WYE Collage-Making Workshop + Community Chat Featuring an Artist Talk

Join What’s Your Elephant for a hands-on collage-making workshop, community conversation, and artist talk in conjunction with What We Carry.
About this Event

WYE Collage-Making Workshop + Community Chat
Featuring an Artist Talk

Overview:
Join What’s Your Elephant™ for a hands-on collage-making workshop, community conversation, and artist talk in conjunction with What We Carry: A Community Art Exhibition & Dialogue.

Participants are invited to reflect on what we inherit, what sustains us, what we carry, and what we may be ready to release or transform through words, images, color, and layered materials.

The afternoon will also include a conversation with exhibiting artists DJ-Laoshi, Natalya Kochak, Zeb, Niki Lopez, and Tina Wright, who will share reflections on their work, their creative process, and how their art connects to the themes of What We Carry.

Description:
Art can give us another way into the things that are difficult to name.

During this guided collage-making experience, participants will use magazines, imagery, text, color, and mixed-media materials to create personal visual reflections inspired by the question: What are you carrying?

There is no right way to make the work and no previous art experience is needed. The process is designed to make room for reflection, storytelling, connection, and conversation at your own pace.

Throughout the workshop, we’ll gather for an informal community chat and artist conversation featuring exhibiting artists:

Artist Talk featuring:

• DJ-Laoshi
• Natalya Kochak
• Zeb
• Niki Lopez
• Tina Wright

Together, we’ll talk about the experiences, memories, questions, and ideas behind selected works in the exhibition, how artists translate what they carry into creative practice, and what can happen when individual stories are brought into conversation with one another.

Participants are welcome to create, listen, share, ask questions, or simply spend time with the exhibition.

Saturday, September 5, 2026
12–3 PM
1310 Gallery | Sailboat Bend Artist Lofts
1310 SW 2nd Ct, Fort Lauderdale

Free + open to the public
All materials provided.
No art experience necessary.

About What We Carry

What We Carry: A Community Art Exhibition & Dialogue brings together 35 artists exploring what we inherit, what sustains us, what we survive, and what we are learning to carry differently.

Presented by What’s Your Elephant™ and curated and produced by Niki Lopez, the exhibition creates space for art, reflection, dialogue, community connection, and the complexity of what people carry.

What We Carry is on view August 21–September 10, 2026 at 1310 Gallery.

Exhibition details:
http://whatsyourelephant.org/whatwecarry

Activations & Community Experiences

• Friday, August 21, 2026 | 6–10 PM – Opening reception with artists, community, music + light bites
• Sunday, August 30, 2026 | 2–4 PM - Community Drum Workshop with Feminafrika
• Saturday, September 5, 2026 | 12-3PM - WYE Collage-Making Workshop + Community Chat
• Thursday, September 10, 2026 | 7–9 PM – Closing Reflection: Art, Movement & Community, featuring a performance by Movement artist Damaris Ferrer at 8 PM

Support What We Carry

Presenting Community Partner: AIDS Healthcare Foundation

Current support for What We Carry includes contributions from Sue Wilder, community donors through Givebutter, and in-kind production, design, communications, and curatorial support from Niki Lopez Creative.

Your donation helps support exhibition installation, signage, printing, supplies, documentation, artist/program support, community engagement, and the sustainability of What’s Your Elephant™. Support for this exhibition helps keep the work accessible to the public while honoring the labor required to produce meaningful community-centered art experiences.

Donate / sponsor / share:
https://givebutter.com/wye_whatwecarry

About the Curator

Niki Lopez is an award-winning Afro-Latina interdisciplinary artist, curator, cultural producer, and social practitioner based in South Florida. Since 2008, she has curated and produced community-centered exhibitions and arts experiences at 1310 Gallery and throughout South Florida, using art as a bridge for dialogue, healing, visibility, and collective care.

Through her creative practice and nonprofit work, Lopez creates spaces where personal story, cultural memory, social issues, and creative expression can meet in meaningful ways.

https://nikilopez.art

About What’s Your Elephant™

What’s Your Elephant is a 501(c)(3) arts and education nonprofit that uses art and facilitated dialogue to address what often goes unspoken. Founded as a community movement in 2013 and incorporated as a nonprofit in 2023, WYE creates culturally responsive spaces for reflection, storytelling, creative expression, and community connection. Since its inception, WYE has engaged more than 3,500 people through exhibitions, workshops, conversations, and immersive art experiences across South Florida.

https://whatsyourelephant.org