Abstract
This paper describes a collaborative self-reflexive practice using art-making, personal experience, womanist performance pedagogy (WPP), the Black Arts Movement, and poetry as the starting material for inquiry. Through arts-based inquiry, we reflected on our practice and Black personhood as art therapists, artists, and activists. We investigated the concepts of therapeutic and professional space in three areas: negotiating identity, co-creating our therapeutic practice, and making alternatives. We utilized the seven characteristics of WPP proposed by Khalilah Ali in her dissertation ‘For Us Poetry is Not a Luxury’: A Case Study of Six Black Women Artist-Educator-Activists as a framework, while drawing from care and healing practices from the Black Arts Movement, and using poetry as material. We merge our experience, theory, and action through this collaborative, self-reflexive, exploratory investigation, to better understand how to cultivate subversion and challenge the power structures and systems that we navigate on a daily basis. Our interest in this topic derived from the two alternative spaces that we created during our time as art therapy students: BIPOC Makespace and Sister Circle. We realized that our starting point does not always have to be in relation to whiteness, critiquing whiteness, or talking about our experiences in relation to oppression that has happened in our education. This paper is giving us the opportunity to choose our own starting point and material to investigate, putting Black knowledge, experience, and praxis at the center.
Highlights
The following text is an experimental writing project that chronicles the authors’ art therapy schooling, internship, and work experiences
This essay is a collage of documentary materials, which include the transcripts of dialogues in these care spaces, personal journal entries, poetry, photos (Figures 1-11), and private conversations with Black women
Through the production of interwoven text, the authors interpret multiple meanings and values that emerge from sustained dialogue and the collective knowing of Black women’s sacred work and existence
Summary
The following text is an experimental writing project that chronicles the authors’ art therapy schooling, internship, and work experiences. The authors engaged in collective-reflectivity and memory mapping over the course of a year as a means to build community and witness each other’s understanding of place and worlds. POSITION PAPER intentional about creating experimental spaces of care for ourselves and the different communities that we are a part of. Through the production of interwoven text, the authors interpret multiple meanings and values that emerge from sustained dialogue and the collective knowing of Black women’s sacred work and existence. Not everyone needs to try to understand what I’m trying to say. I think that’s when I’m like I came to that “smart enough, thoughtful enough, strong enough” thing.
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