How I became a community builder

Over the past two decades I’ve grown Listings Project from a small hand-made email list, to a full-blown technology-enabled community platform with hundreds of thousands of community members in 50 states and over 200 countries around the world. As Listings Project has evolved, I have also evolved—from a full-time professional artist, to the artist and business owner that I am today.  At times, I’ve described this journey as a happy accident.  I didn’t really mean to start a business or an online community, I say. But the truth is Listings Project was no accident.  Like everything else I’ve done, it’s an expression of my life-long obsession with community.  

As a child growing up on the Upper West Side in New York City, I felt most at home in communal spaces: at school, wandering my neighborhood, taking pictures, or even just riding the subway.  As a female, Jewish, dyslexic, and artistic child, I knew what it felt like to be different from those around me. And as a heterosexual, cisgendered, able-bodied, managerial class white child, my life was shaped by profound privilege. Living through my own marginalized and privileged identities, I developed my understanding of community and my own role within the communities I was a part of.

My preschool class photo (I'm on the right side in the center row, second one in from the boy standing in his Oshkosh overalls)

From a very young age, I had an intuitive understanding of how individual self care and community care should operate together. I vividly remember being shocked in elementary school when a classmate asked permission to use the bathroom. To my young mind it seemed completely wrong that he should need an adult's approval to take care of himself and his body, and I told him so in no uncertain terms. Our classroom community, I believed, should be a place where we were all free to be our authentic, individual selves, at all times, in relationship with one another. 

A few years later, as a middle schooler, I began to flex my own community building muscles, almost without knowing it. At summer camp, I unwittingly instigated a craze for the plastic tags used to secure bags of bread. In a moment of whimsey, I tied a few of these tags on my shoes.  Suddenly all the other kids wanted tags to tie on their shoes, too. Through inviting my peers to share in the things that excited me, I discovered that I could create community around fun, goofy or creative activities. 

In addition to being an important community-building experience for me, summer camp was also where I was first introduced to photography. When I returned home, I spent every day in my neighborhood, camera in hand, photographing the people and the world around me. When I took my film to be developed, I always received two copies of every image.  One I would keep, the other I would give to the subject or someone who I thought might appreciate the image. Photography, for me, became another way of building community, and communicating with the people around me.

Installation shot from "Whose House", my senior thesis project from RISD

When I enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, as an undergraduate, I was looking forward to focusing entirely on my photography. But college, for me, was a rude awakening. Bereft of my childhood context, for the first time in my life I felt alone and without community. I had not realized how important my childhood communities—of New York City, summer camp, family, and school—were to my wellbeing. Though I struggled to find community in college, I was deeply inspired by the guest lecturers who visited RISD. Two lecturers, in particular, completely changed the course of my life. Fred Wilson’s “Mining the Museum” radically critiqued white power in a museum setting.  His work taught me that art didn’t have to be about an object, art could be about a transformative political experience. Daniel Martinez’s “Consequences of a Gesture,” which was part of the exhibition “Culture in Action” curated by Mary Jane Jacobs, was transformative for me as well. Together with 800 volunteers from Mexican-American and Black neighborhoods, Martinez created a joint parade between the neighborhoods. His work taught me that you could make art with people instead of for them.

Though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, at RISD, I was looking for a way to combine art and community, and artists like Wilson and Martinez helped point me in the right direction. It wouldn’t be until I was a senior, that I started to find my own voice as an artist working with communities. My senior thesis project, “Whose House?,” was a maze-like house of mirrors installation. I built walls within the gallery made-up of large-scale street photography, clear plexiglass, and windows to create a sense of community between the people inside the installation and the people outside on the street. 

Upon graduating, I used “Whose House?” to apply to an artist residency at PS1, and was admitted as the youngest ever resident. When the residency ended, I became the Education and Community Coordinator at PS1. After experiencing an absence of community as an undergraduate, PS1 was a welcome change. It was there that I first experienced community in my hometown of New York City as an adult artist.

PS1/ MoMA Community Day

At PS1, I conceived of and curated the first annual PS1/MoMA  “Community Day” for Families. I distinctly remember thinking that I would approach creating this event as an artist and community builder, not only as an arts administrator. I decided to design an interactive experience, rather than the typical-of-museums passive experience of viewing art. In the end, over fifty artists took part in a circus sideshow-inspired event. Visitors were invited to watch puppet shows and make puppets, watch break dancers and learn how to breakdance, listen to DJs and sample their own sounds, look at paintings and paint their own, and much more. It was the first time that I consciously created community, tapping into my knowledge as an artist, arts administrator, and intuitive community builder. 

It was also around this time that I met my dear friend, artist Brett Cook. In the tradition of graffiti, Cook made aerosol portraits in his studio and put them up in the streets of New York City, without permission. It was a revelation to me, that public art didn’t need to be officially sanctioned. His work inspired me to create “This is Your Advertisement,” a series of photographed portraits of subways-riders installed in empty advertising spaces on New York City subway platforms. 

It wouldn’t be until I enrolled in graduate school at New York University, that I would learn the term for this kind of work: social practice art.  In the meantime, I continued to seek out spaces and roles where I could actively create community.  As a resident artist at Skowhegan, I explored how I could use my photographs as objects and instruments of community building. As the Director of Education and Community Programs at Socrates Sculpture Park, I drew on my experiences at PS1 to build community programs and events that continue to bring people together to this day.

"This is What I Eat" newspaper/cookbook presentation

In addition to building community as an arts administrator, I was weaving community building into my work as a visual artist. In one project, “This is What I Eat,” I created a newspaper/cookbook with residents of Corona, Queens, at the Queens Museum. In another project, “Community of Community,” I organized a sleepover of social practice artists also at the Queens Museum. Both of these projects benefited from the support and involvement of Tom Finkelpearl, the director of the Queens Museum at the time. Finkelpearl is a crucial figure in social practice art, and someone who changed the course of the arts as the Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

It was around this time, in 2003, that I started Listings Project. What began as a simple appeal to friends for housing leads evolved organically as my community reached out and made their own requests for support and connection. I didn’t realize at first that I was building a community through Listings Project, but now I’ve come to see Listings Project as the inevitable, organic expression of my life-long obsession with community. Not only that, but Listings Project is a social practice art project for me, too!

The Listings Project team in 2019

At Listings Project, I put into practice all that I have learned, thus far, about community. Our intention is to be a force for communal good and collective care through real estate and job listings. To that end, we practice empathetic, personal, and justice focused customer experience. We regularly ask listers for input and listen deeply to their responses when we make decisions. We meticulously vet all of our listings as a way of taking care of and protecting our community. And, we provide clear guidelines for the Listings Project community that help engage each person in actively contributing to maintaining our respectful, life-affirming and justice focused environment. 

As I reflect upon my two decades leading Listings Project, as well as my many other experiences participating in, creating and leading communities, I feel profoundly grateful to the people who brought me here. Some I have shared about in this article already, including Brett Cook, Fred Wilson, Daniel Martinez, Mary Jane Jacob, and Tom Finkelpearl. Others have touched my life just as profoundly, and I look forward to honoring them and sharing more about all that they’ve taught me in the near future.  I also feel inspired, curious and committed to continuing my work and learning as a community builder. The world is in dire need of more life-affirming and justice focused communities. With that in mind, ​​I am cultivating ways to contribute more of the wisdom I have learned with others. I look forward to sharing more with you about my journey as a community builder again soon.

Feature Photo by Stephanie Diamond