Dreaming Accessible Futures: Mental Health & Creative Practice

We are ...a community of mental health workers, clinicians, psychiatrists, current and prior users of mental health services, advocates, artists, and survivors of trauma and adversity, who are interested in exploring the link between personal and societal transformation.

Institute for the Development of Human Arts

A virtual, interactive event exploring how art can hold stories, build belonging, and envision
care-centered possibilities

<h2>About the Event</h2>Art has long been a site for expressing what is difficult to verbalize: personal histories, collective wounds, and the complexities of living within systems that shape our bodies and minds. For artists whose work is informed by experiences of mental health and disability, creative practice can become a way to trace those pathways – making visible what is often rendered invisible. How can art hold stories of survival and struggle while also creating space for accessibility, belonging, and connection? And what possibilities emerge when creative practice is rooted in care rather than extraction or spectacle?Join us on Wednesday, February 4 for a virtual, interactive event exploring how art can hold stories, build belonging, and envision care-centered possibilities. Interdisciplinary artist Chanika Svetvilas will share insights from her solo exhibition, <a href="https://www.hunterdonartmuseum.org/exhibitions/resounding-remnants/" title="https://www.hunterdonartmuseum.org/exhibitions/resounding-remnants/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Resounding Remnants</a>, offering an opportunity to trace how her personal pathways through the American mental health system have shaped her work. Following the presentation, IDHA Program Manager Noah Gokul will join Chanika in conversation to reflect on these themes, exploring how art can shift power dynamics within psychiatry and mental health while opening space to imagine forms of care that exist beyond systems. Through group reflection and dialogue, participants will consider how mental health experiences, material choices, accessibility, and identity shape creative practices grounded in mutual support and connection, drawing from an explicitly intersectional lens.This event is open to artists, writers, people with mental health difference, disability and social justice communities, social workers, therapists, mental health professionals, students, creative writing and art departments, psychology and social work departments, and the general public.DonationsIDHA is a small organization that strives to meet the accessibility needs of our community to the best of our ability. Our events are by tiered suggested donation to ensure we can provide closed captions on our events and other programs, though we strive to never turn anyone away. We appreciate donations of any size for those who have capacity to give.AccessASL interpretation + automated closed captioning will be provided. The event will be recorded and shared with all registrants. Please submit any additional access needs to contact@idha-nyc.org. <h3>Facilitators</h3>Chanika SvetvilasChanika is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker based in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, whose practice focuses on mental health difference and the diversity of its lived experience including the stigma encountered and its intersection with Mad Pride and disability justice. This work is an extension of her interest to utilize personal narrative as a way to share experiences, to disrupt stereotypes, to reflect on contemporary issues and intersectionality, and cultivate safe spaces through installation, sculpture, mixed-media, film, and performative actions and ultimately to make the invisible visible.Noah GokulNoah (they/she) is IDHA's Program Manager. Noah is a Queer multidisciplinary artist and educator here to create liberated worlds through art, storytelling, and sound. They grew up in Oakland, CA/unceded Ohlone land, and identify as a trauma survivor with sensitivities to the world around them. They use music and art for meaning-making and the healing of others, integrating these passions into their work as a peer for young adults in a first-episode psychosis program. They have facilitated in a wide variety of settings, at the intersections of anti-oppression, trauma, incarceration, Caribbean ancestry, music, and mental health. Through their incantations they create spaces of radical imagination and possibility.

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Dreaming Accessible Futures: Mental Health & Creative Practice

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Dreaming Accessible Futures: Mental Health & Creative Practice

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