"Artmaking As Contemplative Praxis"

This photo essay is a companion piece to my essay “Artmaking As Contemplative Praxis” published by the Center for Action and Contemplation in their Spring 2024 issue of ONEING.

This Anti-deportation Artivism action at Bryn Mawr College was hosted by Professor Jennifer Harford Vargas, Phd. Dr.Vargas invited me to lead a suitcase workshop to deepen her students’ understanding of current US immigration policies. The Anti-deportation “Suitcase” references the policy of allowing deportees only one small carry-on suitcase to take back once they are deported and this policy prompted the question “What would you carry?”. The prompt “I Am a Child” is a rif on the historic 1968 Memphis sanitation strike slogan “I AM A MAN”during the Civil Rights era.Here it references the separation of families by ICE. All the artwork shown here was created by Bryn Mawr students and faculty who attended the workshop.

The “Free Compassion, Gratitude and Love” Installation and art action was hosted by The Church of St.Francis Xavier in NYC while I was their artist in residence with a studio space in the choir loft. I dubbed the studio “The Upper Room” studio and it remains one of my favorite studio spaces out of many artist residencies. Xavier is a Jesuit church and I was inspired to do this action as a contemplative practice to draw from myself all three intentions in the midst of political turmoil and my own disillusionment with institutional Christianity and the Church. I placed the painted prayers with one of the three intentions written on the back in a rusty metal bowl. I replenished the bowl with new painted prayers as parishioners and visitors took a painting-intention. I played with different palettes, used rubber stamps,and experimented with watercolor, pastel, oil, graphite and pen and ink. During the month of June, I gave away close to 800 small painting-intentions.