PULLING THINGS APART
TO COME BACK TOGETHER
Healing through Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s abolitionist pods
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUEIn this conversation, Blakeney and dorriz reflect on the founding of Crenshaw Dairy Mart, the time and relational speed of abolition, and the role of third places amidst political crises. The Crenshaw Dairy Mart, based in a former dairy mart building from 1965 located just South of Manchester and off of Crenshaw Boulevard, stands as a living testament to the complex history of Black migration, White Flight, and community resilience in Inglewood. Their ongoing project, abolitionist pod, is a modular series of autonomous community gardens across LA County—sourced with an abundance of locally-grown fruit and vegetable plants—that partner organizations activate through weekly workshops. Their pod curricula engage various communities on topics of abolitionist praxis, food justice, art and healing, and intersectional feminism, with the goal of addressing food insecurity and imagining a safer world where everyone in the community has access to drinking water, food, and shelter.
This conversation took place in the abolitionist pod at the Crenshaw Dairy Mart in sunny Los Angeles over tea with the sound of cars and trains passing by, where Blakeney and dorriz hosted Romi Ron Morrison, an artist and researcher working on Black diasporic technologies and social infrastructure.
NOTES
1. Justice reinvestment is a data-driven approach to reducing incarceration and recidivism by divesting from corrections spending and reinvesting those funds in better public safety strategies.
2. Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization headquartered in Oakland, California with the mission of abolishing the prison industrial complex, and the work of co-founders Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, are just a few of these examples.
3."#PrayforLA" consisted of the first abolitionist pod programs as well as a project CDM participated in, which was organized by The Mistake Room, entitled "Things with Feathers." CDM contributed a project entitled "domingo," a 1967 Chevy Step-van that CDM co-founder noé olivas acquired in 2011 and has organized as a "rolling social sculpture" and exhibition space. The project was commissioned for use as a food delivery van for the predominantly working-class community of Pico-Union. For more information, visit: https://www.crenshawdairymart.com/domingo.
4. Jake Freilich led the art kits initiative that CDM contributed to Summaeverythang's food supply kits. Jake is an artist and studio-mate and was an MFA cohort member of the CDM co-founders.
alexandre ali reza dorriz: In 2020, our first year [of leading Crenshaw Dairy Mart], we witnessed the proliferation of various mutual aid efforts. We saw vocabulary around “defund the police” and “justice reinvestment”1 become popularized after the onset of COVID-19, as well as how the pandemic exacerbated issues of food insecurity. While abolition was thrown into the zeitgeist, it had been built on several decades of grassroots work in and beyond Los Angeles. LA has been an important space in the abolitionist imagination for creating alternatives to incarceration globally.2
During the first week of January 2021, when we were in the wake of the most COVID-19 hospitalizations that LA County had seen, we launched a program called Pray for LA.3 We introduced prayer into this vision of what the pandemic could've looked like if we lived in an abolitionist imaginary, and what could have alternatively existed. This involved multiple projects that incorporated prayer and abolition. And among other mutual aid efforts, we created the Inglewood Community Fridge, led by community organizers juice wood and Vern Yancy. That felt very important, alongside distributing food supply kits with [artist] Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang community center that was led by Jake Freilich. 4 These programs led to what would become the abolitionist pod program, established that May, where we began connecting issues of food justice to abolition.
RRM: That’s important and helpful context that unveils not only the lineage you’re working in, but also how the process of making and cultivating relationships continues to hold the practice together.
Before we started recording this interview, we were talking about some of the things that were left out of that moment when “defund the police” was thrown into the zeitgeist. That social infrastructural building that we’re talking about now is sometimes left out of that conversation; a larger audience is sometimes left with the idea that abolition is just about abolishing the police, and there’s nothing in the absence of that.
So I’m wondering if y’all would like to speak about how you understand abolition, and about the challenging work of trying to correct how abolition might be imagined in a wider context versus how you’re grounding abolition in your practice here. The rich interdependency that you’re building is vital for that vision of abolition.
Ashley Blakeney: We often say that we’re prototyping the abolitionist imagination at Crenshaw Dairy Mart and thinking about abolition in a two-pronged way: dismantling oppressive systems and then building new systems that serve us. The way we approach abolition emphasizes the “low and slow of it all,” as our co-founder noé [olivas] likes to say, and leans into the different elements of it. Abolition is in our relationships with each other. Abolition is in ensuring that folks are resourced. Abolition is in making sure that our team and larger community are cared for. We always say that, with each project, we’ve built an entire ecosystem where we’re sharing resources. The abolitionist pod is from Crenshaw Dairy Mart, but ten other organizations have participated in this project and have in turn been resourced by it.
