New York City arts institutions repurpose to fight hunger in the Covid-19 era
October 30, 2020
On a brisk Monday afternoon outside The Living Gallery, an art space in Bushwick, gallery manager Cal Fish sits at a table piled high with produce, dairy, and meats. Between rumbles of the J train above, Fish chats with neighbors and fills their bags with groceries.
Some, like Francky Gabriel, have become regulars since the gallery began a weekly food drive in April, a month after the pandemic struck New York City. Gabriel stops by every Monday, hoping they have diapers for his newborn. They don’t today, but Fish sends him off with a bag of hot dogs, carrots, sour cream, and other food.
To the right stands a refrigerator painted sky-blue, with sunflowers emblazoned with the text “Free food / Comida gratis.” The gallery operates the fridge with the help of volunteers. Unlike the food drive, the fridge is always available for people to donate or retrieve food, even when the gallery is closed.
At 4 p.m., Fish is wrapping up. But three miles away, the Brooklyn Museum’s weekly food drive is just beginning. Hundreds of Brooklynites, mostly elderly, queue in the parking lot for boxes of free groceries. After picking up their boxes, they step aside to redistribute the food to fit their carts. Some swap items they don’t want.
Sonny Speller, a local man who started going to the pantry last month, gave away his excess potatoes. “I don’t throw anything away,” Speller said. “I want someone to use it.”
The Brooklyn Museum and the Living Gallery are among a small number of cultural institutions responding to hunger in the age of COVID-19. The pandemic and its economic crisis left more New Yorkers hungry in 2020 than any year in recent history: Over 2 million residents face food insecurity across the city now, compared to 1.3 million last year, according to Mayor Bill DeBlasio. This crisis prompted several local arts institutions to redirect their resources to feed the communities around them — sometimes even tucking in some art supplies in the process. This pivot to food distribution is renegotiating the role that arts spaces, sometimes seen as elitist, play in community service.
Early in the pandemic, hunger became a mounting crisis for New Yorkers. The sudden spike in unemployment left many families worried how they would get their next meal. Making things even worse, many food banks and soup kitchens were forced to close during lockdown, short on volunteers and food donations.
Organizers at the Queens Museum in Corona, one of the neighborhoods worst hit by the virus, felt an obligation to respond. In early spring, the neighborhood had no food pantries, but had many residents left hungry during the pandemic. La Jornada, a large food pantry in nearby Flushing, had planned to collaborate with a church on Roosevelt Avenue to distribute food in Corona, but its organizers worried that a socially distanced line of nearly a thousand families would be unwieldy on such a busy street.
So Gianina Enriquez, the museum’s community organizer who previously volunteered at local food pantries, suggested that while the museum was closed during the lockdown, it could host La Jornada’s food pantry for Corona residents. Enriquez and the Queens Museum team repurposed the museum. Since June, they have distributed food to up to a thousand appreciative families every Wednesday with the help of La Jornada and another local organization called Together We Can Community Resource Center.
Jessica Chacha, a co-founder of Together We Can who helps run the weekly pantry, has seen its impact on struggling families. “There have been families that come here saying they have nothing in their fridge, and this will be the first meal of their day,” Chacha said. “And I’m like, oh no! You have little kids — it’s 3 p.m!”
The museum’s exhibits recently reopened to visitors, but the pantry remains.
Meanwhile, on the Lower East Side, the Abrons Arts Center, a performing and visual arts center, began a food distribution program for neighborhood seniors in April. Staff at the center, which is a century old and part of a broader social services organization called the Henry Street Settlement, realized that many of their elderly constituents were now homebound without access to food.
Abrons adapted its staff and space to fight hunger in the community. Their theater tech crew now handles the food distribution program full-time. Their playhouse’s loading dock, formerly used for transporting sets, is now a launching pad for 600 bags of food and a thousand boxes of produce weekly. The artists-in-residence deliver packages to seniors’ doors. Abrons also hosts a 24/7 community fridge outside the center.
“Our program has let artists-in-residence connect with the neighborhood and feel they’re supporting a neighborhood that supports them and their creativity,” said Craig Peterson, Abrons’ art director.
With the infrastructure and community bonds forged, these four institutions plan to continue as long as heightened need exists, at least until the end of 2020. The Queens Museum is also helping its partner organization find a new permanent home in Corona.
While many museums have an educational mission as nonprofits and some showcase art on social issues, this sort of on-the-ground action is unprecedented at this scale, said Gregory Sholette, director of Queens College’s Social Practice Queens program, which explores art and social action.
The institutions that stepped up during the pandemic already had a history of community involvement. The Queens and Brooklyn museums, Sholette said, “have tried to break down the elitist feel for at least the last 30 years. The Brooklyn Museum works hard to bring the community, which is mostly African American, into their doors, and get more people of color as staff and curators.”
That’s why some patrons choose the Brooklyn Museum’s food pantry over others. Linda, a senior on fixed income who did not want to give her last name, trusts the familiar institution and appreciates their free entrance days and community programming. “There are other food pantries around, but I don’t know them, so I’m hesitant to go.”
These initiatives can even integrate food with the arts. To combat isolation for homebound seniors receiving food this summer, the Abrons Center packed arts supplies into their food deliveries and gave instructions for weekly art projects, like collages and mobiles.
“People would do the art assignments and stick them to their door, so when people delivered food, they could see it,” Peterson said. “It was a nice reciprocity.”
The Queens Museum is integrating cultural offerings into its effort, too. They now host free art workshops for families visiting the pantry in the adjacent Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.
“There’s the economic impact of the pandemic, which relates to food insecurity, but there’s also the impact on families — of schools being closed and the challenge of remote learning,” said Catherine Grau, the museum’s community partnership manager. “Those are things we’ve been thinking about. That’s why we came up with the idea of an art lab in the park, with art-making and learning through play, away from screens.”
A recent program included a station to make sculptures with recycled materials. Mateo, 5, built a house from egg cartons with a wooden honey dipper as a chimney.
While it’s inspiring to see people taking action against hunger, these initiatives also reflect a failure of the government to provide adequate help to people in need, said Julia McCarthy, a food policy professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “It’s amazing that these groups are stepping in, but they shouldn’t have to,” McCarthy said. “We should have funding for food that makes sure no New Yorker goes hungry ever.”
Still, this involvement is challenging the role museums play in directly responding to community service needs. “It’s an incredible moment at these institutions,” said Sholette, head of Queens College’s program for art engaging with social issues, who thinks this movement, along with conversations in the art world about racial representation and museum workers’ labor rights, will change museums for good. “Whatever comes out of the other end of this will not look like what preceded it.”
