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,” but I offer a taste of finished work here. To access the full portfolio, use the drop-down option in the menu above.
- Stomping Grounds: 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: 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: 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.
- Exile (May 2014). Video-performance and poems. In Conjunctions (2014, 05.06.14)
- American (post): Multiple Dimensions. Video-performance and poems. In The Offending Adam (2013, 162.1).
- Imaginary Family & Friends: Portraits. Photos and text. (featured on Hyperallergic.) And, from this seed has grown the Imaginary Friends & Family Project
- American (post). Poems, 2D & 3D visual art, installation, community performance, and video. For the who kit and caboodle, navigate from the Multimedia drop-down menu above to American (post) or click here.
- An Elegy: Fine Things, Flip-side(s) & Transformation. Video-performance. In The Offending Adam (2010, 029.2).
- Below the Line: Grip & Electric. Video-documentary. In the mid-1990s, as part of an ethnographic project, I followed several technicians working in New York’s independent feature film world. I asked them questions about their work, their dreams, and their personal lives. Shot on the sets of three low budget films and in the crew’s various NYC apartments, Below the Line offers a slice of what it’s like to chart a creative path in film, to begin an unconventional career, and to balance a demanding professional life with a personal life.
- FED: a home-based community performance.
Ashley David 