Tree of Life
Arts+Healing
A space where people could be together after the attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, on 27 October 2018. First an outdoor living room, then a festival of art and listening.
The outdoor living room
In the days after the attack I organised and built a 30-day outdoor living room outside the synagogue. Donations came from around Pittsburgh: tents, chairs, blankets, tea and cookies, so that people could sit together outside the building.
Friends who were pastors and rabbis were there for people arriving from across Pittsburgh, the US and the world. Musicians came to play. There was free tea and there were free hugs: anyone could arrive, sit, be heard, and leave when they were ready. It ended with a concert.
My mentor, the trauma expert Dr. Lisa López Levers of Duquesne University, guided me through this time, and I took part in trauma-response workshops and meetings with spiritual leaders, to understand what the community actually needed.
A festival of radical listening
At the Pittsburgh Fringe Festival I co-organised a three-day outdoor living room and art festival for healing and radical listening, with more than 40 volunteers.
Projection art, sidewalk chalk murals, experimental theatre, live music and a bonfire, with tents for making art and exchanges that helped people open up and connect across difference.
Seen around the world
My photographs from this time appeared in outlets including ABC Good Morning America, NBC News, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, NPR and Bloomberg, and were selected for a juried group exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2019.
How the pictures ran
I photographed the days after the attack for SOPA Images. The pictures ran in TIME, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, People, CNN, The Guardian and many other outlets around the world.
Listening before acting, and creating the conditions without directing the outcome.
Built around what people needed to bring, not what organisers decided they should find.
Voluntary, with many ways to take part and no single story.
More than 40 volunteers across many art forms at once.
Music, fire and food as anchors for people in the space.