Andrea leads a symposium to discuss her CFA exhibit, Energies of Repair: Visualizing Community Power in NYC.
MUD Workshop Senior Associate Andrea Johnson, in collaboration with Ashley Dawson, recently presented Energies of Repair: Visualizing Community Power in NYC at the Center for Architecture Lab under the theme Repair Democracy and Urban Spaces.
Energy can be difficult to see and even harder to understand. Electricity appears at the flip of a switch, while the systems that generate, transmit, store, and govern it stretch across the city and far beyond it. Energies of Repair grew from a desire to make those systems more legible and to consider what it might mean to repair an energy landscape shaped by decades of extraction, pollution, and unequal investment.
The exhibition brought together maps, photographs, interviews, and case studies tracing New York’s energy infrastructure from industrial waterfronts to communities organizing for alternative futures. It explored different scales of energy advocacy and what it might mean to build a system rooted in public ownership and community control. Case studies highlighted community repair work across the city, from Sunset Park to Greenpoint to Rikers Island.
Integral to Johnson’s approach — and to MUD Workshop’s broader community engagement practice — the exhibit was participatory and grounded in grassroots effort. The exhibit extended beyond the gallery through interviews with activists and a series of walking tours that brought its questions into the landscape. With UPROSE, participants explored community-owned solar and the offshore wind staging area in Sunset Park. In Greenpoint, participants walked the perimeter of New York State’s largest fossil fuel facility with Sane Energy Project and Newtown Creek Alliance, discussing the LNG facility and its impacts on the surrounding community. With NYC Environmental Justice Alliance and The POINT CDC, participants explored a community vision for Rikers Island to become a green energy hub.
Although the exhibit closed on September 2, its questions and approaches will continue to inform MUD Workshop’s work with communities across New York City and the State toward decarbonization and a just energy transition.