About the Project
Mothers Healing Circle
Mothers Healing Circle provides comfort, community, and woman-centered ancestral healing workshops. Our artists facilitate healing through weekly Guided Meditations for relaxation and connection to self, movement and yoga to ground the body, meditative visual arts, song and storytelling to raise the overall vibration.
Mothers Healing Circle will continue providing healing workshops with the addition of MHC growing container gardens for better nutritional health. Mothers will learn the healing qualities of plants and herbs while sprouting and planting micro-greens and collecting family recipes to create a community cookbook. The healing plant knowledge gained will be used in the development of MHC healing body products. These products will be created to celebrate loved ones and to help pamper the body and spirit.
The last part of the grant will be to reacquaint the body and mind with the outdoors. We will encourage neighborhood walkabouts and storytelling around nature to create a series of illustrations that include our connection to nature, healing, community, and history.
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About the Artists
Sonja Henderson
Sonja Henderson received her B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she concentrated in painting and drawing; and received her M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, where she concentrated in sculpture and installation.
Sonja’s sculptures and installations challenge socio-political constructs through manipulation of media, scale, and re-contextualization of form.
In Chicago, Sonja teaches and works directly with communities using restorative and social justice practices centering equity, healing, and human rights.
In January of 2020, Sonja founded the Mothers Healing Circle (MHC) to help heal Lawndale mothers who have lost their children to violence.
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Janice Bond
Janice Bond is a photographer and visual artist based in both Houston, Texas and Chicago, Illinois. Her works in photography, collage, textile, and video are inspired by intersecting human experiences and nature.
Janice’s intention is for others to experience a new form of cultural mapping built on trust, liberation, and love when engaging with her work.
Bond has exhibited in a variety of spaces, including Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), Mark Rothko Art Center (Daugavpils, Latvia), SE Center for Photography (Greenville, SC), MANA Contemporary (Jersey City, NJ), and more.
In 2020 her photography was featured in BORDERS, an international arts and architecture festival in Venice, Italy. Her ongoing projects, Beyond the Binary (2016 – ) and I Still Love Him (2016 – ) affirm that it is imperative for women, particularly women of color, to take the lead in documenting each other as well as other marginalized bodies across mediums and platforms.
Janice creates because creating is truth – the most earnest reflection of us all in our most divine formation.
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About Illinois Humanities' Envisioning Justice program
Envisioning Justice brings Illinois together to examine and reimagine the criminal legal system through the arts and humanities.
Envisioning Justice leverages the arts and humanities to envision alternatives to the enduring injustice of mass incarceration. This Illinois Humanities initiative works with communities and people impacted by mass incarceration to spark conversation and illuminate community-based strategies that address our racist and unjust criminal legal system.
From 2017 to 2019, Envisioning Justice was concentrated in Chicago. Moving forward, Illinois Humanities is expanding this initiative and its attendant activities throughout the state. As a part of this next phase of Envisioning Justice, we will host and document community conversations, provide grant opportunities, and commission projects by artists and humanists working to shift the narrative around incarceration and system impacted communities.
Learn more about the Envisioning Justice program, including upcoming events and grant offerings.
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