Saturday, August 29th, 2026
Edward W. Kane & Martha J. Wallace Center for Black History | 17 Broadway, Newport
Admission $15 – $20 per person | *Student Discounts now available $10 with valid student ID
Artist Ariel Tavares will lead this workshop held in partnership with the Jamestown Art Center.
To connect with and honor the history of God’s Little Acre and the Spirit Bundle found at Newport Historical Society – we will create a piece of art to hold memory.
Memory is a fickle thing. How do we grieve yet honor a loved one, a memory, a place, a world we were born into? How can we live afterwards? We will begin this experience with an open roundtable discussion where we will talk about who is allowed to be honored and remembered throughout history, and the ways we honor the living and dead. After our discussion we will use paper, pictures, words & poetry, and other secondhand materials to create a mixed-media collage!
Participants will leave the session with either a collaged urn of flowers, a poem, and/or an engraving. Students are able to bring photos, poems, or scraps of material to use for the experience!
By the end of this workshop, students will:
Materials Provided:
Artist Bio:
Ariel Tavares is an interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, sweet treat enthusiast, and world builder. Born and raised from Providence, Rhode Island, she was sustained by a big family of cousins & pots of Cape Verdean dishes handmade by a line of heavy-handed love-filled immigrant matriarchs who shaped her work ethic, commitment to community, and love for yellow porches.
As a “self-taught” artist, Ariel is committed to learning whatever medium her ideas demand in order to honor and serve the story, the person, the place at hand. She blends a range of mediums currently including poetry, film photography, collaging, sewing, crafting using second-hand and/or recycled materials, event curation, and digital art. All as tools for collective healing, internal exploration, and the preservation of moments.
Her work explores the question “What If?” A question that drives her artistic practice, outfit choices, her approach to social justice, and most importantly her spirituality which is the sourceof her ideas.
She transforms common everyday materials into vibrant, slightly kooky, community focused pieces. Her work encourages audiences to co-create and to see themselves and themes reflected within their everyday lives. She yearns to foster creative expression not just in herself but in those around her because for Ariel, art and creativity are means of personal and collective liberation. Through her work she hopes people reconnect with their spirit of wonder and silliness as she adamantly believes imagination is one of our most vital resources. And art, a public Service.
Ariel is a past alum of the 2024 Graduate Hotel Sweet Dreams Society Residency, where her Garden of Dreams Exhibition received an official citation from the State of Rhode Island. She completed the Waterfire Accelerate 2025 Program, the Creative Reuse Center of RI’s Barbara Grandis Artist Residency and recently won the Motif 2025 Spoken Word: Free Verse Poet Award.
By day, Ariel is in the advertising industry trying to find ways design can be used to build new systems of care and collective invention.
Instagram Link: https://www.instagram.com/ariellingmyname/?hl=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arieltavares/
Portfolio: https://arieltavares.com/