Senior Capstone · Rutgers University–Newark · 2019

"Liberty and Prosperity" is the state motto of New Jersey. It is also a promise that fewer and fewer residents can afford to hold the state to.

New Jersey is one of the most expensive states in the country to live in. Cost of living runs well above the national average while wages lag behind it — an imbalance that has pushed families out of the state for decades. My own family was one of them. I moved thirteen times in twenty-four years.

This capstone made that pressure visible three ways.

A four-card greeting series carrying sound bites from interviews with New Jersey residents about the financial reality of staying here — the format borrowed from something we send to say thinking of you, holding something considerably harder to send.

A four-sided poster mobile, hung above the cards to be read in the round. Each face maps one geography of the state — rural, shoreline, city, suburban — against census data tracking migration and financial pressure across demographics over time.

A seventeen-minute autobiographical video documenting the twelve homes I lived in across New Jersey. I went back to all of them. I photographed the houses and what surrounded them, and tracked the rent at each one as it climbed until it forced the next move. It ends where I think most of these stories actually end — not in defeat, but in the particular grit that living here builds in you.

Exhibited for two weeks at Project for Empty Space, Gateway One, Newark, as part of the graduating class exhibition of 2019. I served on the organizing committee and spoke at opening night. The project contributed to the Design Excellence Award from Rutgers University–Newark.