We Co-Create Art Towards Healing

We met at an Asian American Arts Alliance event in NYC one cold January evening in 2013. We shared obsessions: participatory art, activism, the constant question of how to foster connection.

Our collaborations encourage people to play, interact, reflect, share stories, and connect. We ask how we inhabit the sacred and how art can be of service to healing. We share in celebration and grief — one another’s and in community. We circle for each other and a more interconnected & just world. What do you circle for?

Our Relationships Are Art

We find chosen family and learn how to live generatively through and in our relationships — even when conflicts and sorrows surface. Authentic collaboration is community as art.

We began by experimenting, through an exchange of words & visual art, and co-wrote stories. In a lucky stroke, our first story, “Mirrored Women,” a retelling of Shahrazad, was published in the Nonbinary Review. In recent years, we’ve collaborated on embodied participatory art in Make Yourself Meek Make Yourself Vast.

In Weave&Woven, we created a physical mehndi & rivers with ribbon and inscribed the walls with poems from Miracle Marks. Participants learned raas and explored home, belonging, the feminine & divine — and added their inscriptions & art to the walls.

Purvi (the loud one) insisted on a mehndi for Anjali (the introvert) before her wedding & Anjali facilitated Purvi’s online celebration. And we have shared in each other’s losses. As much as our art, our sistership is our wondrous creation.