Dance has always fascinated me.

It is one of the most honest forms of human expression, a conversation between the body and the world around it. Growing up in New York City, I remember block parties and summer gatherings where music pulsed through the streets. But in a single moment, joy could fracture. The staccato rhythm of gunfire could replace the beat, and the dance would change—bodies ducking, dropping, running… Movement became survival.

Street Dancers emerges from this tension, growing from those memories and the reality that many underserved communities still live in this duality: the desire for joy shadowed by the threat of violence. The work is cast from lead and brass using real spent bullets. Lead forms the meandering path, symbolizing the streets themselves, weighted with history, danger, and the uphill journey toward safety and opportunity. Rising from that path are three inverted brass Metahūms. Their unstable orientation reflects the experience of navigating life while denied the stable foundation many others take for granted.

These three figures represent Identity, Agency, and Education—forces that can shift the dance of survival toward empowerment and liberation. For me, this work is both personal and collective. It is a meditation on resilience and a call to action: to see, support, and invest in the communities that are too often isolated from meaningful resources and opportunity.

I hope Street Dancers invites viewers to consider both the fragility and the strength within these journeys—the movement from fear to self-determination, and the transformative power of reclaiming the rhythm of life.