Artist, Writer, Facilitator of Healing and Social Justice
It has taken a lifetime for me to turn around, acknowledge, and say ‘hi’ to the artist in me. I put her away long ago when my worry and doubts about ‘making a living’ as an artist became all that I could hear. Thankfully, I trusted my creativity which held and carried me through a rich career in education, advocacy and mental health. I am always holding a creative practice, fostering associative pathways to brilliant connections with people, ideas and communities.
Now in what is considered my third act, I marvel at the wildy and numerous ways my creative heart expands and embraces art-ing–painting, photography, personal narrative, cooking, sewing, crafting and gardening. I navigate my multifaceted identity with a deep sense of exploration and self-discovery. My heritage as a white cishet female and a Jew of Color, with Greek, Sephardic and Ashkenazic roots, woven into my experiences as someone born in Germany and raised in Chicago, undergirds my creative practice.
I am working on the ‘both/and’ of honoring myself and my creativity while also creating work that moves peoples’ hearts as they move through the world. As an only child in a small family, a social worker and an educator, my way has been to build community and restoration through one on one conversations. I can see how each piece of art holds a one on one conversation too; how it builds community slowly by slowly.
What do I want the work of these conversations to be?
This is what I am grappling with in my work right now.
I like nature, patterns, connections, and colors. One of my very first adult jobs was mixing ink colors for a master printmaker; it was one of my most fulfilling and visceral jobs. And not becoming a master printmaker myself is one of my deepest regrets. Right now with so much struggle in the world, the losses and harms mounting from climate change, greed and hate, I grapple with if it is enough to just make beautiful art.
Does art that quenches my longing to connect through and with beauty help others?
Is what I do self-indulgent?
What can I create that reveals something new and helpful to the world?
