On a stretch of Tompkins Avenue where new businesses, rising rents, and shifting demographics continue to reshape Bedford-Stuyvesant, members of The Bed-Stuy Block Association believe public art can do more than brighten a blank wall. The Tompkins Avenue Community Mural now taking shape along the avenue does not argue that Bedford-Stuyvesant should remain frozen in time. Rather, it insists that change need not require amnesia.
Over the past several weeks, volunteers, artists, business owners, and longtime residents have gathered beneath a once graffiti-covered wall to create a mural tracing Bedford-Stuyvesant's past, present and future. Historic neighborhood landmarks—including the Tompkins Meat Market and the trolley that once traveled along Tompkins Avenue—appear alongside scenes of contemporary life: children playing double dutch and hopscotch, roller skating, gathering on stoops, and moving through the rhythms of everyday community. Together, the images imagine a future rooted in creativity, resilience, and the belief that Bed-Stuy's evolution should remain inseparable from the people who have long called it home.
Organized by the newly formed Bed-Stuy Block Association, the project is as much about reclaiming public space as it is about preserving the stories, relationships, and cultural memory that have shaped one of New York City's most historically significant Black neighborhoods. However for TBA President Isha Maat, owner of Make Manifest, the mural began with something far simpler: a wall she could no longer ignore.
"I look at that wall all the time," Maat said. "It's right across the street from me, and it was always filled with graffiti. We really needed to do something over there—to beautify it." What began as an effort to transform an overlooked corner of Tompkins Avenue soon evolved into a broader conversation about belonging, visibility, and whose histories remain legible within a rapidly changing neighborhood.
Founded last September under the former Tompkins Block Association, the organization grew out of conversations with longtime residents who felt that the neighborhood's transformation had also altered its social fabric.
"The neighborhood's changing," Maat said. "People don't know their neighbors anymore. The energy is different."
Rather than resist change itself, the association has sought to create new opportunities for neighbors, artists, and local businesses to participate in shaping the community's future together.
Working with artist Robert Provilus, the association developed the mural around the theme of "past, present, and future," inviting artists and residents to collectively tell a story of Bedford-Stuyvesant across generations. While Provilus developed the initial composition, inspired by the neighborhood's enduring stoop culture and everyday rituals, the mural itself became a collaborative work through community paint days that welcomed local artists, volunteers, and passersby alike.
The process reflects the association's broader belief that community is built not through spectacle but through participation. Beginning without an operating budget, the organization relied almost entirely on neighborhood donations, merchandise sales, conversations with passersby, and social media support.
"I think all of it has been a success because nobody knows us," Maat said with a laugh. "We started with zero dollars."
The association launched their GoFundMe with a goal of $12,500 to support project costs, artist fees and future programming. To date, they have raised just over $5,000 through community donations.
The mural does not simply commemorate Bedford-Stuyvesant's past; it offers a public argument about its future. As the neighborhood has increasingly become shorthand for Brooklyn's transformation, its history is often compressed into narratives of decline followed by redevelopment. The association rejects that chronology, offering instead a public archive painted not by institutions or developers but by the people who continue to shape the neighborhood's everyday life.
"People think Bed-Stuy is what it is because of gentrification," Maat said. "This mural is definitely a pushback against that. This is a strong, beautiful, thriving community, and it's always been that way. It's had challenges, but this mural is a small snapshot of that rich legacy—its culture, its life, its community, its togetherness, its beauty, its vibrancy. That richness will always be at the core of what Bed-Stuy is."
Once completed, the mural will mark only the beginning of the association's broader vision for neighborhood engagement. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will be followed by a community block party on Aug. 9, with additional neighborhood initiatives planned throughout the year. Together, they reflect an understanding that neighborhoods are sustained not only through preservation but through participation.
As Maat put it, "We don't want to miss the plot. The plot is community. The plot is togetherness."
