REITERATION
SPRING / SUMMER 2026
Photos by Jason D. Little
Reiteration (2026) revisits three previous site specific iterations from the participatory public art projects Lingo Bingo and Lingo Bingo BK: Sunset Park for Car Free Earth Day, Harlem and Crown Heights for Summer Streets, all three in conjunction with NYC DOT.
Revisting these iterations provides me an opportunity to explore how different variables effect the participatory process in advance of next year’s Lingo Bingo United. And there is perhaps nothing more fulfilling in these challenging times than to be in the streets practicing solidarity in real time.
Scheduled dates as follows:
Car Free Earth Day, Sunset Park, Brooklyn – Saturday 4/25 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
NYC Summer Streets, Harlem, Manhattan – Saturday 8/1, 8/8, and 8/15 from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Brooklyn Summer Streets, Crown Heights, Brooklyn – Saturday 8/22 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
SUNSET PARK IN THE RAIN
The weather is always a major variable to consider: finding shade from the summer sunshine, chasing game elements caught up on gusty days, but in 15+ events we had yet to facilitate an iteration in the pouring rain. Our jackets are waterproof, as are the Lingo Bingo boards, but other game elements are not…
In my years as a street organizer I learned to respect the wisdom of the weather. There are days when the universe conspires to shower us with sunshine, and there are other days when she just needs to weep. She is offering us a precious opportunity to demonstrate our resilience and solidarity. Even in the face of adversity, we are still here.
Special thanks to my brother Jack Wang and peace sister Raybblin Vargas for co-facilitating with me in the cold rain, and to Jason D. Little for capturing the beauty of the moment throughout all of the photos in this update.
HARLEM REST STOP
Time is always a variable to consider, and this year’s Harlem location made that all the more evident. We were just south of 125th Street in 2024. This year’s site was further south, between 110th and 113th Street, essentially an off ramp from the Summer Streets route running crosstown at the north end of Central Park. While participation remained very diverse over the three Saturdays, foot traffic was almost exclusively folks who were stopping off en route, with far fewer members of the community simply strolling by.
Splitting 7 languages across 4 boards results in a lot more wild cards: instances where player one picks a word/phrase in a language that does not appear on player two’s board. This “wild card” can be matched in any one of the other languages on player two’s board. When the word/phrase is in multiple languages on their board, player two picks one of those to match. It was apparent that this conscious choice helped anchor the word/phrase in their memory.
All these variables add to the dynamism of the game, but also exponentially increase play time depending on the number of players. In order to facilitate this more easily, I prepared a set of matrices to more quickly locate the various phrases in the different languages. Using this I could assist the player to notice that they have multiple options, often in languages they have never spoken before.
I also brought full sets of wild cards in Bangla and Chinese (Mandarin), which were used by native speakers in a kind of all wild card game. The Chinese cards were originally created for the Flushing and Sunset Park iterations, while the Bangla cards were beautifully hand written by Muhammad Shahidullah during the 2024 Harlem iteration.
This added variable can engage participants in surprising ways, allowing them to create a game within a game, one where they define the objectives. For example, one Chinese speaker chose to focus on learning how to pronounce all of the Arabic words on his board – getting 5 in a row completely secondary to this desire. In another instance a Bangla speaker used the cards as an entry point with her daughters, learning to recognize Bangla script on the fly as they played. I witnessed this process in reverse as well: an Urdu speaker visually recognizing the Nasta'liq characters, allowing them to pronounce the Arabic words on their board, learning the meanings of the words as they played.
I am grateful to have had my co-facilitator Mbacke Thiam, from Afrilingual, on hand to communicate with the many participants who spoke French as their primary language, and to patiently refresh my Wolof pronunciation time and time again.
CROWN HEIGHTS BLOCK PARTY
And, of course, the most essential variable of all is the community. Lingo Bingo seeks to engage members of the community in a process through which they can realize an experience of interconnection and solidarity. While each iteration is created to reference the languages present in the community, it is the presence of members of the community that allows the sharing and dialogue to occur.
As in Harlem, the crowd was particularly diverse, but here we had several multiple player games where the participants spoke different languages. I was fortunate that my co-facilitator Rejin Leys was on hand to pick up the slack when we had multiple games running at the same time! It was beautiful to see Rejin share her passion for Haitian language and history with participants, many of them carrying away what they learned from the interaction.
New York City Department of Transportation did a excellent job organizing the many activations in Crown Heights this year. Our neighbor at the site, Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, provided a wonderful spectacle to behold, delighting large crowds all day long. The variety of activities made the site more like a block party within the community than a rest stop on the way to somewhere else.
The generosity of all involved was reflected back as participants sought to contribute their energy to our emergent experience. On one occasion a woman essentially took over the facilitation role in the middle of her game, having Rejin and myself play cooperatively across two boards so that we could “win together!”
On a personal note, I had a lovely interaction helping a woman pick a word to take home. She commented as we went through the cards together, “American Dream, oh yes, I need my American Dream. Dignity, and of course I need my dignity. And my Family. And my Faith.” I told her that I couldn’t possibly make her choose between them, that she was welcome to have them all. When we posed for the picture she handed me two of the cards and said “Here, you are my family now – you can hold these.” Thank you Rai.
