Hello! We are Abby Gonzales and Bo Owens! We are graduate students in SIUe’s art therapy counseling program and are so excited to partner with Con and Red Chair Studios this semester! For our first blog post, we wanted to introduce ourselves and give you a little overview of how we plan to spend our time here!

We are going to get to help facilitate weekly community art groups with individuals at Peter and Paul Community Services. This organization has various components that work together to help individuals at risk of experiencing homelessness. Our specific group will work with individuals who have phase 2 HIV and/or various other severe mental illnesses diagnosis. You can learn more about the organization, programs, and mission here: https://ppcsinc.org/

We are also going to have the opportunity to host Art Hives for the local community surrounding Red Chair Studios! Art Hives are pop-up community art studios that welcome all people as artists. The motto is ‘each one teach one’, urging community members to collaborate and learn from each other! They happen world-wide and are centered around inclusion, respect, learning, and of course, creating art in community with others! You can learn more about them here: https://arthives.org/ We will keep this blog updated on times and locations that we conduct art hives so that you can drop in and create art with us throughout the semester!

Other fun opportunities that we will be involved with include things like helping with a CAT workshop, the Print Bazar, and something that I am personally most excited for- collaborating with artist Leslie Holt and her Neuro Blooms art installation! Neuro blooms are pieces of art based on Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans of brains with different mental illnesses. These images are turned into pieces of art and then made into things like pins, stickers, and prints. The idea is that these pieces represent mental illness in a concrete, visual form that conveys the brains chemical role in mental illness. They are also an avenue to encourage brave conversations to take place. For our collaboration, we will be placing stickers in the windows of different establishments to spread awareness and decrease stigma around mental illness. Red Chair is holding an event on October 8th in conjunction with Second Saturday Art Walk where they will be displayed. Look at the website https://www.neuroblooms.com/ to see images of these pieces of art and learn more!