June 28, 2024: Kiara Alfonseca of ABC News interviews Ceyenne Doroshow, Gabe DeFazio, Chris Berntsen, Petr Stand, Amron Lee, and jah elyse sayers for The uncertain future of a historic LGBTQ+ safe space: New York City’s People’s Beach.
“The problem really becomes about the uneven development,” said Jah Elyse Sayers, founder of research and archival group The People’s Riisearch Group. “Whatever erosion will be naturally happening, it’s not also accompanied by the usual accretion of sand … Our literal beach is shrinking. The building that really defined the space and held the space is gone.”
March 23, 2024: The Painted Bride presents: something soft, an interactive performance ritual to explore how we can soften.
something soft is a multimodal performance ritual from Ma’at Works Dance Collective (Mawu Gora, jah elyse sayers, Majesty Royale-Jackson) exploring modalities of softness through diverse ideas of technology. Through multiple invitations they invite the audience into rhythmic somatic patterns, sensory exercises and lullabies to reimagine how we hold, suspend and care for ourselves. Afro Presentism speaks of the future as a moving present. They implore these strategies and use technologies from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, undrowned to imagine ourselves in our softest humanity. The work is inspired and made with, and by, black, neurodivergent, queer, trans and non-binary folk in mind.
https://paintedbride.org/projects/something-soft/
November 8, 2023: “What is Queer Space? Civic Leadership Program Seeks Answers at Jacob Riis Beach” by Dean Labowitz and Ami Mehta for American Institute of Architects, NY Chapter:
To begin to understand the significance of Riis Beach to the queer community, the four-hour session began with an audio-visual workshop led by the scholar, artist, and activist, Jah Elyse Sayers. Sayers, who has done years of research (or “Riisearch”) on the site, opened by leading the fellows through a somatic, grounding exercise, asking participants to visualize a place where they felt open possibility. The activity set the stage for Sayers’ immersive audio experience: curated recordings from their oral history project. Over the course of two summers, Sayers has recorded Riis experiences from beachgoers, some who have attended Riis annually for over 30 years. To process the powerful audio, Sayers guided the fellows through small group discussions centered on Riis artifacts: archival photos, Reddit posts, Trip Advisor reviews and newspaper articles found in their research and by Mehta online.https://www.aiany.org/news/what-is-queer-space-civic-leadership-program-seeks-answers-at-queer-nyc-landmark-jacob-riis-beach/
June 1, 2023: “Turning the Tide,” by Dean Labowitz for Urban Omnibus:
GLITS emerged as the leading voice among groups advocating for a queer vision for Riis and founder and executive director Doroshow has big dreams for the site. She wants the land to be permanently under queer and trans stewardship through a Community Land Trust (CLT) where she can build a health and wellness center to serve her community. She wants gender neutral bathrooms, wheelchair ramps to the water, places to buy food and drinks, attentive lifeguards, and better transit access. She wants the arrests to stop and to quell the harassment she and the GLITS community have faced from Neponsit homeowners and Councilmember Ariola’s office. She wants queer and trans people to staff the queer section of the beach, from lifeguards to park rangers. And she wants queer and trans New Yorkers to have a place to go to be themselves every summer until the seas rise. GLITS is also working with scholar Jah Elyse Sayers to explore landmarking the beach with the National Park Service. Sayers notes in a 2022 essay in Deem that a strategy combining landmarking and a CLT that provides resources for the community “has the potential to loosen the stranglehold of private property logics on public space preservation by supporting the embodied health of beachgoers. This approach takes seriously the necessity of living to placemaking and the necessity of care to living.”
https://urbanomnibus.net/2023/06/turning-the-tide/
October 26, 2022: “The Uncertain Future of the Queer Beach,” by Michael Waters for The Baffler:
By the 1970s, a large population of queer and trans people of color in particular found refuge at Riis, a trend that holds true for Riis today. The beach is a space apart, one that the scholar Jah Elyse Sayers calls an example of “queer Afrofuturist placemaking” that “exceeds place or planning.” At Riis, “the liberatory potentialities of QTBIPOC sociality” live on.
Yet Riis today is facing an existential threat. New York City is in the process of demolishing the decaying hospital that for half a century walled off the gay part of the beach from the neighborhood around it. The real question is what will take its place. Will the area become a community land trust, as the trans advocacy group GLITS is asking? Or will a developer come in and create a playground—or worse—that will warp the nature of Riis as a queer haven and expose it to additional layers of policing and outside scrutiny?
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-uncertain-future-of-the-queer-beach-waters
September 12, 2022: Design Trust awards grants to health equity projects, including “Protecting Queer Community Space at Jacob Riis”
Jah on how they envision a healthy city: “To have a healthy city, we need a city built around healing justice. Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective describe healing justice as ‘identif[ying] how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and [bringing] collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts, and minds.’ For me, this description prompts the questions: What do generational traumas and violences look like at the scale of the city?, What consequences of oppression have shaped our built environments and institutions?, What infrastructures support the collective practices of healing that are already in motion?, and What infrastructures might connect us in our struggles for collective healing? When we integrate these questions into our work, it becomes more possible to see and nourish often under-resourced collective healing infrastructures built across environmental, racial, disability, gender, sexual, migrant, and economic justice movements in order to unsettle oppression, domination, and exploitation and bring a healing city more and more into being.”https://www.designtrust.org/news/design-trust-awards-grants-health-equity-projectsty-projects/
October 19, 2021: an interview with jah and excerpts from oral history interviews they conducted with Carl Anthony in preparation for his book The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race are featured in the “Community is a Practice” issue of Architecture Exchange’s audiojournal.
In Episode 4, Molly Esteve describes the life and work of the architect and environmental justice advocate Carl Anthony. Using Anthony’s own words and commentary from Jah Sayers, the episode demonstrates how the Black radical tradition pushed designers and planners beyond the neighborhood to a metropolitan approach to community liberation.
June 26, 2020: “Ph.D. Student Jah Elyse Sayers on how trans people of color establish their space in NYC” by Tanya Domi for The Graduate Center, CUNY:
Domi: How does the art you create contribute to your life and day-to-day living?
Sayers: I make performance and sculptures. I use art as a way to dive into uncertainties, tensions, overlapping metaphors, and affects that I don’t quite know how to express solely verbally or textually. This takes some pressure off of my writing because I’m less worried about trying to express everything in words when I know I can turn to other mediums both for exploration and expression of ideas and affects. I think it’s all the same project of deepening learning and inviting other people in to build ideas and whole worlds together. Learning fabrication skills is something that came out of pursuing metalwork as an art medium, and I use those skills now to help build gardens. My sculpture practice comes out of trash-picking, and helps me look at old furniture and other would-be trash a little differently such that an old loft bed or some broken up pallets can become a garden bed or some scrap metal can become a clock. Art and making bring me joy and the physical practices help calm my mind and focus my thoughts.
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/phd-student-jah-elyse-sayers-how-trans-people-color-establish-their-sense-place-nyc
February 25, 2020: Design Trust for Public Space Fellows Forum presents Peer Learning Program, facilitated by Lee Jimenez and jah elyse sayers.
The Peer Learning Program, designed and facilitated by Jah Elyse Sayers and Lee Jiménez, to engage our cohort of 105 multidisciplinary Fellows, reflects Design Trust’s own model of “open-ended inquiry” and learning together. The goal is for fellows to identify and explore a shared learning interest as pairs, while reflecting on values that are important to support growth in one’s profession. . . The article outlines the process and key take-aways from the kick-off workshop.
