My process dictates that much of the work percolates and offers new possibilities for continued inquiry, exploration, and community engagement long after it’s “finished.” Here’s a taste.
- Stomping Grounds (2023): Piloted in Waltham, Massachusetts and intended for broad application across U.S. rural and urban communities—this photography and storytelling collaboration calls attention to the mechanisms by which community is made, sustained, and remembered. By engaging with a broad cross-section of communities, the project seeds a path of inquiry and participation that is representative of diverse constituents, and it catalyzes, by definition and design, ongoing and expanding circles of community engagement. It fosters conscious democratic participation in creative placemaking.
- YogaRoll (2020-2021): In response to the pandemic and a LatinX neighborhood’s death rate higher than 94% of US counties, this project emerged from Second Ward Space to create opportunities in Houston to roll up on micro-mobility—bikes, skateboards, onewheels, etc.—and practice yoga safely. Collectively, we performed community health in the face of overwhelming crisis, confusion, and isolation.
- Second Ward Space (2020-2021): This Houston collaboration combined three pillars—community, yoga, and provisions—to co-create space for an underserved and gentrifying neighborhood to coalesce and explore creative place-making via a gift-exchange economy, local enterprise, holistic health and wellbeing, locally grown and safely distributed vegetables, and conversation.
- FENCE+CO’s ChalkTalk (December 2019): a collaboration to break the divide that a fence implies and reconfigure it as a site of democratic participation and community exchange.
- Scion: A Community Metaphor-Maker (July 2018): a a cob-construction sculptural form and community catalyst. Montalvo Arts Center, July 2018.
- Fortitude: Collaborating to Fortify Social Justice & Global Ecology (June 2018): an exploration in how we might collaborate to fortify social justice and global ecology via process and form. Montalvo Arts Center, June 2018.
- ExquisiteKnowing Challenge: Exploring Poverty & Privilege on Bikes (August 2017): an immersive, cycling-based 6-day examination and living experiment in community, working homelessness, and innovation.
- Abacus Creek: Ekphrasis in Action (March 2017): 6th graders respond to Nick Cave’s Soundsuits
- Imaginary Friends & Family: Warsaw Portraits (November 2013). Photos and text. (featured on Hyperallergic.) And, from this seed has grown the Imaginary Friends and Family Project (2013-2015)
- Fed: A Home-Based Community Performance (2014)
- Performing Warsaw: Art Every Day, Everyday Art (2013-2014): The critters and I relocated for twelve months to Warsaw, Poland, to extend the questions, themes, and methodologies I had been working with for the past few years to a different socio-historical-linguistic context. Through text, photography, video, performance, and participant observation, I explored how dislocation and exile shifted my perspective and insight and how the experience and work of Polish artists and curators broadened my own vision.
- American (post): An Experiment in Democratic Participation (2010-2013). Poems, 2D & 3D visual art, installation, community performance, and video.
Ashley David 