Genesis Martinez-Crespo

Genesis’ project, La Gran Herida (The Grand Wound), will be an assemblage of photographs and drawings examining personal displacement within the gentrifying landscape of Philadelphia. Genesis’ series seeks to dismantle an overarching stigma that artists are responsible for gentrification by expressing the diasporic state of artists of color. This multi-contextual body of work will be exhibited in spaces that will also function as "talk back" caucuses, where critique, strategies, and information can be exchanged about how to challenge systems of oppression. In these spaces, Genesis will feature voices of those who resist academic definitions of a successful artist. 

Genesis believes that for social shifts to thrive, we must create a home to hold space for our nuanced identities. Genesis plans to express these identities in an installation entitled Una Casita Luna (The Little Moon House). Una Casita Luna will follow the tradition of early Puerto Rican immigrants of Manhattan’s Lower East Side who created them to cope with displacement.  With the help of the Norris Square Neighborhood Project’s Art Factory, Una Casita Luna will be made public through an after school program and Genesis will host workshops on relief and relief printmaking (the process of inking the protruding areas of a surface, leaving recessed areas free of ink).