For two years, two Crown Heights artists asked the neighbors on their block the same thing: tell us a story about living here. The answers, along with photographs and artwork, are now a book, Before It's Gone: Archive to Survive, and its launch is on Saturday, November 7, at Weeksville Heritage Center on Buffalo Avenue.

The afternoon is free, with an RSVP, and pairs the book launch with a panel discussion on art and community engagement as ways of preserving Black and Brown neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Who made it

The book comes from the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, a community-based public art project that Mildred Beltré and Oasa DuVerney founded in 2010. The two artists have lived in the same Crown Heights building for more than twenty-five years. According to Weeksville, the collaboration began with drawing and sewing nights the two hosted in each other's apartments, and grew into a practice of making art for and with the people around them.

Beltré and DuVerney are artists, educators and parents, and their project has long dealt with what happens to a block as it changes: who stays, who leaves, and how neighbors come to trust or distrust one another. Archive to Survive is the result of that work turned toward memory.

What is in the book

The book is a community story collection gathered over two years from longtime residents of a single Crown Heights block. It brings together their narratives with photographs and artworks. The organizers describe the stories as covering neighbors and places that are no longer there, and as ranging from tragedy to love to laughter. The point of collecting them, in the artists' framing, is to keep a record of the lives lived on that block before those memories are lost.

Copies will be available at the launch, and the authors plan to sign books after the panel discussion.

Why Weeksville

Weeksville Heritage Center preserves the history of Weeksville, one of the free Black communities founded in nineteenth-century Brooklyn, and runs programs on Black history, culture and preservation from its campus at 158 Buffalo Avenue. A book about holding on to a Crown Heights block's own history fits squarely into what the center does, and it is a short walk from the block the stories come from.

The November 7 launch is one of two free evenings on Weeksville's calendar this fall. The other, Weeksville Watch Night: Black Stories, Unbound, is a screening of four short films with a fireside conversation on Friday, October 30, from 6 to 9 p.m.

If you go

What: Before It's Gone: Archive to Survive book launch and panel discussion with the Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine.

When: Saturday, November 7. Weeksville lists the event from 3 to 6 p.m.; one line of the event page also mentions a 2 p.m. start, so check the listing before you head over.

Where: Weeksville Heritage Center, 158 Buffalo Avenue, Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The A and C trains stop at Utica Avenue, and the 3 and 4 stop at Crown Heights-Utica Avenue, both a walk from the center.

Cost: Free. RSVP through Weeksville's event page.

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