In 2011, Groundswell was one of sixteen cultural organizations awarded a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund to develop a project that enriches neighborhoods, ignites communities, inspires with new artistic work, or builds a better future through art and design in New York City.

With this funding, Groundswell chose to partner with the NYC Department of Transportation to focus on creating a series of murals in Hunts Point, Bronx, a neighborhood faced with economic, environmental, and traffic safety issues. For two years, EmcArts documented StreetWise on ArtsFwd.org to share how we implemented our award funding. You can watch the short documentary and read our profile here.

Thanks to the generosity of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund, Groundswell was awarded funding to create StreetWise: Hunts Point: a series of projects in partnership with the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) dedicated to highlighting community activism and addressing traffic safety issues in Hunts Point. Developed in 2012 and 2013, StreetWise strove to create long-term solutions for these issues within the community and to support the ongoing activism efforts of the neighborhood’s residents.

As Amy Sananman, Groundswell's Executive Director, said, “We wanted to see whether we could take a series of murals and build a case for a better transportation infrastructure in the Hunts Point community. We saw the grant as an opportunity to do a number of projects together in a more sequential and intentional way and toward a greater goal.”

The Streetwise projects had an ongoing call to action woven into every step of their development. It was never going to be enough to depict the issues through artwork—that was merely the first step. Action needed to be taken by the youth activists and community participants to make change become a reality. Groundswell’s youth muralists took this aspect very seriously.

Crystal Bruno, the Lead Artist on multiple Streetwise projects, reflected upon this call to action, saying: “Creativity isn’t limited to painting and drawing. It’s also how to creatively problem-solve the issues of your neighborhood, how to navigate streets and find green spaces. It’s moving beyond beautification and into actual infrastructural and structural urban planning changes.”

The documentary by EmcArts showcases the murals and street sign projects created by youth and community members over the course of the Streetwise initiative. Through these projects, participants learned about the immediate and contemporary issues the community is facing and developed suggestions for how to address these challenges. The project culminated with the presentation of these suggestions to the New York City Department of Transportation for implementation. 

Streetwise: Hunts Point has been an incredible opportunity for Hunts Point youth to give back to a neighborhood that so richly deserves it. The partnership in itself hit at the core of what Groundswell stands for—public art for social change, supporting a creative communal dialogue and inspiring direct action. Only time will tell what the long-term effect of the murals and signs will be, but if the current response has been any indication, it seems that things can only get better for the residents of Hunts Point.