Solo Exhibitions

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Curated by Steven and William Ladd

Courtesy Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. All images by JC Cancedda

When the Navy Yard issued a call for its first-ever outdoor sculpture installation, we saw a chance to deepen our long connection to the community and to reimagine what community-based art could look like. The project helped expand our process to fit the scale required by our upcoming 2026 Kennedy Center project.

We proposed a series of monumental wooden pillars for the Navy Yard’s public forecourt. One side of each pillar featured photographic reproductions of collaborative scroll-based artworks; the other side featured portraits of the community artists.

“Outdoors, we learned invaluable lessons about scale, materiality, and durability. Indoors, we reflected on the evolution of our work over two decades. Together, the two halves of the exhibition formed a bridge—linking the community-based roots of our practice to the ambitious, national vision ahead at the Kennedy Center and beyond.”

Mid-project, we were invited to expand into Building 92 with an indoor exhibition of works tracing a clear line from our early projects to current work, including a major installation of personal artworks that juxtaposed the introspective aspects of our practice with the collaborative side.

Outdoors, we learned invaluable lessons about scale, materiality, and durability. Indoors, we reflected on the evolution of our work over two decades. Together, the two halves of the exhibition formed a bridge—linking the community-based roots of our practice to the ambitious, national vision ahead at The Kennedy Center and beyond.

These pillars stood alongside others displaying a large-scale word cloud built from community responses to the question: "What one word describes your hopes for the future of America?" The text panels captured a collective voice, powerful in its simplicity. Other pillars—what we have come to call Pillars of the Community—included photographic portraits of local residents, each paired with a QR code linking to a video of the participant telling their story in their own words—a slice of contemporary Brooklyn saved for future generations!