"Speak your mind (Habla tu mente)" with Chela Ixcopal

​Speak your mind (Habla tu mente): An artmaking workshop to process grief and loss due to incarceration and/or deportation.

​During this workshop we will gather as a community to talk about our experiences with grief and loss due to incarceration and/or deportation. The conversation will be followed by artmaking in the form of collage and creative writing. This workshop is open to anyone who has experienced loss due to deportation or has had a similar experience. Speak your mind (Habla tu mente) is the first of many workshops that will provide a safe space for people to process their experiences creatively and in community.

​This workshop will be facilitated by Chela Ixcopal (AiR '25; ACG '23), the current Leeway x Fleisher Visual Artist-in-Residence. Their residency focuses on developing a multidisciplinary oral history and visual storytelling project that amplifies the voices of Philadelphians who have lost family members to deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Chela is a multidisciplinary teacher, curator, book designer, artist, Bruja, and emerging writer. Drawing from their Mayan Guatemalan and Ecuadorian roots, Chela’s work cultivates healing spaces that explore social justice, cultural identity, and ancestral knowledge through lived experience and collective memory.

​Leeway Foundation and Fleisher Art Memorial do not support the violence that the current administration is enacting on our immigrant communities. Fleisher is a sanctuary space, and we will not allow ICE or any violence whatsoever in our facility. We stand with our immigrant communities.