Woven in Water: A Participatory Art Piece for Stats N Stanzas 2025

This community art piece was created as part of Stats N Stanzas 2025, a poetry and public health event organized by Ryan Petteway and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. The event centers art and storytelling as tools for confronting social inequity, processing collective grief, and imagining more just futures. Inspired by Nikki Giovanni’s poem I Married My Mother, which reimagines crying as an intentional act of release, participants were invited to respond to the question: What helps you through tears? Contributions were made to a shared painting, folded in the style of an exquisite corpse, so that each addition built on the last without revealing the whole. When the paper was finally unfolded, its creases and marks remained—visible blue impressions representing the emotional weight and release of tears. Through layered responses and collective storytelling, the piece reflects on what it means to grieve, to heal, and to engage in shared acts of vulnerability and care.