I think part of the disconnect you’ve been naming is due to time getting left out of the equation. We know that there need to be new systems and new solutions, and it takes time to build them. There has to be room for failure and for prototyping, and these efforts also have to be resourced. And I think that’s something that abolitionist organizations and organizers are consistently struggling and grappling with. We need the space, time, and resources to try these new things. So we’re trying to embrace that here. We tend to dream really, really big and try something really big, and emphasize that artists are and should be at the forefront of this because of their creative imaginations. Through our inaugural Fellowship for Abolition and the Advancement of the Creative Economy [2022-2023], we worked with three artists who were prototyping what abolition looks like and one of the artists, Autumn Breon, presented in her final exhibition a care machine, which is a free vending machine where you can get condoms and Plan B pills and medicine, and all types of books. It’s really beautiful because since her fellowship has ended, she’s toured the machine all across the country, and that’s like abolition in action.
We often say that we’re prototyping the abolitionist imagination at Crenshaw Dairy Mart and thinking about abolition in a two-pronged way: dismantling oppressive systems and then building new systems that serve us.
AB: That’s right.
RRM: So you’re starting to also articulate a different way to think about building—not as imposing one big structure, but as creating different pieces that maybe grow on different timelines or in different places but have a shared politic or process.
AB: Absolutely. Thank you for that beautiful callback. We also practice that in the way we work with institutions. When we built the first abolitionist pod structure [in May 2021] at the MOCA Geffen [museum in Los Angeles, housed in a former police car warehouse], we had courageous conversations with them about policing and how our pod would be secured. Their contracted security firm has a longstanding relationship with LAPD, and we really had a teach-in about why that wasn’t our practice, and if we were going to be in collaboration, that was not something we wanted. We taught them about abolitionist security practices and helped shift the conversation to prioritize people over property, emphasizing that our focus remains on people's safety rather than the sculpture's protection. That teaching has historically been part of our process, if and when we collaborate with organizations or spaces that may not have abolition in their value set. Bringing them into this moment with us is very important.
RRM: You were also mentioning before how important it is to have the resources for this work to happen. Could you share how you navigate that as the executive director of an organization? What would you tell others who want to enact and resource their abolitionist projects while keeping a commitment to their practice and politics?
AB: Yeah, it’s a ride. [laughs] We’re in a very unique moment right now that I’ve been calling The Great Retraction. When we opened, and because it was 2020, we were very blessed. Funders were very willing to give to a space like ours because it was around the time of the racial uprisings and the pandemic. Abolition was a topic of conversation. Four years later, some funders are like, we’re shifting priorities and abolition, defunding the police, is not the topic of conversation. Philanthropy is pivoting.
That was a learning curve for me, and the team has helped ground me. We would get a grant and I’d be like, well, we have to build this thing in a year. I would be on these time crunches, and that’s not always possible—not when you’re doing something that has never been done before, and not when you’re doing something with integrity, and not when you’re trying to build the intimacy and healing and care that go into these projects.
So that has been an exercise in patience, and also in learning and teaching. A lot of folks are having these conversations right now about how to pivot the cultural understanding within philanthropy. First, we need more of a trust-based giving model, especially for abolitionist organizations or organizations that are doing something that hasn’t been done before. And second, ease off the gas on the constant production and that relationship between capitalism and productivity; it’s not sustainable, but it’s the way that philanthropy tends to move.
RRM: It feels like you’re pushing back against a certain linear, progressive notion of time that’s about efficiency and productivity and output and marketability and all this other stuff. You’re prioritizing the time of cultivation, relationship building, and experimentation, and thinking about the choreography between those notions of time. How would you describe the time of abolition and how you navigate these different time signatures?
AB: I really appreciate the way you are calling back and processing this information. Okay, so I was thinking about our somatics practice. Between 2022 and 2023, CDM and several partner organizations participated in two embodied somatic retreats to deepen our commitments to ourselves and our organizations. These retreats helped us remain grounded in times of crisis or uncertainty, strengthened our ability to say "no" from a rooted place, and guided us in crafting our organizational declaration—a commitment to sustaining a sanctuary of care and creativity. Since then, members of the team have continued individual somatics practices while we continue our work. That was impactful for our team in figuring out how to move with the changing times, including identifying and gaining permission to name where we can move a little bit quicker and where we can slow down.
