marksearch designs interactive opportunities to amplify & preserve diverse neighborhood narratives

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Led by cultural researcher, artist, and educator Sue Mark, marksearch has been fostering collaborative, interactive opportunities for communities to amplify and preserve their neighborhood stories for over 20 years, both locally and globally. marksearch projects explore relationships between long-term and new neighbors, the value of local knowledge, and tensions that arise from economic and cultural changes. Working with community groups, public historians, and local experts, marksearch creates public conversational commons for sensitive dialogue, celebrating and preserving diverse neighborhood narratives.

Through strategies like neighbor-led walking discussions, community celebrations, skill-sharing workshops, interactive story-telling and published community scholarship, our projects center the voices and expertise of everyday people. We highlight neighborly relationships and tensions arising from economic and cultural shifts. marksearch projects collectively gather, celebrate, amplify and preserve multi-faceted neighborhood narratives that nurture long-term resiliency. marksearch’s research-based, socially engaged art projects have received support from local, national and international foundations, public art commissions and fellowships.

Our projects are experienced in parks, plazas, flea markets, libraries, community centers and have also been presented in Japan’s Setagaya Museum (Tokyo) and 21st Century Museum; Oakland Museum of California, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The Headlands Center for the Arts. We have spoken about our work at many Bay Area colleges and universities; marksearch projects have been featured on local and international radio programs including KPFA, PRI ‘The World’ and screenings at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Oakland Museum of CA. marksearch has been honored with fellowships at the Kala Art Institute (2014-2022) and with the US Japan Friendship Commission (2016, 2019-2021). They were the Community Engagement & Design Specialist (2023 – 2025) for the African American History & Engagement project, a partnership between California State Parks and the California African American Museum to research, document, and interpret Black community histories in California State Parks.

Recent projects highlights:

• The Island: We Are Neighbors Together, a visual storytelling project about resilience, hope and reparations in collaboration with the Self Help Hunger Program community members.  Video stories were screened on the HEAR HERE Community Billboard multimedia truck in Oakland and Berkeley at festivals, markets and in parks.  Supported by Berkeley Civic Arts, 2024
• One Day / One Action, a social media campaign generated through community stories that engages San José’s residents with local environmental policies. Supported by San José’s Public Art Program and Environmental Services Department, 2019-23
• 旅はすみか/ Journey Itself Home, meditative walks with mobile sound memorials to nurture communal safety and belonging during the COVID-19 Pandemic, created in collaboration with survivors of the Tohoku Triple Disaster. Presented on the disaster’s 10^th anniversary with the Tokyo Olympics in Japan. Supported by the Japan-US Creative Artists Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Tokyo Foundation,  2019-23.
• Commons Archive, started in 2015, brings neighbors into conversation through community projects, celebrations, and workshops looking at local histories in Oakland and Berkeley, CA. The HEAR HERE Community Billboard, a multimedia vehicle for neighborhood empowerment, is the latest Commons Archive initiative. HEAR HERE evolved during COVID-19 in partnership with multicultural community organizations and has received support from the Berkeley Public Art Commission, the California Arts Council, the California Humanities, the Creative Work Fund, the Kala Art Institute, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation Open Spaces Program, Oakland Cultural Funding Program, and San Francisco Foundation’s Equity Grant, 2015-2024.