We concluded WPA’s 2024 Open Call series, Where should we start? with an event organized by DC-based artists Leigh Davis and Adrienne Gaither. Their response to this prompt was: We start by addressing our shared grief.

Letting Go, Holding Space, & Moving Through was a 3-part participatory grief ceremony to come together and meet this moment of genocide(s), oppression, and personal loss that we are collectively experiencing. So much is happening daily—this was an offering to move through the insurmountable level of grief with communal support.

The ceremony included a eulogy, a guided moment of silence, prompts to provide reflective space(s) for grief, and a restorative tea blend. Leigh and Adrienne invite participants to bring an object, image, keepsake, or anything you would like to offer to this ceremony.

The event was shaped in collaboration with Marissa Glonek, LMSW, iele paloumpis, a death doula, and Brianna Hernández, an artist. Additionally, attendees experienced, and contributed to, a floral work by Genevieve Villamora, a tea blend by DeCarla Martin, and T. Wise supported as a facilitator.

About the Organizers

Leigh Davis (she/her) makes interdisciplinary works to explore grief, memory, and storytelling – how these universal experiences help define what it means to be human. Trained as a photographer, her projects now range across media, from sculpture and installation to sound, performance, and video. Her video installation Feeling Tones featured at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn) in 2023. OFFERING, a public song circle, was created with the Threshold Singers of Washington DC for Sound Scene (DC) in 2022. Davis has exhibited projects at Open Source (Brooklyn), BRIC (Brooklyn), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center (Oakland) and Spectral Lines (New York). Her exhibition HUMAN RESOURCES is currently on view at Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia). A native of Pittsburgh, Davis is a Part-Time Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design and works between NYC and DC.

Adrienne Gaither (she/they) is a DC-based visual artist. Through abstract geometric paintings, she explores topics like race, family, mental health, class, and abstraction politics. She has held exhibitions at Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, NY; and Cuchifritos Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Her work is published in Margo Crawford’s 2017 monograph Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, Common Practice: Basketball & Contemporary Art, and Nervous Systems; Art, Systems, and Politics since the 1960s. She is currently expanding her sculptural practice, experimenting with 3D forms to further world-building and provide new perspectives on geometric abstraction.

About this Series

For our 2023–2024 program season, we invited DC-area artists to submit ideas for one-night only events around the question: “Where should we start?” WPA’s first-ever symposium How can we gather now? (March 2023) explored questions of community and the potential of gathering as a crucial practice. During her keynote talk, author and organizer adrienne maree brown spoke about the different scales and modalities of gathering and how healing and change start at the individual level.

“With everything we need to do, there is always a starting place within, a starting place between, and a starting place for the collective.” – adrienne maree brown