Our prints, fabulous Julia Samuels creations, are your gift if you donate $30 or more in the next week. Just make sure to give us your address!
22" x 30" 3-color hand pulled screen print, published by the artist in an edition of 85. This archival version of 596 Acres' Brooklyn broadsheet features a map of Brooklyn, NY with all publicly owned vacant lots highlighted.
"I'm So Lucky You Found Me: public land inside the city" is a handmade book by collaborator Daniel Eizirik, a Brasilian artist who spent winter 2012-13 documenting the experience of transforming Brooklyn's acres. This is 596 Acres' first book! We learned so much making it - about the life of lots in various stages of transformation, about printing and scoring and hand-stitching books, and about the connections between Brooklyn's neighborhoods. These books are lovely if we might say so ourselves. You can own one!
They are on the shelves at Bergen Street Comics at 470 Bergen Street in Brooklyn, and at Printed Matter, 195 Tenth Avenue New York, NY 10011.
Or we can mail you one: each one is only $10 + shipping and handling.
All proceeds go to support 596 Acres' work in 2013. Here's a little preview from our friends at Inhabitat.
THE BRONX, NEW YORK CITY - On Thursday, March 21, the 596 Acres’ interactive online map will begin providing information about vacant public land in the borough of the Bronx. 596 Acres will also begin distribution of print maps and signs for labeling lots throughout the borough in the coming weeks. Simultaneously, 596 Acres launches their website in Spanish!
"I'm glad that community-level interest, thought and planning around vacant space will be taken more seriously," said Aazam Otero, a Bronx resident and public space advocate.
Thank you so much to the nearly 50 people who attended our Brooklyn General Meeting on Sunday, March 10th. Representatives from Lots all around Brooklyn (and a few Queens folks) were in attendance. We also welcomed some folks who are still looking for the lot in their life. Hope you all found one!
The Run Down:
In the first half of the meeting, two different lots with access, 100 Quincy Garden and Myrtle Village Green shared their collected wisdom about the experience of gaining access.
-- 100 Quincy Garden - Khemenec, Kate, and Sheena shared their experiences gaining access. They answered many people's questions about the process of getting approval from Greenthumb for their license, and they talked about what it takes to demonstrate that the whole block is behind you. Reach out to them at their website or check out their lot page to read about some of their experience if your group is facing the same questions.
-- Myrtle Village Green - Stephan and Paula talked about the long term experience of gaining access to Myrtle Village Green. They have great knowledge about how to keep a group together when faced with adversity! Reach out to them at the MVG website or check their lot page to read through the whole story.
Second Half:
-- After that, we popcorned out questions. Most people's questions were specific, and it seemed like a lot of the assembled group had specific answers. We broke out into smaller discussions and hopefully everybody got the answers they needed.
This is all awesome, and it's not even spring!
Please RSVP to organizers@596acres.org. (it's not required, but it helps us with snacks!)
596 Acres is pleased to announce that we are starting work with the Garden Justice Legal Initiative (GJLI) of the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia to custom-build an online tool for the Philadelphia land stewardship community.
Like the tools we’ve built in New York, this map will help individuals and groups in Philadelphia identify, organize around and access publicly-owned vacant land in Philadelphia, as well as provide information about pathways to protected land tenure for Philadelphia groups that are already land stewards. GJLI is hiring a facilitator to use the platform and connect online organizing with communities working on the land.
You can read more about the Garden Justice Legal Initiative's advocacy work in the press here and about our collaboration here.
We are really excited to continue conversations with vacant lot transformation facilitators in other cities as we head into 2013.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
596 Acres, a young Brooklyn-based project that is making a big impact on New York City by providing tools for communities to unlock vacant public land, has found its first permanent home at the new Silent Barn as a studio. In the last year, working out of out pockets, our kitchens, coffee shops and donated spaces around Brooklyn, 596 Acres has played a key role in the creation of eight community controlled spaces that used to just be lots behind fences - these are new gardens, parks and playgrounds that are run by neighbors all over the city! Four more spaces are poised to open this Spring. With a new permanent home at the Silent Barn, the impact on community can only deepen.
Since the start, 596 Acres has been grounded in print production - 596 Acres broadsheets and graphics show up on fences around the city, in galleries around the country and even in the Venice Biennale.
596 Acres now expands its Print Archive in 2013 by publishing a artist book with Brasilian artist Daniel Eizirik: "I'm So Lucky You Found Me: Public Land Inside the City." The book is a drawn documentation of vacant land in the city, created on location at Brooklyn's vacant lots with the collaboration of neighbors and vacant lot transformers. It will be available for sale ($10!) at the Book Launch at the Silent Barn on Friday, January 11, 2013, and through 596acres.org.
596 Acres Print Archive: http://596acres.org/en/about/596-acres-archive/
Contact: Paula Z. Segal, Founder & Director, 596 Acres, paula@596acres.org
Event Details:
596 Acres, The Law Office of Mohen & Segal & The Silent Barn present
I'm So Lucky You Found Me Book Launch & Studio Warming Party
Friday, January 11, 2013
7 p.m. at 11 Stanwix Street, Brooklyn NY 11206
Music starts at 8 p.m.:
Celestial Band (yoruban based gospel sounds, from a 596 Acres organizing community)
Zeke Healy & Karen Waltuch (guitar & viola, all dressed up)
G Lucas Crane v. Non Horse (on tapes)
CONSUMATA (cumbia sabanera groove train)
This is a private party. RSVP by emailing 596acres@gmail.com.
