Healing Arts: Cultivating Resilience and Resistance

A gathering to share healing justice practices which feed our resilience and resistance.

Friday, April 20, noon-5 PM
Arts and Letters Room 412.

All are welcome to come to one, two, or all of the presentations/workshops. They are all interactive and all are offered by amazing women artists, writers, performers, healers, scholars. Following the schedule below is more information about each of the workshop presenters.

12:00-1:45
My Body’s Narratives and The Narratives of My Body
a writing workshop with Dorothy Bell Ferrer

An interactive writing workshop about the elements of personal narrative from an Afro-Caribbean perspective which encourages participants to take charge of their voices and discover their personal narrative as a measure of resistance to capitalism and colonialism.

2:00-3:30
A Full Circle: Storytelling Art for Resistance & Healing
a talk and performance with Ada Cheng

In this workshop, Ada Cheng will weave personal stories with reflections on the art of storytelling. She will demonstrate how, through examples of the stories she has told, storytelling can be used as a tool for resistance as well as that for healing from trauma. In the last part of the workshop, participants will collectively explore how they can integrate storytelling into their respective work for effective engagement.

3:45-5:00
Opening the Heart Ceremony
a workshop with Misty DeBerry

This workshop seeks to create a space where participants can explore and practice ideas of closure, passing on, and transitioning out of the activities from the day. Through gentle embodiment, reiki based visualization, and collective collaging, we will ask ourselves what does it mean and/or feel like to engage in shared modes of healing?

Workshop Facilitators:

Dorothy Bell Ferrer – https://insurgentprieta.wordpress.com/

Ada Cheng  – http://www.renegadeadacheng.com/

Misty DeBerry – Misty De Berry is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. There her scholarship sits at the intersection of performance studies, Black Feminist Thought, Marxist theory, and art history. Currently she is at work on her dissertation, which examines modes of debt and temporality in the lives of Black women. Ultimately concerned with embodied aesthetics as strategies for interrupting harm in the lives Black women, her scholarship is deeply informed by her work as a performance artist, playwright, and master reiki practitioner.

We are performing our identities at all times, and there is no “true” self beyond such performance. But some of us explore and perfect this way of being with true artistic brilliance. Andy Kaufman performed as Tony Clifton, Foreign Man, and a variety of other personas, once claiming that “Andy Kaufman” was the true fake. Andy’s sister, Carol Kaufman Kerman, joins us to tell stories about what it was like to be in Andy’s family when Andy was exploring who he was and wasn’t. On the eve of his solo show opening at the DePaul Art Museum, we are also joined by DHC Fellow Zachary Ostrowski—a graphic artist, musician, and performance artist who often performs under the personae of Beverly Fre$h and Mr Midwe$t. The DHC is honored as well to host headliner Alan Abel, the greatest prankster and hoaxer of the past century, who will discuss his life of brilliant cons and put-ons. The evening also features a live musical performance by world-renowned tenor Luciano Pavarotti. Come as you are—or as someone else—and ask, “Who am I now?” with the DePaul Humanities Center!

Lifting as They Climbed: Mapping a History of Black Women on Chicago’s South Side: A Self-Guided Tour with authors Mariame Kaba and Essence McDowell.

Tuesday, April 10
5:00-7:00 pm
Arts and Letters 103
Refreshments provided

Lifting as They Climbed is a guide/tour book that features Black women who contributed to the development of Chicago from the mid-19^th century to today. This publication tells a story of some Chicago Black women who have shaped the city’s history, including Marjorie Stewart Joyner, Mary Richardson Jones, Ida B Wells-Barnett, Margaret Burroughs, Alice C Browning, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elder Lucy Madden Smith, Mary G Evans, Bessie Coleman, Fannie Barrier Williams, Nora Holt and many more. The book is getting a lot of attention, see articles below in the Tribune and the Defender.

The book includes 43 landmarks and locations connected to Black women activists and artists who lived and worked on Chicago’s South Side. The women were active members of multiple organizations who pursued a broad range of issues and others were artists (writers, painters, musicians, dancers) who both documented the conditions of Black people and shaped the culture of Chicago & the entire country. Chicago’s Black women activists organized to make the city work better for themselves, their loved ones and communities.

Check out the recent articles about the project in The Chicago Tribune — http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-chicago-historical-black-women-20180312-story.html and the Chicago Defender – https://chicagodefender.com/2018/03/21/199313/. The website of the project itself is: http://liftingastheyclimbed.zibbet.com/

This event is organized by The Women’s Center and cosponsored by the Center for Black Diaspora, the Departments of African and Black Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Critical Ethnic Studies Program.