Visual Storytelling: Laundry Day at the Gantt Center

Adult content disclaimer: This workshop includes sensitive adult content.

We all have a story to tell. As women* our voices are often silenced. (*cis women, trans women, trans-femme, and non-binary folx)
- Andrea Downs, Artist, Activist, and Project Coordinator

Airing Out the "Dirty" Laundry is a visual storytelling project that is a catalyst for women’s* voices, a call to gather together, opportunity to listen and to be heard, and to foster the love and understanding that resists hate and injustice. It is a collection of stories that creates opportunities and spaces for us to share and reveal our stories of strength, unity, and resistance of oppression, injustice, and exclusion through visual storytelling.  When we reveal our stories, we create the possibility of shifting the narrative.

In this workshop, participants can share their stories using fabrics and other materials that will be joined with the others on a clothesline. These items will become a part of all future and upcoming installations of Airing Out the "Dirty" Laundry exhibiting in Charlotte and across the country.

Artistic skill is not required. Participants should bring an article of clothing, textile, pieces of fabric, letters, or papers that are significant, connects with the meaning of the story they will share and can serve as the base layer for their piece.

About The Artist

Andrea Downs is an artist who has taught art for 15 years. She creates work that is designed to foster collaboration, connections, and deeper dialogue across different segments of the diverse communities within which she lives and works.  Relationships, connections, identity, and an openness to engage with one another are at the center of Downs’ work.  She creates opportunities and shared experiences in order to foster the kinds of connections that build strong communities. Her most important work, in partnership with her husband, is raising her two children to believe in equality. Andrea lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina. Learn more about Airing Out the “Dirty” Laundryhere.