What is a forest without the people that arrive there? What is a city without nature to border it? What is a society without a history to build it? What is a history without people who build through it?

“Heirlooms: the Forest as Gallery” is the landmark first show at the Slow Factory Forest, founded as a haven during our uncertain time by Collis Browne and Céline Semaan.

Slow Factory is radically reimagining art, land, and liberation—transforming the forest into a site of memory, resistance, and imagination.This inaugural gathering reclaims nature as both sanctuary and stage, bringing together artists, activists, and audiences for participatory artworks, performances, workshops, and rituals rooted in ecological restoration and cultural healing.

The forest is located in Nyack—or, Lenapehoking, the land of the Lenape people— the first recorded land in the British colonies of America where Black people owned land in the 17th century and continued through the present.Throughout its colonial history, Nyack has sheltered the dispossessed and persecuted, serving as a passage point on the Underground Railroad.

In the midst of our country’s persecution of those seeking shelter and safety as well as our world’s addiction to resource and land theft, we are honored to stage a community event on land that has, throughout its history, housed and protected people.

For the inaugural art show, Slow Factory has invited the NewYork based, artist-run gallery Ward Gallery to co-curate and collaborate on this foundational moment. Ward, which was founded in 2024 by Gabrielle Richardson and Saam Niami, with their massively popular contemporary survey “New York…NOW!”, stands as one of the most exciting young gallery projects in an uncertain time period for the art world. Through creativity, artist-forward thinking, and tenacity, they are riding through this current moment in the art world through imaginative spatial initiatives. Where else other than just outside of the anxiety of New York’s art world with space to breathe and greenery to remember that the origin is art?

For this first show, Slow Factory and Ward Gallery gathered artists concerned primarily with movement, community-histories, and environmental preservation and documentation. These artists include Carlos Agredano, Cassandra Mayella Allen, Cara Marie Piazza, Nadia Irshaid Gilbert, Praise Fuller, and Vivien Sansour.

To commemorate and to begin the archive of the exhibition Heirlooms:The Forest as Gallery, Everything is Political invited Ward to interview the exhibiting artists as well as our editor-in-chief Céline Semaan for this issue. The following are edited transcripts of conversations between Richardson and the artists with text and edits by Niami.