid shaping and steaming these dumplings. And once when everything was ready... Over a cup of tea or coffee, we would sit and enjoy them. All right, first, we're going to make the dough. Flour, some water, and we need to get an egg. Now, you gotta watch the dough depending on the humidity outside. These dishes are true gems in our culture. These recipes are well over 125, 150 years old. This is how I see myself getting in touch with my ancestors. To focus on healing collective trauma. I know trauma as a psychotherapist. But I also know trauma in the developmental sense. Just last week it was my birthday and I decided to pull up my mom's cornbread recipe that she used to make. When I pulled it out the oven, and it was beautiful, and it tasted just like real cornbread, and I was like, "Oh, my God, here you are." Like you are still here in these ways and in these, you know, something as simple as a recipe... Something as simple as a recipe.

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Struck home very much for me because I do think food has that ability to not just nourish but to lift the spirits. Everyone has some sort of little tradition like that in their family. So that's something that I think is very powerful in terms of conveying that idea of usness among everybody. We have this opportunity to make changes that we didn't have before. There's the part of it that happens, you know, through therapy and through healing. But there's also the part of it that happens culturally through storytelling, what we build together. The thing that I hope that people take away from it is a kind of an openness and a little bit of the courage of those people that shared. I hope that some of that becomes infectious.

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