Open Your Eyes (O.Y.E.) Community Arts Project – Cyanotype
Art-making workshop by with guest artist Dionis Ortiz
Project: Cyanotype
For: Adult cancer survivors, friends and family.
Cost: Free
Registration is required to participate: RSVP
Wednesday evenings from 6:30-8:30pm.
About the facilitator: Dionis Ortiz
Dionis Ortiz is a multimedia artist, community art producer, and educator who works in printmaking, collage, and sculpture. Drawing from his experiences as a child born and raised in Harlem of Dominican descent, he creates geometric, process-based works from ill-regarded and found materials to celebrate the people of the African diaspora.
He was a participant in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, received a Rema Hort Mann Artist Community Engagement Grant, and has been an Artist in Residence at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan. He has produced several solo exhibitions in New York and his work was recently included in Estamos bien: La Trienal 20/21 at El Museo Del Barrio (New York).
Community engagement is central to his practice and he has produced projects for Harlem River Park Fund, Museum of Art and Design, and ImageNation.
In 2021 he was Artist in Residence at Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling and his mural design was selected by PubliColor for an elementary school in East Harlem. His work has been featured in The New York Times several times and is included in Latinx Art: Artists, Market, and Politics by Arlene Dávila.
This community work extends to teaching and Ortiz teaches all ages from pre-K to teenagers and undergraduates at Hunter College and Cornell University.
He received his B.F.A from SUNY Purchase College and his M.F.A from CUNY Hunter College.
Wilhelmina Grant-Cooper
Wilhelmina Grant-Cooper is a self-taught, Harlem-based visual artist, arts instructor, and author. Wilhelmina creates assemblages using mixed-media and found objects which she repurposes into visual art. Her artistic undertakings included assignments as artist-in-residence at The Ralph Lauren Cancer Center and as a Creative Center at University Settlement artist-in-residence wherein she used the arts to nurture the creativity of cancer patients, their families, and staff in a healthcare setting. She also guides elder participants through arts activities at senior centers in Washington Heights, Upper East Side and Brooklyn.
In 2010 Wilhelmina was honored with three prestigious awards for art: The Black Art Makers Award of National Conference of Artists, The Women’s History Month Creative Power of Women Award presented by New York State Senator Bill Perkins, and The Alain Locke Art Action Award presented by The Harlem Arts Alliance. She was also a NoMAA (Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance) 2016 Uptown Arts Stroll Honoree. Wilhelmina is the founder of SISTAAH, Inc. (Survivors Inspiring Sisters Through Art and Advocacy for Health), an arts-based non-profit organization which seeks to inform, encourage and facilitate access to early detection of breast cancer by connecting the medically underserved to free screening services. Using SISTAAH, Inc. as a platform, Wilhelmina has launched numerous successful grant-funded community art projects: Saving Our Sisters in the African American Community, the Harlem Hand Fan Initiative, and O.Y.E. Open Your Eyes Community Art/Health Awareness Project.
She self-published her first book, A Feeling of Fullness: Insights of a Divinely Guided Journey Beyond Breast Cancer (2016, Xlibris Publishing Company) which chronicles the journey from the nearly-missed breast cancer diagnosis at age 37 through her present-day life as an artist/author/health awareness advocate. Her second book entitled Uplifting Cancer Survivors in the COVID Era: Expressions of Kindness and Inspiration Between Aunties and Nieces was released in October 2022.
Some collectors of her artwork include: Alice Walker, Bill Clinton, The Heath Gallery, and Hamilton Landmark Galleries. Eleven of her assemblages appear as set dressing in Seasons 1 and 2 of the Prime Video Series HARLEM.
Wilhelmina is an avid gardener and lives with her husband in Harlem. Her website is:
https://sistaah.org
