LOOKOUT COLLECTIVE

For several years, Lookout Collective has been an outdoor art and nature community for young people in Brooklyn. Born out of the pandemic lockdown the collective emerged to lookout at the world and to lookout for each other. Initially, the group met in Mount Prospect Park during the summer to explore artmaking, nature studies, community-building, and performance. From our shared picnic blankets, we weathered hurricanes and steamy days while creating utopian mud cities, electric music videos, colorful publications, recycled boats, plant-based inks, tie-dyed socks, and a sense of connection to each other.

After years of Lookout experiments in the park, we now have an at-home artmaking, event, gallery, and community space. We continue with same vision, to create a space for caring about the people and the world around us. Working as a collective (meaning we’re all in this together!), we aim to collaborate with artists and neighbors of all ages and backgrounds to nurture opportunities to create the worlds we want through the arts.

We coordinate artmaking events, after-school workshops, figure drawing sessions, portfolio prep sessions, pop-up exhibitions, readings, and more.

WHO

Lead Lookout Coordinators: Nate Sensel and Marit Dewhurst
Nate and Marit met while coordinating teen art programs at MoMA. They have both worked in art education as educators, artists, and administrators for years and years in museums, schools, community spaces, international organizations, detention centers, and colleges. They have a ten-year-old, Desi, who is also a core Lookout Coordinator.

Lookout Educators: We work with a rotating team of educators who prioritize play, imagination, agency, critical consciousness, activism, collaboration, cross-cultural community-building, and love.

Lookout Collective: Everyone who participates contributes in the ways they can from helping manage communication to dropping off popsicles. We aim for a mode of collaboration where we all lean on each other to create the kind of community care we crave. We try to build on the ideas and practices of many before us who remind us that we all need each other to thrive. We rely on trust in each other above all else. It’s all an emergent experience in community building.

“Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language… [it means] you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.’ We belong in a bundle of life.” – Desmond Tutu, 1999, No Future Without Forgiveness

“Without community there is no liberation…But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” – Audre Lorde, 1979, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”