Join us Saturday, December 16, 2023, from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. in Los Angeles at Club Creative or online for We Are Not Our Cruxes, a project that centers the voices and mental health of adult adoptees and those who have gone through the foster care system. The project seeks to strengthen community and provide healing using art.

Through a series of hybrid convenings, participants engage in critical conversations aimed at exploring their unique struggles and experiences of those who identify as adopted or foster care alumni. Additionally, these gatherings offer art-based healing workshops, carefully designed to explore the emotional landscape of adult adoptees and foster care alumni while simultaneously promoting emotional well-being and resilience. Invited panelists for the critical conversations include adoptee artists, activists, mental health professionals, and scholars. The art-making portion of the events will be led by artist, art therapist, and transcultural adoptee Nicole Rademacher.

This second session will feature mental health professional Angela Gee, artist Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez, and actress Santana Dempsey.

Events are designed for adults, 18+. Those who identify as adult adoptees and/or foster care alumni are invited to be part of a larger project, that includes an online interactive multilayered visualization.

All events will be recorded to form part of a short documentary at a later date. Please indicate on the ticket form if you do not want to be recorded, and we will exclude your likeness from being used. If you attend via Zoom, all names will remain anonymous.

This project is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.

MEET THE PANELISTS

Angela Gee, LMFT (in her own words):

I am a searcher… I always was… and I still am… searching for the missing piece. Louise Bourgeois, artist.

I am a Marriage and Family Therapist in Los Angeles, California. As a Chinese-American adopted in-race and an adoptive parent in a transracial family, my personal history informs my professional practice. My generation did not have the support and resources to guide my identity development as an adoptee and person of color. Therefore, I have focused my efforts to provide support for adoptees and their families throughout the lifespan.

In addition to my clinical work, I provide additional support services that I wish were available to me. Working within our community has given me an unending sense of purpose and belonging.

Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez (b. 1987, Bogotá) uses their art to transform individual witness into collective action. As a person who was separated from their first family for 28 years through a private, transnational adoption process, they co-create spaces that encourage people to express truth to power by working together in shared knowing and practice.

Their work has been shown in the U.S. at the Queens Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Latchkey Gallery, The Mills Gallery at Boston Center for the Arts, RISD Museum, and the Knockdown Center, and internationally in Montreal, Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, and La Paz.

In addition to their own artistry, they spend time on We Are Holding This, an abolitionist press focused on independent publishing for people impacted by family policing and separation.

Santana Dempsey has made a notable impression as a versatile actress, writer and painter. Adopted out of foster care at the age of six with her biological sister, Santana grew up knowing the impact art had on her well being. “It was the one place I never had to conform. I never had to be put in a box.”

Santana’s most notable TV/Film credits include: Kenan, Scandal, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, MegaChurch Murder, Lowlife… She played Ana in Real Women Have Curves at the Pasadena Playhouse and was part of the prestigious ABC talent showcase. Currently, she has a Choice Hotel’s commercial airing.

Santana’s motto: Our differences become our greatest assets!