Shanequa Benitez’s But It’s Ours: The Redline Between Poverty and Wealth

Artist: Shanequa Benitez

This body of work shines the light on gentrification, mass incarceration, inequality for women, police brutality, mental health, hope, and pain. Each piece gives life to each topic. Walking through Yonkers and New York City, all you see is gentrification happening everywhere. Redlining undesirable areas also known as ghettoes is a cause. This work is a reflection of the effect.

In large-scale, vibrant paintings and documentary photographs, Shanequa Benitez visualizes the experiences of environmental racism and redlining in her native city Yonkers, NY. Beginning in the 1930s, Yonkers was divided by racist, discriminatory housing policies that segregated the city through racial covenants excluding Black buyers from white communities and by denying loans to Black owners––forms of systemic oppression with ongoing impacts on the community such as financial inequity, food deserts, and poor or nonexistent access to health care.

Through portraits, scenes of urban life, and photographs, Benitez explores environmental injustice on the ground, intimately making visible the experience of extreme temperatures, the lack of access to green spaces, and inadequate healthcare. She makes vivid the forms of “slow violence” through which the climate crisis impacts her community.

Benitez’s paintings stem from her photographic practice––she used her grandfather’s Vivitar 35-millimeter camera to document friends at Cromwell Towers, in the Locust Hill neighborhood of Yonkers, where Benitez grew up. In paintings that shift in scales and move between surface and depth through collage techniques and inclusion of the written word, Benitez explores themes of injustice, joy, and healing. As Benitez writes in a statement from which the exhibition’s title is drawn, “Even when faced with adversity, denial, and the lack of resources, POC (people of color) have learned to be resilient. One thing most POC share is pride for their community and neighborhood, because IT’S OURS!”

Exhibition ran from Saturday, February 25, 2023 - April 7th, 2023