This summer, Locust Projects launched a series called Care, offering space and resources to artists who work at the intersection of self-, interpersonal, and community care. Some of these artists are mothers, with parenting experiences that inform their creative practices. Arsimmer McCoy is a collaborative storyteller with deep roots in her Miami Gardens (formerly Carol City) community. Loni Johnson creates healing spaces for Black women, investigating how she claims space and how our ancestral memory informs the ways we move through space. And Coralina Rodriguez Meyer translates structural violence into heirlooms to restore civic agency.

In Mother Artist, these women will discuss their art practices, their commitments to caregiving, and how integrating care into cultural work can lead us all towards a more nourishing, tender, and sustainable future. The artists will engage session participants through passionate and compassionate discussion, experience-based skill sharing, and artist-created participatory activities.

This session is open to all. Artist parents are welcomed and encouraged to attend with their children.

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Loni Johnson is a multi-disciplinary visual artist born and raised in Miami, FL. Ms. Johnson is an artist, educator, mother, and activist who understands that, as artists, there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture our communities with her creative gift, and it must be utilized to better our world. She explores creating healing spaces for Black women. Through an exhibition of movement and ritual, Johnson’s performance and installation works reconnect and reactivate our ancestral memory, which allows us to reimagine how we see ourselves and reclaim our space. Loni explores how her practice affects her awareness / existence in spaces and the investigation of how she claims and navigates through space, especially focusing on spaces that lack accessibility to her people, her communities. Through her work, the artist wants to present how ancestral and historical memory informs how, when, and where we enter spaces.

Raised queer in the rural South and Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race, indigenous Colombian American artist who translates domestic and structural violence into American heirlooms. Her Quipucamayoc role (Inka artist, architect, family planner & cultural historian) engages her community to perform their citizenship as a masterplan for surviving American colonial mythology. Coralina founded FEMILIA (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism) to propose intimate solutions for urban scale problems while she was building skyscrapers in NYC. Combining documentary sculpture, digital media installation, textile and matrilineal ancestral traditions, Coralina’s collaborations with activists and neighbors restore civic agency to her unvanquished community. Documenting the birthing justice crisis in Miami (a city with the highest maternal death rate amongst BIPOC) in social practice, sculpture, and photography, the artist's Mother Mold project draws from her high risk hospital delivery and her mother’s delivery in a car on the outskirts of the Everglades.

Arsimmer McCoy is a storyteller from Miami, FL, by way of Richmond Heights. McCoy is a collaborative artist, educator, and cultural worker who has been dedicated to these disciplines for over a decade. As a writer & poet, her work is centered around her reflections on accountability, obligation, community, transparency, and the nuances of living in this city.

Monica Peña is a Miami-born and based filmmaker, writer, and artist advocate. Her creative work has explored radical vulnerability, mystical realism, and sense of place. She has been generously supported by the Sundance Institute, the Knight Foundation, and Filmmaker Magazine, among other organizations, film festivals, and media. In turn, she supports other artists by connecting them with resources and opportunities through various roles at arts organizations in Miami and beyond. She currently leads public programs at Locust Projects, including Care and WaveMaker Grants, part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting network. Monica is devoted to questioning and reimagining both creative and administrative processes to make the arts accessible to all, especially those who have been systemically excluded from the art world.