Belong by Gianna Stewart
Rochester Contemporary Art Center
137 East Ave.
Nov 6, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pm

This First Friday is your last chance to see RoCo’s public art installation, BELONG by Gianna Stewart.

In spring of 2025 several organizations including the New York Times documented the rapid redaction of certain words and terms from official government websites. Since then, groups such as PEN America have have attempted to track this erasure by compiling lists of words removed from government publications and censored by institutions attempting to comply with the administration’s directives. Simultaneously arts and educational organizations have been encouraged to remove many of these words from their grant applications and programs, and many have complied.

This tryptic carefully incorporates PEN America’s list into the letters BELONG, which is also one of the words on the list. Here the words are presented openly, in public space, and in direct opposition to the attempts to scrub them from public discourse.

BELONG is on view alongside Sanctuary: Borders & Belonging in 2026, on view inside RoCo.You can also buy a t-shirt version of Gianna’s public artwork – drop in from 6-9pm.

Learn more about the artist and this project here.