325 Main St, Kerhonkson, NY 12446
(41.7732272, -74.2956160)
2020-2023

325 MAIN is a neighborhood conversation investigating belonging—who belongs, where, and why? Our opening question: WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE?

We started this hyper-local project from the art studio that we shared with Cal Patch, in a storefront at 325 Main Street in Kerhonkson, New York. Over several years, during and post pandemic, we watched and experienced changes in our neighborhood, in part due to the influx of new people to our small hamlet of 2,000 in the Shawangunk area.

In the push for a new look on Main Street, our studio rent was doubled. It’s the old story troupe of “inevitable economic progress” that gets repeated generation after generation, in community after community, with winners and losers. Lower income folks and artists know it well.

We wanted to begin to understand these abstract dynamics in the context of our neighborhood by inviting neighbors into ongoing conversation. We began with a public intervention in our front window asking a series of questions to which neighbors and visitors to the neighborhood could fill out a postcard and leave in a response box or text/call in their responses. We hosted public conversations on the Main Street green to create opportunities for more in-depth conversations. In the last month before we were pushed out (in favor of tenants operating “real business”), we created a poetic text from the community’s responses and hung it in the window. (link to that text on separate page).

Special thanks to our collaborators: Chloe Annetts, Chris DePew, Cal Patch, Jodi Van der Kruik, Edgar Westerhof, Phyllis and Irene Rocha.