Social PRACTICE

My work emerges from compound environments—spaces where public life and private experience converge, where the textures of care, labor, and cultural expression are entangled. I understand all cultures as inherently syncretic and relational. My studio practice and public-facing work form a single continuum: one space of making, reflection, co-design, and shared authorship.

Working with repurposed and surplus materials, I cultivate creative ecosystems in partnership with communities. I approach the waste stream as a material commons and a cultural archive—one that reveals our shared entanglements with place, labor, and ecology. Creative assembly is a form of resilience. The social practice studio operates as an incubator and refuge, guided by disability justice principles, material stewardship, and inclusive methodologies that honor multiple ways of knowing and making.

I create interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and cross-ability environments that encourage participants to build new creative relationships with each other and with the materials at hand. Slow-making, reciprocity, and collective dialogue shape the work. These processes generate connective tissue between identities, geographies, and stories, often culminating in public expressions—performances, parades, installations, festivals, and community exhibitions that amplify collective authorship.

Over the past twenty-five years, I have established more than forty community art studios in both rural and urban contexts, often within communities impacted by structural inequities and historically restricted access to creative space. Much of this work occurs in neurologically diverse and cross-ability settings, alongside organizations reimagining their missions to include arts engagement, social enterprise models, and expressive therapeutic programming as central forms of care. As a founding member of the Chicago Creative Reuse Exchange and a co-creator of the Creative Reuse Warehouse in Englewood with Envision Unlimited, I have helped build infrastructure for creative reuse economies and material justice in Chicago.

My social practice is grounded in cultural humility, global citizenship, and a commitment to non-extractive collaboration. It is a meditation on labor, lineage, and shared resources. Through my Social Fiber Projects—rooted in oral traditions, text, weaving, and the embodied histories of materials—I have co-created community art spaces in the United States, Turkey, Ethiopia, Germany, and Guatemala. Across these collaborations, I prioritize mutuality, long-term relationship-building, and creative participation as pathways for generating social currency, belonging, and collective transformation.