First Aid Kit: Art as Empowerment | Mental Wellness in 2020
According to the World Health Organization, mental wellness is defined as “a state of well-being in which the individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.”
For the second session of the “First Aid Kit” series, Bakehouse resident artist Maria Theresa Barbist is joined by artists april I. martin (Oakland, CA) and Ashley Wyche (Miami, FL) to discuss the importance of art as a tool for the empowerment of communities. Through their work, both artists challenge racist and sexist narratives by elevating and highlighting the role of strong women in the communities they work with. April and Ashley will speak about how they use their artistic practice as a strategy to improve their own and communal mental and emotional well-being.
To register for this session, please access the following link.
About the artists
Maria Theresa Barbist has been a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex since 2015. In her artistic practice, she translates traumatic memories and emotional states into performative actions, moving pictures and sculptural objects. She holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Innsbruck and received her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. Barbist has worked as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist (Psychodrama) at the University Hospital Innsbruck and specialized in movement based expressive arts therapy at the Tamalpa Institute.
april l. martin is a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious black queer woman living in gentrified-ass West Oakland. She is a multi-media artist working in film, photography and printmaking. Her art takes a critical view of black social, political, and cultural phenomena. She is co-director of the feature length documentary, Cincinnati Goddamn (2015) and is currently co-producing a series of short Know Your Rights videos with the National Lawyers Guild. As a visual artist, april has been awarded a Puffin Foundation Grant, the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Wexner Center for the Arts New Media Artist Award, John C. Collier Documentary Photography Award, as well as, artist residencies at the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH) and the Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA). April has a BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Ashley Wyche is an interdisciplinary artist born in Miami, FL. Ashley’s work synthesizes real identity representation with fictional and animated universes. She visits and redevelops interpretations of familiar comic book hero characters with the goal of decolonizing their pre-existing fictional spaces. This redefinition of authorship and ownership of icons such as Wonder Woman (DC Comics) or Storm (Marvel Comics) is for Wyche a process of learning, understanding and eventually owning these characters and experiences though they may be fictional. But as political philosopher Frantz Fanon stated, “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” She is currently working towards her BFA at Florida International University.
Image: april I. martin, Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, CA., 2020. Courtesy of the artist.