ARTIST BIO

Chelvanaya Gabriel (they/them) is a multimedia art activist/storyteller and resilience facilitator with a background in the sciences. They were born and raised first in the Pacific Northwest then here in Western MA. 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 create space within their work, and in community, where stories of wellness, trauma, disability, and neurodiversity, especially of QTBIPOC folx, can be witnessed and collectively processed. Decolonizing contemplative practices and an embodied awareness of ancestral knowledge guide their work. With an afroqueerfuturist/disability justice lens, they ask “Whose stories aren’t being told?” From poetry to paintings and murals, they pose this question and step into boldness and an audacity to take up space in the (art) world, for themselves, for others who resonate along the way and for our ancestors.

Creative Resilience, their latest project, is a series of art-based dialogues about wellness and identity developed within an anti-oppression and liberation-centered framework. Workshops can be found at Northampton Center for the Arts and/or Chelvanaya does consulting/mentoring work with organizations and individuals, using artistic practice as an entry point to relational liberatory community building and compassionate exploration of our unique perspectives on topics such as wellness, identity, diversity, grief, gratitude, and reframing the stories we tell ourselves. They also run spaces designed to loosen up one’s creative muscles with playful exercises and contemplative/somatic practices.