Activating Public Memory for a More Abundant Future

For ten years, I led arts programs in Rikers Island with my NYU students. Each Saturday morning, I crossed the bridge on the Q100 bus, staring out at the murky waters of the East River, gathering my resolve to enter a penal colony, the last of its kind, to transform a prison classroom into a space of community, creativity, and belonging.

The thing about working in a place like Rikers is that you are always left with the same feeling: “It’s not enough.” Young people in matching prison uniforms shuttle in with faces drawn tight, and for a moment in that classroom, those faces soften into something like joy, something like play, a sense of freedom found through playing theater games and writing poetry. But as soon as the workshop is over, faces return to stone, bodies become rigid, and you know, “it’s not enough.” Seeing a correctional officer bullying one of my incarcerated students, knowing there is nothing I can do about it: “it's not enough.” Leaving the facility behind and reading in the paper about another death on the Island, and again knowing that the work I do there is not enough.

I eventually realized that my frustration wasn't with arts programming. The workshops mattered deeply. What felt insufficient was treating the symptoms while leaving the underlying story intact. As long as Rikers remained accepted as a permanent feature of New York City, no workshop alone could bring an end to the harm.

In 2018, a public commission led by Judge Lippman recommended the closure of Rikers, bolstering the grassroots Close Rikers coalition’s campaign for permanent closure. At that time, I was traveling the country facilitating a project called Mass Story Lab; a space for communities to reckon with the impact of incarceration on families and communities. The very first Story Lab focused on Rikers Island and brought together the testimonies of formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones. 300 people, including prosecutors, advocates, community organizers, and students, filled a room at the New School to hear their testimonies. That event became the catalyst for the Rikers Public Memory Project (RPMP).

As a cultural worker who has spent two decades creating spaces for people to imagine more just liberatory futures, I was drawn to memory work because, like collective storytelling, it provides a powerful catalyst for stretching the limits of what we believe is possible.

Since launching RPMP in 2018 in partnership with the Humanities Action Lab and Freedom Agenda, we’ve taken our lead from those who have experienced Rikers to understand how personal narratives of harm and survival can help us do three things: remember what Rikers is and why it must close, repair the harm of the state sanction violence that takes place daily on Rikers Island, and once it closes, commit to a process of redress with the communities that have been the targets of systemic injustice and disproportionate rates of policing and generational incarceration. Those are the pillars of our work: remember, repair, redress.

The narratives that RPMP preserves provide a record of what Rikers was and how we can ensure that such a place never exists again. The archive now holds more than 130 audio interviews. With every story we collect, another possible future is seeded. We fertilize those seeds by activating the narratives in our archives through community care programs, a multimedia exhibition now traveling across NYC, a people’s history of Rikers timeline, and our narrative change fellowship program, which invests in the creative production of directly impacted artists and creatives.

Every society tells stories about itself. Those stories determine what feels inevitable and what feels possible. There is no imagination without memory. Our brains are incapable of imagining the future without an awareness of the past. Our shared histories serve as the building blocks of our imagined futures. Through community archives, we can preserve the past while expanding the range of futures we can collectively imagine.

Closing Rikers is not the end goal. To stop there would simply not be enough — closing Rikers is just the beginning. It’s the start of transforming the criminal legal system in NYC into one that prioritizes care over punishment, of freeing up the resources wasted on a decaying penal colony to invest in housing, education, healthcare, and the arts. It signals that, collectively, we believe in a more abundant future for future generations of New Yorkers.