Chelvanaya Gabriel (they/them) is an Queer Black Trans Non-Binary visual artivist/multimedia storyteller and resilience facilitator with a strong background in the sciences. A self-taught artist, they found an Audre Lorde-inspired form of self-care and healing-survival in creating visual work after the 2016 election. They focus on creating space within their work, and in community, where stories of trauma, disability, and neurodiversity, especially of QTBIPOC folx, can be witnessed and collectively processed. Actively decolonized contemplative practices and an embodied awareness of ancestral knowledge are central to this work. They insist that we ask “Whose stories aren’t being told?” They are stepping into boldness and an audacity to take up space in the “art world”, for themselves, for others like us and for our ancestors.
Creative Resilience, their latest multi-modal project, includes an art-based dialogue about wellness, resilience and identity developed within an anti-oppression and liberation-centered framework. This project has taken on new urgency and relevance in these pandemic times where the whole globe is, to varying degrees, navigating the trauma and grief of this moment. Each person has been forced to evaluate for themselves what wellness means to them in the context of a unavoidable awareness of the impacts we have on each other. Concepts like community care and mutual aid are examples of how the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular, has changed the ways people relate to one another, and the ways we think of ourselves in relation to each other. Finding creative ways of exploring these dynamics in a deeply community-engaged way is at the forefront of their mind these days and informs the projects they have been developing and gravitating towards.
Support their work: Instagram @scifilens | Ca$hApp & Venmo: @chelvanaya
