Photo by Kaitlyn Johnson

By Maria Liu Wong

As I walk towards the end of the block, I see Monique and her kids cross the street. They used to live upstairs in an affordable housing unit above our gallery in central Harlem, but have since moved a few blocks over. In the past three years, they have gone from upstairs neighbor to regular visitors a few times a week, stopping by after school to look at the latest exhibition and make art at our designated “makerspace” with Anthony, our manager.

On Tuesdays just before 1:00 pm, a van pulls up in front of the gallery. A group from The Fisher Center, a day center for adults with special needs, emerges and heads to the door, to be greeted by Anthony and Sachi, another colleague. For the past month or so, they have been coming to look at and make art together.

My favorite time of the year at the gallery is the opening reception of our annual juried group exhibition. I get goose bumps when I see and listen to a diverse group of NYC-based artists, predominantly from Harlem, share about their creative process. They are young and old, a mix of races and cultures, emergent and seasoned, and practitioners of a variety of media and genres. For the past three years, we have issued an annual call for artwork around themes that resonate with our mission, like “Who is my neighbor?” and “Glimpses of Grace in the City.” This is a response to the numerous local artists who have come through our doors and inquired about hanging their work.

These brief anecdotes capture glimpses of how I see shalom happening in my neighborhood, addressing in part the deep wounds of a place in a state of change. Ten years ago, there were abandoned buildings and now, it is difficult to get lunch for less than $10. Frederick Douglass Boulevard is being marketed by some now as “Food Drink Boulevard.” The space for welcome for those who have called this place “home” for generations is shrinking, and economic pressures that have led others to now call this place “home” are exacerbating rifts of race, socioeconomic status, culture, language, and education.

So, how do I – a visible outsider as an Asian American woman in a historically African American neighborhood that is becoming more diverse – work with my staff to address these complex realities, honoring those who have been here while welcoming those who have more recently arrived? There are no simple answers. “Home” is contested for so many in our city. Yet by creating a “third space” in a storefront community arts gallery on a corner in central Harlem, we are becoming a form of shalom, making room for difficult conversations, for seeing in new ways, for asking unexpected questions, for breaking bread in community, for creating and making, and for deep listening when there are no words of response. As a practice of hospitality as an institutional good neighbor, this is public faith.

We invite the Spirit to do the work of healing deep wounds, which we cannot fix with paint and paper. And we persist in lamenting together with our neighbors the brokenness of our society, while at the same time, being present and lighting a beacon of hope that disrupts the narrative that shalom is only of the future, and not of the present.

Maria Liu Wong serves as Dean of City Seminary of New York in Harlem, NYC. She leads a women’s fellowship group and a newcomers’ Beta group with her husband Tony, and volunteers in the children’s ministry at Redeemer Presbyterian Church Downtown. Her research focuses on urban theological education, women and leadership, immigrant youth, diversity, and action research. She lives in the Lower East Side with her husband and three energetic little New Yorkers, and enjoys creating ways to make time and space for students, faculty (and herself!) to learn from and with each other.