Transformative Arts presents Biddy's Garden – a purposeful action by a group of artists to cultivate creative expression and specific visual language that centers how we as women experience the earth's vitality. Bridget "Biddy" Mason was a free Black woman who in the 1860s after winning her emancipation purchased a land parcel in Los Angeles, in what would later become the financial district and where Transformative Arts is headquartered now. Biddy's Garden honors Mason's work serving her community with innovation programs and her midwifery with art-making by five Los Angeles-based artists: June Edmonds, Adrienne Devine, Mercedes Dorame, Francesca Lalanne and Silvi Naçi.
This gathering of five women artists – a scared number according to faiths across the global, and in numerology symbolizes freedom, curiosity, and change – represents Transformative Arts commitment to both indigenous knowledges that recognize a pluralism with the natural world, and the creative impulses Los Angeles and women of color are responsible for nurturing. During this six-week activation, some of these makers will create new artworks, host women's circles and tend a small garden inside the TA space that signifies Biddy's contributions to LA, that continue to make space for important visual language and literacy.
View transformativenow.org