Surviving the Arts with Anxiety: A Workshop by Wit López
Free – Online via Zoom
A workshop for 2SLGBTQ+ creatives
Join artist Wit López for a special workshop discussing ways to thrive in the arts with anxiety. This is part of a series of virtual workshops López created specifically for 2SLGBTQ+ artists who struggle with their art practice due to anxiety. Although López is not a mental health professional, they were diagnosed with anxiety in 2008, and have spent most of their life navigating visual art and performance with this mental illness. In their workshops, they use what they have learned from their personal experiences as an artist and arts administrator to assist fellow anxious artists through aspects of their practice that might trigger feelings of anxiety.
If you are a 2SLGBTQ+ artist who has experienced anxiety around writing grants, building your portfolio, marketing your work, or who is looking to share space with fellow anxious artists, this workshop is for you.
Wit López is a Brooklyn-bred and Philadelphia-based disabled, gender non-conforming / nonbinary trans mixed media creator, performer, and independent curator of African-American and Boricua descent. With two visual artists for parents, creating has always been a part of López’s world. Their work combines the skills their parents taught them—fibre art, painting, collage, and photography—and contains elements of their formal training in theatre and classical music, including costuming, staging, and props. López’s visual work and performance art use their background in anthropology and Africana studies as a lens to examine, decolonize, and reconstruct aspects of their own identity. Through fibre and imagery, López explores hairiness, accessibility, queerness, gender identity, Blackness, and Latinidad, while also fully embracing absurdity and macabre humor.
López’s work is currently on view in the exhibition The Baroness Elsa Project. Curated by Heather Anderson and Irene Gammel, The Baroness Elsa Project reaches back a century to bring elemental traces of the radical art, poetry and personage of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) into conversation with the work of eight contemporary artists: Lene Berg, Dana Claxton, ray ferreira, Wit López, Taqralik Partridge, Sheilah ReStack, Carol Sawyer, and Cindy Stelmackowich.
Accessibility
CART captioning will be available.
