Recess Assembly

Recess Assembly is a Brooklyn-based arts collective operating in Clinton Hill. Since 2009, the organization has run community programs including Assembly, which serves justice-involved young people ages 18-26 through visual art, performance, and collaboration with professional artists.

Recess formed in 2009, beginning by uniting artists and audiences through the creative process. The organization operates from Clinton Hill near the Brooklyn Navy Yard through two core programs. Assembly, founded in 2016, offers system-impacted young people aged 18-26 an inroad to art and connections to working artists, while serving as an alternative to incarceration. The program disrupts what Recess calls the false narrative of the "criminal" through visual storytelling, performance, and collaborative projects with artists. Session allows artists to directly engage and partner with communities throughout the creative process for systems change and narrative shift, while critical writing supports writers producing new texts in dialogue with artists' projects. Recess participates in an economy of trust and care rather than service or charity, led by community members valued for their creative vision, lived experience, and imaginative capacity.