The grand edifice of the Brooklyn Museum, New York City.

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

British-Iraqi artist and data journalist Mona Chalabi has teamed up with Brooklyn Museum, New York, the World Health Organization and CULTURUNNERS, to create a site-specific installation, highlighting the impact of climate change and environmental inequity on Brooklyn communities.

In a time of pandemic and rising temperatures, The Gray-Green Divide asks which neighbourhoods lack vegetation, and at what cost. The Gray-Green Divide has been installed on the imposing front steps of Brooklyn Museum Plaza.

Chalabi’s playful drawings visualise why trees in New York are an issue of environmental justice in the way they impact a community’s physical, mental and social health; not only do trees create shade and shelter, reduce energy needs and remove air pollution, but access to trees also affects physical and mental wellness.

When many New Yorkers were confined to their homes due to COVID-19, extreme heat and unequal proximity to cool green space became — and remain — heightened public health issues.

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One can now find drawings of New York City’s one hundred most common trees, based on data from NYC Parks, on the front steps of the Museum.

By illustrating each of New York City’s one hundred most common trees and its leaves, Chalabi invites viewers to admire the surrounding greenery.

On the adjacent wall, maps of Brooklyn show average temperatures and tree locations. A chart reveals how tree density corresponds with neighbourhood wealth.

Together, the works tell hard truths about the inequities of the borough’s green spaces, laying bare the links between incomes, trees and heat.

Comments Chalabi: “About a year ago, the World Health Organization asked me to make some art in response to Covid-19, and I started thinking about trees in my home borough of Brooklyn.

“I used data from NYC Parks where volunteers had recorded “everything” about the 666,134 street trees in New York. I filtered the data to only include living trees and ended up drawing 100 trees; then I drew their leaves to help you identify.” Mona Chalabi: The Gray-Green Divide is organised by Lauren Zelaya, Director of Public Programs at Brooklyn Museum, and supported by The Future is Unwritten Artist Response Fund as part of Healing Arts, a global cultural call to action in response to the pandemic.

  Mona Chalabi is a British-Iraqi artist and data journalist.

Healing Arts 2022 is produced by CULTURUNNERS and Arts + Health @ NYU under the auspices of the WHO Arts and Health Program.

The Future is Unwritten Artists’ Response Fund was established by CULTURUNNERS in 2020 as part of the United Nations 75th Anniversary Program (UN75) and World Health Organization Solidarity Series of Events.

The Fund provided financial and production support to artist-led projects that contribute to improved mental, social and environmental health in the wake of COVID- 19.

CULTURUNNERS Director and Healing Arts Co-Founder, Stephen Stapleton, said: “Chosen artists like Mona have utilised their platforms and practices to implement healing, communicate critical health prevention messages, interpret humanity’s response to the crisis and further mobilise the global public towards recovery and acting in new, creative and deliberate ways for the improved health of individuals, communities and society at large.” The Fund prioritised projects on the “frontline” of the pandemic, where the crisis exacerbated pre-existing threats to the environment, economy, public health, political stability and human rights.

‘Artists on the frontline’ have been among the first to react, stand together in solidarity and demonstrate compassion with those most vulnerable and at risk, amidst the greatest health challenge to the human race in a century.

Considering both the physical and psychological cost of the current health crisis, the Fund aimed to empower artists working with marginalised communities, and whose projects represent models which can be scaled to contribute to a paradigm shift on health and sustainability issues around the world.

By tapping into a generational wave of activism and the growing call to ‘Build Back Better’ after the pandemic, the projects challenge the fear and divisiveness of recent times to champion a ‘Decade of Action’ in support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Chalabi is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine and The Guardian, among many more.

She has written for radio and TV including NPR, Gimlet, Netflix (The Fix), BBC (Is Britain Racist? Radio 4 and The Frankie Boyle show) and National Geographic (Star Talk).

Before she became a journalist, she worked with large data sets in jobs at the Bank of England, Transparency International and the International Organization for Migration.

She studied International Relations in Paris and studied Arabic in Jordan and was born and raised in London.

The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet (52,000 m2), it NYC’s third largest in physical size and holds an art collection with approximately 500,000 objects.

Founded in 1895, the Beaux-Arts building, designed by McKim, Mead and White, was planned to be the largest art museum in the world.

It initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, only to be revitalised in the late 20th century, thanks to major renovations. Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically the collection of Egyptian antiquities, spanning over 3,000 years. European, African, Oceanic and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is heavily represented, starting at the Colonial period.