Facilitators ask for a commitment to 3 afternoons—July 7, 8, and 9 @ 1:00–5:00 p.m—to engage in discussion, reflection, collaborative inquiry, and hands-on making. Limited to 8 people.

Participants will be invited to reflect on our social responsibility as citizen-artists, and explore the vital role that materials, making, and studio spaces play in fostering practices of care within communities.

Together, we will examine studio spaces that function as sites of creative hospitality—places of welcome, refuge, rejuvenation, and collective creativity. These are spaces where making together becomes an occasion, a gathering, a festival, or a happening. Through shared artistic engagement, we will explore how creative practices can activate wellness, support agency, mutual learning, belonging, and the ongoing making of ourselves as a community.

Centering the studio as a companion to practice, we will investigate the intersections of public art, socially engaged art, and the creative arts therapies while reflecting on the personal, ethical, and political commitments that shape the identity of the citizen-artist. We will consider how studio spaces can operate as ecologies of care—relational and material environments that support creative enterprise through the resources at hand while generating new forms of public engagement within civic life.

Together, we hope to explore how creative hospitality can cultivate connections across differences, nurture collective well-being, and contribute to more caring and sustainable social worlds.