Chinatown Yarn Circle: Stand Speak Shape
2021-24: This project brought together members of the Chinatown community to form Yarn Circles that created art and also discussed issues impacting the Asian American community. Crochet volunteers engaged in the shared experience of spending time together over the course of 3-5 months and contributed individual pieces of art towards the creation of a large-scale art piece to beautify their neighborhood with a meaningful civic message. The result was a 25 foot x 4 foot textile mural with over 1500 Asian-themed flowers and bamboo adorning the words Stand-Speak-Shape and their corresponding Chinese characters.
A joint project of the Ministry in the City HUB and Walls-Ortiz Gallery at City Seminary, the Creative Community Care Virtual Residency brought together socially-engaged Christian creatives from New York City, Indianapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, and Corsicana (Tx) for peer mentor support, learning, and sharing. In 2021, residents developed local projects in their respective cities, exploring creative practices of care in the context of community. Projects engaged the concerns and questions of the pandemic period (mutual aid, care re-imagined for social distance, etc.) at the intersection of the arts, learning, faith, and the city. In 2022, the resident pairs offered public online workshops. Starting in 2024, Creative Community Care, a traveling group exhibition of the artwork will be on display with related programming in cities across North America. In 2024, the exhibition has been on view in Santa Ana, CA (March 1-5), Houston, TX (August 7-23), and will be in St. Paul, MN (November 1 - December 15). In 2025, it will go to Indianapolis, IN (March - April), Charlotte, NC (May-June), and possibly Boston, MA (November). For 2026, we anticipate a stop in Toronto, ON (Canada) before a final show in New York City.
Lord, meet us and our neighbors in the fragility of our bodies and the reliance we have on affordable and dependable healthcare. Help us to have compassion and gratitude when we experience first hand how suffering can deplete us but that we are never alone.