ICP Household Artwork Hour: Communal Braiding (July 2026)

Explore ICP’s exhibitions throughout this hands-on all ages household workshop. Bring discarded cloth or used garments that you just wish to repurpose for a communal braiding workshop in ICP’s galleries, led by educator and artist Cassandra Mayela Allen. 

All ages 4 and up are welcome.

Parents and guardians should stay with their youngsters in the course of the exercise.  

About the Artist

Cassandra Mayela Allen is a Venezuelan artist based mostly in New York City whose multidisciplinary follow—encompassing blended media, textiles, set up, and socially engaged tasks— examines reminiscence, belonging, lively meditation, and labor as instruments for self-healing. Rooted within the migrating physique and the objects it carries, her work treats private belongings as dwelling archives: woven, stitched, and suspended, they develop into materials data inseparable from the communal practices that generate them. Allen foregrounds collaboration and encounter, inviting various social networks to take part within the making and that means of every piece. Her work prompts artwork as a relational course of reasonably than a set object, centering acts of constructing as a way of reaching a state of “flow”, reflection, and connection.

Mayela Allen is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2025) and has participated in residencies together with Bolster Arts (2025), Modern Ancient Brown (2024), Pocoapoco (2024), and Campo Garzón (2024). In 2023, she obtained an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She has introduced solo exhibitions at Instituto Cervantes, LES Girls Club, Olympia, and JO-HS Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at MOCAD, UNAM, EFA Project Space, Eric Firestone Gallery, V1 Gallery, NADA Miami, and Mama Projects, amongst others. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, BOMB Magazine, Elephant, American Craft Council, and Vogue México.

Image credit score: Aquel Amplex, Found materials and clothes, braided collectively, 2024-2026