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Thanks to our friends at Good Eye Video (Brooklyn NY, cinematography) and Daniel from Contorno (Brasil, editing and animation), we have this great new video of organizers speaking about the lots in their lives. We're so glad to be able to introduce them to each other and to you. And we're thrilled to be the catalysts and facilitators of change in their neighborhoods!
Happy Holidays!
Friend and collaborator Daniel Eizirik is working on documenting public vacant lots with 596 Acres this winter, in conjunction with the exhibition "On Purpose" at the BRIC Rotunda gallery (33 Clinton Street, Brooklyn Heights). The drawings are created through shared experiences on location. The locations for this documentary are publicly owned vacant lots - those that have been transformed and those that remain sites of future transformations.
Until December 21, Daniel will be drawing and working as a facilitator of drawings by collaborators including neighbors and vacant lot organizers (this could be you!). If you wish to collaborate and participate in these immersions, contact Daniel directly (eizdaniel@gmail.com or 516 943 3667). He would love to come out and meet you in your neighborhood or to attend any events you are having locally. & feel free to forward this and re-post the images (credit Daniel Eizirik).
In January, we will be putting these images together into an artist book that you can keep (SAVE THE DATE: Lots of Land/Land of Lots release will be on January, 11, 2013).
If you want to see some more of his drawings, he has posted drawings of 143 Stockholm and 462 Halsey.
Before you email us, please check our Rockaway Relief Common Questions.
This summer, 596 Acres worked closely with communities in Rockaway around issues of vacant public land during a three-week residency in Edgemere, Rockaway. We were welcomed and made lasting connections. A dozen groups started oranizing projects around sites and are engaged in our network.
The people in those groups live in Rockaway. They are some of the most affected by Hurricane Sandy; the affects of the storm are exasserbated by a history of unequal resource distribution to the Rockaway neighborhoods. Thousands have been without heat or power for a week now. Access to food and medical care is being provided by awesome on-the-ground community responders like you and me. The problem is worse because Rockaway is cut off from the transit network and there is a gas shortage.
With our friends at UnLocal, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities and the Gowanus Studio Space, we are doing what we can to coordinate assistance for our friends and neighbors. We are trying to listen closely to their needs. Read below for how you can help.
In solidarity,
Paula
for 596 Acres
| This message was sent on Sunday, November 4 at 8pm. It is a follow up to an earlier message, sent 24 hours prior, that generated an overwhelming response. That earlier message is below but the most current information is here. <3 |
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Our weekly newsletter is awesome! We tell you you what's going on across the Acres network, where you can plug into projects in your neighborhood, about resources your autonomous projects can use and how we're growing as an organization. It arrives in inboxes on Thursdays.
Sign up today! To make it more fun, we're gonna give away a set of gift certificates for wine tastings at three conveniently located Long Island vineyards: Roanoke Vineyards (Riverhead, NY), Laurel Lake Vineyards (Laurel, NY), & Clovis Point (Jamesport, NY). The 200th person to sign up will get one!
PEOPLE WORKING OUR LAND TOGETHER
596 Acres and Sun In Bloom present
A Celebration of our Neighborhood Bounties
A lot of vacant lots in New York City are privately owned. We are starting to work with community groups and private landowners who see the benefits of having a site activated versus sitting abandoned and vacant. Two examples:
The lot that Feedback Farms (a part of A Small Green Patch) is on is owned by a private landlord. It is sandwiched between two publicly owned lots (HPD) to which A Small Green Patch has a license; when they got that license, they contacted the borough president Marty Markowitz's office for help reaching out to the private landowner -- turns out he was friend of Marty's. The private landowner is donating rent for the year and will be getting a thank you letter from our fiscal sponsor that might help on his taxes; he also hasn't gotten a single Sanitation ticket since the creation of the Farm (those were a real problem before) and gets to feel good about how he is contributing. Feedback Farms has a general liability insurance policy that covers farming/gardening activities at the site.
The lot that One Kin Farm is on is also private land. The owner was approached by the lead gardeners on that site, who, building on 596 Acres' experience with A Small Green Patch, offered to carry an insurance policy (which we helped them arrange for free), take care of the lot and give the owner a thank you letter from a 501(c)(3). They also took him on a tour of thriving gardens in the neighborhood and generally charmed him.
We are working with other groups who are also trying to reach out to private landowners and still others who are in the midst of negotiations. There is another private owner in Bushwick who is looking for stewards for his land now.
The big difference is that when it's a private owner, it really is all about the relationship. If you can get a meeting with them, we can help you figure out how to frame what you can offer.
Get in touch if you know an owner who wants his land used for public good & greening!
We're planning an August residency at the Rockaways to dovetail with the release of our data for Queens. There is A LOT of vacant land there. We would love to partner with any existing organizations to schedule visioning sessions and pick targeted lots to label. Get in touch!
