Unfolded Narratives Workshop with Jenny Yurshansky

Join teaching artist Jenny Yurshansky in an engaging, all-ages workshop that facilitates the exploration of one’s individual family narrative and encourages shared discussion amongst the participants, culminating in the creation of paper fortune tellers which visualize the way chance is embedded into the history of our family narratives.

This session will be an opportunity to focus on the complexity of what it means to think about home, origin, and place, especially in one’s own family history. How are the patterns that exist in our own families indicators of larger socio-historical patterns that we can identify or contextualize ourselves within? How can this be understood in the framework of immigration and displacement? These workshops are a means of experiencing how our stories are manifold and yet they are interwoven and offer us paths for understanding our own histories, places of origin, and how that impacts our sense of belonging and identity.

Artist Jenny Yurshansky will share information with you about her practice and how she deals with these questions in her practice, which is deeply informed by being a refugee. Through a research-based approach, she explores the trauma of displacement, interrogating notions of belonging and otherness within the frames of landscape, historical documents, and social constructs. Formally, this manifests as absence, loss, or erasure.

Her long-term projects form intertwined narratives and span the mediums of sculpture, photography, installation, and writing. She will also guide participants through visualizing, conceptualizing, and crafting their own story which will take the form of a small fortune-teller sculpture.

The fortune-tellers that participants created in the first two workshops have been scanned and compiled into large pieces of patterned fabric. Attendees for this final workshop in the series are invited to quilt together around these social fabrics, adding their voices to the unfolding narrative and providing us the opportunity to share and find patterns in one another’s stories and keep these histories alive. The quilted fabrics from this workshop and others like it will be assembled into a large installation-sized quilt that will be exhibited at 18th Street Arts Center. All participants will be credited as co-creators of the quilt and will be invited to the opening of the exhibition. Both new and returning participants are encouraged to attend.

Guests of all ages are welcome to register, with encouragement for intergenerational family groups. Advance registration is required, and slots are limited.