Hello Again
Public Artwork
Art Lot
Brooklyn, NY

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Hello Again is a large-scale analog GIF & building facade installation overlooking the Carroll Gardens intersection of Columbia & Sackett in Brooklyn. Created by artist Gabrielle Mertz, the work contains the complete data and text of three seminal and connected legislative actions on voting rights spanning more than 150 years: the 15th amendment (which granted African-American men the right to vote), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (enforcing the 15th amendment and outlawing discriminatory voting practices), and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2021 (which would restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965). With Hello Again, Mertz exposes the process of viewing in the current Age of Information and Visual Overload. The work’s layering and compressed movement is reflective of the way we experience through a lens of memory and across time. Democracy-building is presented as a moving and ever-evolving act, with steps forward and back, attempts to correct past wrongs and better the future, with the ultimate understanding that the work is never finished.