Reserve your free spot here.

In conjunction with our current exhibition, Visions of Hope: Moving Images from Teens with a Movie Camera, this participatory workshop invites community members into a space of reflection, witness, and creative expression. Facilitated by Dr. Rochele Royster, art therapist & community psychologist and founder of Me/We Creative Arts Lab & Studio, this gathering brings together editors of Project Mend and the broader community.

Together, we will explore:

• What incarceration takes
• What remains
• What is carried
• What can still be imagined

Participants will be guided through a gentle writing and art-making process using fabric, wrapping, stitching, and doll-making inspired by the Dolls4Peace project. The dolls serve as symbolic vessels that hold memory, grief, resilience, and possibility. No prior art-making experience is needed.

Inspired by the current exhibit, Visions of Hope, this workshop asks: How do we tend grief collectively and practice repair with hope?

This is a community-based creative space for tending what has been lived and envisioning what can be made. All materials will be provided. Participants are welcome to contribute their piece to a collective installation or take their work home. Open to all. Please RSVP, space is limited.

About Rochele Royster
Rochele Royster, Ph.D, ATR-BC is an assistant professor of art therapy in the Department of Creative Arts Therapy. Prior to joining Syracuse University, Royster was a learning behavior specialist in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and lecturer in the Department of Art Therapy and Counseling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Depaul University (Department of Education), and Adler University (clinical psychology department doctoral program).  Royster has worked for the last 20 years integrating art therapy into the educational setting and has worked with youth, adolescents and young adults with various learning differences such as autism, traumatic brain disorders and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Using a trans-disciplinary approach, she is interested in community and school-based art therapy; race, power and policy in education; multi-sensory methods in reading and literacy; trauma-informed classrooms; environmental justice; black disability; and special education as it relates to decolonization of pedagogy and practice in institutional and public settings.

About Project Mend
Project Mend is a grassroots, multimodal, open-access archive that amplifies the scholarly and creative contributions of people who are currently or formerly incarcerated, along with their broader communities. Many of our contributors are Black and brown individuals working to interrupt cycles of incarceration. Through this work, the archive pushes back against dominant narratives that diminish, silence, or dehumanize these lives.