Community Storytelling

Latin America

Bringing communities together to articulate a shared history is at the heart of Brenda's conceptualization of a "social sculpture." These processes have spanned many decades and geographical regions for refinement and exploration. Starting an artist-in-residence position at the Rieckan Foundation through the Creative Action Institute in Guatemala where she worked for a year promoting library use as a force of effective democratic process through collaborative community arts but found the unaddressed effects of trauma from genocide, mass torture and their consequent impunity prevented far more urgent. The following year the artist received another grant from the Indigenous Support Network to continue on in Guatemala working exclusively with war widows and affected Indigenous youth in the area to tell their story publicly in the face of social forces seeking to suppress it. The grant led her to work transforming a former clandestine grave site into a monument reflecting the stories of the community at large in paertnership with Grupo Apoyo Mutuo and the Franciscan order. Young people actively advocated for Indigenous controlled school systems to protect Mayan ways of thinking, being and definitions of literacy by taking over a football field length mural wall.

Urban Indigenous Communities

Migrant Justice

Poet Wall

Intimate Partner Violence

Motus Theatre

Youth Health Humanities