In terms of infrastructure, I’m constantly thinking about what systems we can have in place that will allow us to be efficient regardless of what the timeline is or what we’re working on. For example, another big thing in the arts world that is really, really impactful specifically for artists of color is getting paid and getting paid on time. Something that we deeply pride ourselves on here is that we have a very, very efficient system for getting people paid within two weeks. That was one of the first systems we put in place with our bookkeeper. We get so much feedback around that, and it makes me so happy. But in the same breath, when folks reach out to us and want to collab, sometimes it's going to take a month or two for us to get back because we are going to take a step back and say, do they align with our values? Does this fall within our scope of ancestry, healing, and abolition? Is there trust in this relationship? Is this a good representation of what we’re doing? It’s really a give-and-take around what is feeling like a priority and also understanding that everything cannot be a priority.
RRM: Important distinction. [laughs]
5. See the "End of Year Letter (2024)" by Crenshaw Dairy Mart, https://www.crenshawdairymart.com/end-of-year-letter-2024.
6. Dignity and Power Now is a Los Angeles-based grassroots organization focused on bringing about transformative and healing justice for incarcerated people and their communities.
7. Patrisse Cullors & alexandre ali reza dorriz, “Abolitionist Aesthetics and the Abolitionist Movement: Los Angeles Grassroots Organizations and the Aesthetic Foundations of Real-Time Abolition,” UCLA Law Review (2023), https://www.uclalawreview.org/abolitionist-aesthetics-and-the-abolitionist-movement-los-angeles-grassroots-organizations-and-the-aesthetic-foundations-of-real-time-abolition/
6. Dignity and Power Now is a Los Angeles-based grassroots organization focused on bringing about transformative and healing justice for incarcerated people and their communities.
7. Patrisse Cullors & alexandre ali reza dorriz, “Abolitionist Aesthetics and the Abolitionist Movement: Los Angeles Grassroots Organizations and the Aesthetic Foundations of Real-Time Abolition,” UCLA Law Review (2023), https://www.uclalawreview.org/abolitionist-aesthetics-and-the-abolitionist-movement-los-angeles-grassroots-organizations-and-the-aesthetic-foundations-of-real-time-abolition/
But it is a test of patience. It’s been three years of us trying to build this current pod and it’s not built yet. It's something that we've had to grapple with, from the funder-side being like, "We need to get this done right away," but we literally cannot because of things outside our control—from insurance requirements to bureaucratic processes that exceed our capacity as a small organization. So how are we going to pivot? How are we going to change? How are we going to improvise? That’s how we spend a lot of our time, especially because we want to stay true to our values.
RRM: One of the things I hear a lot in your response around time is also a practice of care. There’s not always an easy one-to-one relationship between the type of time, fast or slow, or hesitant or immediate, and then one form of care. But that care is the thing that then modulates what time you need to be in. You mentioned the care to get people paid quickly, but also the care to take more time to discern if a collaboration fits. There’s a care for the organization and for each other in that.
AB: Absolutely.
RRM: Could you speak about how you understand healing and care within the work of abolition, both individually as people and as a collective with Crenshaw Dairy Mart?
aard: For me, I’ve been understanding how the abolitionist pod program can be a vessel for our abolitionist teachings in collaboration with our program director, Vic Quintanar. How do each of the programs embody the teachings of abolition? What is the social architecture of an embodied abolition? That’s something that these geometries, [these geodesic domes of the pods,] are slowly making more visible to us. One of our first meetings from Imagination Year (2020), an internal-facing curriculum of programmed study for the abolitionist pod, was centered on [architect and theorist] Buckminster Fuller’s concept of tension and integrity, “tensegrity,” and how to build a structure without weight-bearing columns that could sustain its weight autonomously. So the form of the geodesic dome, which he developed and which we adopted for the abolitionist pods, is a structural and metaphorical combination of a lot of tension and integrity between these nodes and rods.
That itself was a brilliant anecdote for us to sit with, thinking about the tensions within abolitionist praxis between the constant building and prototyping, and the actual destruction of harmful systems, and the constant tension between physical nodes but also community members and collaborators. All these sorts of things create this beautiful, elegant, freestanding structure. The more I spend time with our team, the more I spend time with collaborators, I just think of the weight that the structure withstands every day and the gravity that it holds just to balance itself. That feels most potent for me. How do I embody that in my day-to-day life with family members and with this work?
One of our collaborators, and one of the folks who actually led us in forming our first workshops and in articulating our big vision before we opened our doors, was Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson, who’s the current executive director of Dignity and Power Now.6 In an interview we did with him for the UCLA Law Review, he talks about how abolition, when it’s wordy, when it’s in this sort of mess of the systems conversation around prison industrial complex abolition, becomes sometimes inaccessible.7 So how do we embody a lack of punitiveness in the ways that we hold each other accountable? How do we embody care when someone has been harmed? All those things that you’re alluding to, those are practices that need to be embodied.
