Gerri Kirby is a wife, mother and grandmother. She has been in recovery for 15 years and completed the Christian 12 Step Ministry as part of her recovery journey. Gerri’s work centers on helping others in their recovery through creative art making. She has worked at Muslim Girls Recovery Center in Cairo, Egypt, led creative healing workshops at Sun Cloud Health and has led women’s retreats in-person and virtually. She has also worked in religious spaces as a spiritual coach, confirmation leader, mission council and Muslim outreach.
When choosing to go into battle, one must choose precision weapons. To fight anxiety and depression my weapons of choice were art materials. My healing began when I wasn’t concerned […]
When I was asked to create a work of art exploring literacy, I wanted to create a dance but I had no dancers or a studio, so I chose to use my own body in the space I had, my yard. Fluent Nature is video of micro-choreography that explores what cannot be expressed with words, how nature has its own language, and how placing the human body in nature changes the story.
Title: What Is Me and What Is Not Me | Artist: Alex Chadwell | Medium: Music
My thinking on arts and literacy centers around the concept of literacies and artmaking as both sense-making and meaning-making processes that organically and inevitably overlap, intersect, and reciprocate. Compositionally, What is me and what is not me is a sound collage of sorts (there is no notation for the piece, and I'd be hard pressed to recreate it accurately) that abstractly and aurally represents the relationships between literacies and artmaking.
Title: A Curious Honeybee | Artist: Gideon Young | Medium: Film
Offering welcome through traditional and digital elements of literacy, A Curious Honeybee provides an experiential learning environment by activating visual, musical, natural, and emotional literacies.
La Carpa Theatre is a project that I am currently directing in the Detroit Latinx community. The project aims to strengthen and uplift youth voices through devised theatre, in the style of the Mexican Carpas. This audio was created in the theatrical environment envisioned for our project. The ways in which literacies are re-defined are at the heart of La Carpa Theatre's mission.