No Such Place as America

2017 - 2021

No Such Place as America is a project created in collaboration with Patricia Kelly, the Executive Director of Ebony Horsewomen in Hartford CT, and a group of Black and Latinx teenage equestrians, using a combination of performance and equine therapy to express their thoughts on what they have learned from horses about trust, power, control, and the nature of self.

Kelly and Crean worked with local teens who are expert riders to produce workshops concerning the potential of equine therapy to illuminate issues of power, as well as possibilities for communication and collaboration. The youth led these workshops for Hartford Police, highlighting the officers' fraught relationship with control, as well as the young people's mastery at transcending fear in their daily lives. The group of young Black and Latinx men who are confident experts with horses, working with law enforcement who had never been around them, demonstrated an unusual shift of power. With equine therapy, horses acted as a form of mirror to help demonstrate to police how their affect projects a sense of confrontation, thus increasing the potential for conflict.

Resulting work includes single and multi-channel video, weaving narrative elements with more impressionistic studies on performance, movement and gesture; as well as documentation of the combined performance & equine therapy methodology used by the group.

This project title, as well as one of the videos, is based on short story of the same name by Peter Bichsel. It describes America as being founded on a fictional story that we continue to tell ourselves, which might be creatively adopted or rewritten as needed.

This project was made possible with research funding from Parsons School of Design, and the generous support of A Blade of Grass Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art, 2018.