RRM: That gives me a lot [laughs], because part of what I’m hearing is the importance of intimacy. Marquis Bey is a scholar who writes about Black radical practices of feminism and their relationship to fugitivity, and they define fugitivity as “the critical intimacy that we share with one another when we come together to pull things apart.” I’m curious how you’re thinking about intimacy in your work, but also what processes around intimacy y’all are trying to cultivate.
It’s been three years of us trying to build this current pod and it’s not built yet. It's something that we've had to grapple with, from the funder-side being like, "We need to get this done right away," but we literally cannot... So how are we going to pivot? How are we going to change? How are we going to improvise?
AB: I think that in both the intimacy and the healing piece, there has to be a level of acceptance and a level of come-as-you-are. I remember there was an unhoused encampment near the [MOCA Geffen] pod, and one day somebody was taking a nap in the pod. To me, that’s intimacy and healing. That’s someone who maybe would have been told to move in another instance, being able to take a nap among a thousand plants. That’s just really beautiful. I think about the care that noé has poured into our physical space, with the plants and the cleanliness. When you cross through our playground and onto Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s premises, you already feel a grounding and a rootedness in the physical space. And that’s because somebody has tended to this space with a lot of care as an invitation to come as you are and be here.
I remember when I first started working here, I was like, time doesn’t exist at the Mart because people would come for one reason or another and then just stay for hours, and it was fine. We may or may not have the time or capacity to entertain them, but they might just hang in the pod or hang at the bench. I’m even thinking about Ms. Loretta [Fields-Powell], our bookkeeper, who was retired and had worked a very long career, but her real love and passion was always helping young people and specifically young artists. And she tells me all the time that this is the job of her dreams—and she’s in her late sixties, after a full life and full career, and she finally feels like she is in the space that she has always wanted to be in and is doing work that feels meaningful to her. And that to me is intimacy and healing. Even our co-founders all split their time between their art practice and working for Crenshaw Dairy Mart. Right now, noé is installing his show titled “la jornada” at the Charlie James Gallery. We try to provide our co-founders with that spaciousness, to have the ability to be like, do your thing and we’re going to hold it down and then you’ll come back.
RRM: Thank you for that. I feel like it's speaking to something I’ve been thinking about and trying to articulate around what it means to share the risk of uncertainty. I think these open lines of intimacy, of time, of care, and of healing, establish the trust that allows for flexibility and adaptation. You’re cultivating the conditions for this trust to be the bedrock, which then makes the space of uncertainty not predictable, but able to be absorbed, and the risk is shared rather than offset or allocated to someone else.
I wanted to close by thinking about adaptation and shift in this moment, because we’re two days out from this large electoral decision [2024 US presidential election], and there are very palpable feelings of uncertainty, of anxiety, of fear. And I think you can also start to see a response to that which embodies punishment: pointing fingers, scapegoating, ostracizing. When I was reading through some of the material around the pod, I was struck by a paragraph about some of the building materials, this mix between the bamboo and the dandelion. It describes how the dandelion uses above-ground propagation—it’s moving in the wind. And then the bamboo grows underground, is more concealed, but has deep roots and maybe grows laterally versus up or down. Moving with those two images as metaphors for the work that you do, I’m curious how the dandelion or the bamboo might relate to the future of your work amid what will likely be a very hostile political terrain.
aard: There is so much going on right now, but with the pod we are learning how we represent abolition as something we can metabolize. We create an understanding of how to embody these practices for creating safety nets, security, protection. Patrisse and noé’s practices are so much invested in prayer, and I think of prayer and community a lot—even if one does not have faith, prayer brings in community to at the very least create circles, hubs, pods, things. And if I think back to when we were formulating the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, the purpose of the Dairy Mart was never to just be a monolithic institution. That was actually part of our critique.
The arts economy does not deserve to have monolithic institutions. It should have neighborhood galleries everywhere, a community gallery in every single place, an organizing hub that you go to on every square block, the same utility that libraries offer, the same ways that parks operate. There should be art accessible in every sort of hub. And those art spaces could be organizing spaces. A lot of the rhetoric that we’re hearing right now from movement leaders is about going back to our communities and organizing again, revisiting our neighbors and putting our hands in soil together—all of these practices that we have the tools for. It’s just a matter of continuing to work on the tools.
