Untold Stories: Joy, Grief and Aging at The Watershed
Portland, Oregon
Ongoing
In collaboration with Portland State School of Social Work, CPAH, Jeannette Sager, Adela Cardona Puerta and Gwen Hoeffgen
Portland, Oregon
Ongoing
In collaboration with Portland State School of Social Work, CPAH, Jeannette Sager, Adela Cardona Puerta and Gwen Hoeffgen
The Watershed is a transit-oriented, mixed-use development in the heart of the Hillsdale Town Center in Southwest Portland. It includes 51 units of affordable rental housing for seniors (55+), with eight units set aside for formerly homeless veterans. The building also houses CPAH’s administrative offices and a community event space.
This collaborative project with fellow artists Gwen Hoeffgen and Adela Cardona Puerta was a four-week workshop series, facilitated at the invitation of Master of Social Work student Jeannette Sager due to an introduction by PSU Art Professor Emily Fitzgerald.
Each workshop session invited residents to reflect on their lives through discussion, storytelling, dancing, laughter, and creative prompts. Through drawing, residents mapped their life journeys and shaped the legacies they wished to leave behind. With photography, they captured moments and questioned memory and permanence. Through writing, they spoke to loved ones, to themselves, and declared their place in the world.
The workshops culminated in a self-curated exhibition, where each resident chose how to tell their own story through the work they created. These pieces were exhibited in the community event space, open to the public, and is now a rotating gallery.
What began as a short-term series became a safe, meaningful space to share, process, and connect. We witnessed residents greet each other differently, find common threads in their stories, and celebrate both their similarities and their differences. They found, in a real and unexpected way, how to be alone together.
Since then, Gwen and I have continued to nurture these relationships through bi-weekly bingo and coffee visits, and new projects such as Mop the Floor (a facilitated class co-led with Gwen Hoeffgen) .
These photos are a collection of moments spent throughout the proccess, a small look into the stories told and new ones made.
Each workshop session invited residents to reflect on their lives through discussion, storytelling, dancing, laughter, and creative prompts. Through drawing, residents mapped their life journeys and shaped the legacies they wished to leave behind. With photography, they captured moments and questioned memory and permanence. Through writing, they spoke to loved ones, to themselves, and declared their place in the world.
The workshops culminated in a self-curated exhibition, where each resident chose how to tell their own story through the work they created. These pieces were exhibited in the community event space, open to the public, and is now a rotating gallery.
What began as a short-term series became a safe, meaningful space to share, process, and connect. We witnessed residents greet each other differently, find common threads in their stories, and celebrate both their similarities and their differences. They found, in a real and unexpected way, how to be alone together.
Since then, Gwen and I have continued to nurture these relationships through bi-weekly bingo and coffee visits, and new projects such as Mop the Floor (a facilitated class co-led with Gwen Hoeffgen) .
These photos are a collection of moments spent throughout the proccess, a small look into the stories told and new ones made.
Community Event Space
Featured Artists:
Julia Mackenzie Stone, Bernadine Dovee, Barbara Bowers, Patty Lynch, and Michael Axt