ICP Family Art Hour: Communal Braiding (September 2026)

Make artwork impressed by photographic strategies throughout ICP’s month-to-month Family Art Hour. Each session contains a hand-on exercise impressed by ICP’s exhibitions or assortment.  

This session of Family Art Hour is hosted by educator and artist Cassandra Mayela Allen. Inspired by Yves Saint Laurent and Photography exhibition, carry discarded cloth or used garments that you just wish to repurpose for a communal braiding workshop held in ICP’s gallery.

Tickets for this program are included with Museum admission (free for teenagers ages 14 and underneath) and supplies are offered. Come early or keep after to discover our present exhibition, Yves Saint Laurent and Photography and Photobooks USA 2000–25, with complimentary Yves Saint Laurent and Photography Kids’ Guide out there on the admission desk.

Families with youngsters ages 4 and up of all talents are welcome. Parents and guardians should stay with their youngsters through the exercise. 

About the Artist

Cassandra Mayela Allen is a Venezuelan artist based mostly in New York City whose multidisciplinary observe—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 fairly than a set object, centering acts of constructing as a method 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