AB: I’m absolutely on the same page. I wrote down “third space.” I think what’s been really beautiful about the way that the Dairy Mart has been moving since its inception has been our responsiveness to what folks are needing. It feels like a very unique intersection of art and mutual aid on different levels, whether it’s the pod, or the fellowship being birthed out of wanting to better resource Black artists, or our inaugural film festival [2024] because artists needed access to show their work. What we’ve been planning for the next year is more workshops, smaller scale, just bringing folks together in this space. We have a ton of space and it really feels like right now folks want to be in community and they want to be together. And what better way to do that than to make some art and be organizing in the process? It feels like we have an invitation and an opportunity to be that third space, to be an auxiliary home for folks. That’s both what we want to do and what is needed at this moment. And I feel like that’s how we continue to spread both laterally and with our dandelion seeds. It feels really good that that’s where we’re heading.
I remember when I first started working here, I was like, time doesn’t exist at the Mart because people would come for one reason or another and then just stay for hours, and it was fine. We may or may not have the time or capacity to entertain them, but they might just hang in the pod or hang at the bench. I’m even thinking about Ms. Loretta [Fields-Powell], our bookkeeper, who was retired and had worked a very long career, but her real love and passion was always helping young people and specifically young artists. And she tells me all the time that this is the job of her dreams—and she’s in her late sixties, after a full life and full career, and she finally feels like she is in the space that she has always wanted to be in and is doing work that feels meaningful to her. And that to me is intimacy and healing. Even our co-founders all split their time between their art practice and working for Crenshaw Dairy Mart. Right now, noé is installing his show titled “la jornada” at the Charlie James Gallery. We try to provide our co-founders with that spaciousness, to have the ability to be like, do your thing and we’re going to hold it down and then you’ll come back.
RRM: Thank you for that. I feel like it's speaking to something I’ve been thinking about and trying to articulate around what it means to share the risk of uncertainty. I think these open lines of intimacy, of time, of care, and of healing, establish the trust that allows for flexibility and adaptation. You’re cultivating the conditions for this trust to be the bedrock, which then makes the space of uncertainty not predictable, but able to be absorbed, and the risk is shared rather than offset or allocated to someone else.
I wanted to close by thinking about adaptation and shift in this moment, because we’re two days out from this large electoral decision [2024 US presidential election], and there are very palpable feelings of uncertainty, of anxiety, of fear. And I think you can also start to see a response to that which embodies punishment: pointing fingers, scapegoating, ostracizing. When I was reading through some of the material around the pod, I was struck by a paragraph about some of the building materials, this mix between the bamboo and the dandelion. It describes how the dandelion uses above-ground propagation—it’s moving in the wind. And then the bamboo grows underground, is more concealed, but has deep roots and maybe grows laterally versus up or down. Moving with those two images as metaphors for the work that you do, I’m curious how the dandelion or the bamboo might relate to the future of your work amid what will likely be a very hostile political terrain.
aard: There is so much going on right now, but with the pod we are learning how we represent abolition as something we can metabolize. We create an understanding of how to embody these practices for creating safety nets, security, protection. Patrisse and noé’s practices are so much invested in prayer, and I think of prayer and community a lot—even if one does not have faith, prayer brings in community to at the very least create circles, hubs, pods, things. And if I think back to when we were formulating the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, the purpose of the Dairy Mart was never to just be a monolithic institution. That was actually part of our critique.
The arts economy does not deserve to have monolithic institutions. It should have neighborhood galleries everywhere, a community gallery in every single place, an organizing hub that you go to on every square block, the same utility that libraries offer, the same ways that parks operate. There should be art accessible in every sort of hub. And those art spaces could be organizing spaces. A lot of the rhetoric that we’re hearing right now from movement leaders is about going back to our communities and organizing again, revisiting our neighbors and putting our hands in soil together—all of these practices that we have the tools for. It’s just a matter of continuing to work on the tools.
AB: I’m absolutely on the same page. I wrote down “third space.” I think what’s been really beautiful about the way that the Dairy Mart has been moving since its inception has been our responsiveness to what folks are needing. It feels like a very unique intersection of art and mutual aid on different levels, whether it’s the pod, or the fellowship being birthed out of wanting to better resource Black artists, or our inaugural film festival [2024] because artists needed access to show their work. What we’ve been planning for the next year is more workshops, smaller scale, just bringing folks together in this space. We have a ton of space and it really feels like right now folks want to be in community and they want to be together. And what better way to do that than to make some art and be organizing in the process? It feels like we have an invitation and an opportunity to be that third space, to be an auxiliary home for folks. That’s both what we want to do and what is needed at this moment. And I feel like that’s how we continue to spread both laterally and with our dandelion seeds. It feels really good that that’s where we’re heading.