Rachel G. Barnard
ABOG Fellow for Socially Engaged Art
As an ABOG Fellow, Rachel Barnard will create The Fair, a project focused on fostering transformational relationships between Department of Probation officers and clients, as part of the 2018 NYC Department of Cultural Affairs’ Public Artist in Residence (PAIR) program. Barnard will develop a series of concrete interventions in collaboration with the DOP community, to be staged across all five boroughs. Interventions will restructure moments of human connection and promote a shared sense of belonging between the groups.
Artist Bio
Rachel G. Barnard is a social practice artist formally trained as an architect. In 2012 she founded Young New Yorkers (YNY), an arts diversion programs for teens being prosecuted as adult in criminal courts. To date over 700 young people have been sentenced to make art at YNY instead of jail or other adult sanctions. Most participants have their adult criminal cases dismissed and sealed.
Teens sentenced to YNY use art to become advocates for themselves and for criminal legal reform. Each program culminates in a participant-led public art project that addresses a criminal legal issue of their choice. Teens in the past have focused on local policing, economic disparity, solitary confinement, gun violence, and the local impacts of mass incarceration. Teens then invite the very criminal legal professionals involved in their sentencing to attend the public projects – this in turn humanizes the culture of the courtrooms, the professional members of which possess discretionary power over each teen’s case outcome.
Barnard’s social art practice brings large groups of people together from diverse, and oftentimes adversarial, communities to create new spaces of belonging. As such the connections made within and between communities through a project take priority over a completed work.
Visit Rachel Barnard’s website
UNITY: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, June 2017. Participants in Barnard’s art diversion program designed an art game in which criminal legal professionals and community guests were invited to shared their thoughts and vision for local policing in New York City in exchange for a rose from the unity wall. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
One of the participants who designed UNITY: Visions for Neighborhood Policing gives the prosecutor who sentenced him to the program a rose in exchange for her vision for policing. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
UNITY: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, at the Actors Fund at The Schermerhorn, June 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
UNITY: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, at the Actors Fund at The Schermerhorn, June 2017. Participants in Barnard’s program designed a public art project in which criminal legal professionals and community guests shared their ideas around neighborhood policing in New York City in exchange for a rose from the unity wall. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
UNITY: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, at the Actors Fund at The Schermerhorn, June 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
Wisdom Gift Exchange was a dazzling interactive public art project designed by the young women in YNY’s inaugural 4-Week Restorative Arts Diversion Program. It was a celebration of being given a chance to learn from our mistakes and a meditation on the wisdom that can be gained when one is given this opportunity rather than be handed a punitive sanction. US Eastern District Court, October 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
Wisdom Gift Exchange, hosted by the US Eastern District Court, October 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
The Honorable Judge Gubbay and YNY Graduate Shawnti catch up at YNY’s latest participant-designed public art installation. Bringing together young people and criminal legal professionals at exhibitions humanizes the culture of the courts and encourages more proportionate alternative sentencing for court-involved youth. Catching Kindness: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, Department of Probation, December 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
Catching Kindness: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, Department of Probation, December 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.
Catching Kindness: Visions for Neighborhood Policing, Department of Probation, December 2017. Photo: Mansura Khanam.