Ages 5-12 welcome. This program is free and open to the public!

Children are welcome to participate in an open-studio workshop between 11am - 3pm (while materials last) at the lawn outside of Logan Square's Comfort Station. The open-studio workshop will provide children with materials to draw and design their own objects to hang from the trees in the lawn and also make another object to take home. We will be using shrinky dink paper to draw on it, then with the help of an adult volunteer we will bake them to harden. There is also an option to glue on to them additional decorations, and finally hang them on trees. Throughout this activity, the facilitator will engage children in a conversation around giving and taking within our community and how we are using our creativity to participate in the community. Children can witness their artworks included in the communal space as a form of their expression being heard and welcomed. Children can also take home an object that they make, as a symbol of also receiving when giving back to our community. 

Farah is a Kuwaiti artist, activist and art therapist born and raised in Kuwait and is currently based in Chicago. Her studio art and art therapy practices are bridged by social activism and research. In both realms, Farah incorporates a mind-body approach to material exploration that is focused on community building, accessibility of mental health services, and raising awareness about domestic and gender-based violence. Her studio practice is rooted in photography and expands into video, performance, fibers, light/projection, and installation. Working in both urban and natural landscapes, she use these settings to engage in conversations with captured frames, performances, and installations. Through this conversational element, Farah attempts to capture the portals and spaces between two or more worlds, as she engages the performing body in movement from cultural to natural landscapes. She explores the politics of seeing and the roles of access, agency and power in the displacement of identity as a material. Farah’s artwork has been exhibited internationally in various galleries and museums including Mana Contemporary, Contemporary Art Platform, Paris Contemporary Art show, Centro Cultural De Santa Cruz for the Bolivia Biennale, and the Katzen Arts Center at the American University Museum. In 2016 Salem published her first photography book titled In-Between the Skyline of Kuwait City. In 2017 Farah was the Laureate winner for the International Women’s Photographers Award.