On Saturday, Aug. 8, Decatur Street in Bed-Stuy became something of a living cultural commons. Brownstone stoops, sidewalks and storefronts were transformed into stages and gathering spaces as artists, residents, families and local businesses came together for the 13th annual STooPS Summer Festival.
This year’s theme, “Joy as Resistance,” offered more than a slogan for the free neighborhood festival. For STooPS Art & Community Founder and Director Kendra J. Ross, joy has become a way of thinking about what it means to preserve community that has undergone profound change.
The festival allows artists to encounter art in spaces that already belonged to their everyday lives. Rather than placing the work inside a traditional cultural institution, STooPS brings performances and exhibitions directly into the streets, homes, stoops and businesses of Bed-Stuy.
“I knew stoops have always been a space in Brooklyn where people come together, where people laugh, where people gossip, where people mourn, where people activate,” Ross said.
For more than a decade, the organization has understood the stoop as both physical architecture and social infrastructure. Artists and homeowners collaborate to host performances, while audiences move through the neighborhood encountering live music, dance, theater, spoken word and visual art.
The result is an arts festival that asks its audience to reconsider where culture happens—and who gets to participate in making it.
“I moved to Bed-Stuy in 2009, just as the conversation on gentrification started, and I knew I did not want to be extractive,” Ross said. “I knew Bed-Stuy had a rich arts and culture legacy, and I wanted to create a space that highlighted the longstanding entities while also creating a space for people new to the neighborhood to find ways to contribute.”
That question — how to participate in a neighborhood without taking from it — has been embedded in STooPS since its founding in 2013.
That question has particular resonance in Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood whose Black cultural history has long been central to Brooklyn’s identity and whose demographics, housing market and commercial landscape have changed significantly over the past two decades. For Ross, creating cultural programming in that environment means acknowledging the history of the place while making room for people who have arrived more recently. The festival’s emphasis on joy is part of that work.
“Life has been so hard lately,” Ross said. “I wanted to highlight and embrace joy as another way that we can resist against all of the oppressive forces that are trying to bring us down.”
The commitment to honoring local contributions was also reflected in STooPS’ annual Local Heroes/Sheroes Awards, which recognized individuals whose work has helped strengthen Bed-Stuy’s cultural and civic life. This year’s honorees include Olaronke Akinmowo of The Free Black Women’s Library, Rotimi and Michael Peter of Bed-Vyne, Herbert Sweat, Jamila and Ali Wright of Brooklyn Tea and renowned journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones.
“All of these folks are really doing hyper-local things that have a global reach,” Ross said. “They are each transforming our community by adding joy and perspective to our lives.”
After 13 years, STooPS has grown from a grassroots art crawl into an established part of Bed-Stuy’s cultural calendar. The organization recently became a designated nonprofit, opening the possibility of bringing its model to other communities experiencing displacement while building a larger system of volunteers and donation-based support. But its expansion does not erase the importance of where it began.
This past weekend, Bed-Stuy residents once again demonstrated what happens when art is placed directly into community spaces: strangers become neighbors, stoops become stages and joy becomes a way of staying connected to place.
