Healing Arts is a global campaign by the Jameel Arts & Health Lab in collaboration with the World Health Organization
Healing Arts is a global campaign by the Jameel Arts & Health Lab in collaboration with the World Health Organization
7 February 2026 | 10:30AM - 5:30PM MoMA, 4 W 5th St, New York, NY, 10019
Through screenings, conversations, and music, audiences will learn from the perspective of those directly impacted by structural violence, environmental racism, and the prison industrial complex.
Join artists from the community-based organizations Brotherhood Sister Sol, Archive-Based Creative Arts (of the Parole Preparation Project), South Bronx Unite/the Land Stewards, and the Fortune Society for a daylong celebration. As part of the 2025 Adobe Creative Residency, participants worked with Samora Pinderhughes and his organization, The Healing Project, to create collaboratively made video, audio, and photography works. Through screenings, conversations, and music, this program will invite audiences to listen and learn from the perspective of those directly impacted by structural violence, environmental racism, and the prison industrial complex.
The program is planned in conjunction with the exhibition Samora Pinderhughes: Call and Response.
Admission is free, and RSVP is required. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. This program takes place in person at MoMA. A recording of the event will be added to this page at a later date.
Samora Pinderhughes. Rituals for Abolition. 2022. Performed December 10, 2022, in conjunction with the exhibition Samora Pinderhughes: GRIEF, The Kitchen at Westbeth. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist
Samora Pinderhughes. Rituals for Abolition. 2022. Performed December 10, 2022, in conjunction with the exhibition Samora Pinderhughes: GRIEF, The Kitchen at Westbeth. Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk. Courtesy of the artist
South Bronx Unite/The Land Stewards is a Community Land Trust (CLT) that was founded in 2015 by South Bronx residents to acquire land for public use and to hold it in perpetuity. The Land Stewards seek to ensure that community members retain a stake in their neighborhood and promote pathways to meaningful self-determination for the Mott Haven-Port Morris community. They advocate for community-driven development and work to create and steward physical spaces that provide cultural, social, artistic, educational, environmental, and recreational benefits and opportunities, thereby improving the quality of life in the South Bronx.
Libertad Guerra is an anthropologist, curator, and cultural organizer. She is the executive director of the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center, is cofounder of the South Bronx Unite environmental justice coalition, serves as a member of the Mott Haven / Port Morris Community Land Stewards board, and most recently cofounded the LxNY/ Latinx Arts Consortium of New York network of 30-plus arts organizations. Her academic research and symposia focus on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and New York City social-artistic movements and the aesthetic politics of place in im/migrant urban settings.
Mychal Johnson is a cofounder of South Bronx Unite, advocating for environmental and social justice in the South Bronx. He serves on the boards of the Mott Haven–Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the NYC Community Land Initiative, the NYC Waterfront Management Advisory Board, and the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality. His work centers on environmental, social, racial, and economic justice, promoting community-controlled public land and development that improves quality of life without gentrification in environmental justice communities.
The Fortune Society, founded in 1967, is a New York City–based nonprofit whose mission is to support successful reentry from incarceration and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities. Fortune’s Creative Arts program provides community members with an outlet for creativity, discovery, and skill building; through the arts, our aim is to create a space for healing and to nurture radical hope by encouraging free creative expression and amplifying narratives of artists impacted by the carceral state. Last year, over 600 individuals took part in Fortune’s Creative Arts programming, which included more than 400 hands-on workshops and events, an annual arts festival, and a studio residency at MoMA PS1.
Caleb Knight is a writer, musician, educator, and abolitionist in long-term recovery from a substance use disorder. He serves as the creative arts senior associate at the Fortune Society, where he facilitates songwriting and production workshops, and recently graduated from the MFA poetry program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in places like MoMA PS1, Grain magazine, Ghost City Review, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among others.
Malik Simmons is a poet, songwriter, and artist from Brooklyn, New York, and a former intern and current community member of the Fortune Society. He is a loving father of two.
Parole Preparation Project supports currently and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers through advocacy, litigation, and community care. As an art program within Parole Prep, Archive-Based Creative Arts (ABCA) collaborates with artists, writers, and archivists in New York State prisons on publishing, exhibition, and audio projects.
Frederick “Willie” Kearse was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and now serves as a community engagement specialist at the Parole Preparation Project. A proud Bard Prison Initiative graduate and dedicated mentor, Kearse centers his work on rebuilding and uplifting communities impacted by incarceration. He is a published author, a passionate advocate for public health and criminal justice reform, a prison abolitionist, and an active member of Parole Prep’s Survivor of the System (S.O.S.) group, where he helps provide vital support to those returning from long-term incarceration. He is also the cofounder of the Archive-Based Creative Arts workshop, a collaborative arts program that amplifies the voices, histories, and creative visions of justice-impacted people
Tyler Morse works in the Correspondence department of Parole Prep and co-facilitates ABCA with Willie Kearse. Alongside her work with Parole Prep, she co-operates CFE Garage, a cross-accessibility space and distro in Los Sures, Williamsburg. She is interested in autonomous archival practice, open-access information sharing, and the press as a shared resource.
The Brotherhood Sister Sol (BroSis) is a Harlem-based organization in which Black and Latinx youth claim the power of their history, identity, and community to build the future they want to see through education, community organizing, and training.
Abraham Velazquez Jr. is an alumnus of the Brotherhood Sister Sol and served in the roles of Liberation Program facilitator and coordinator from 2018 to 2025. They earned a BS in communications and an MA from New York University in educational theater. For the last decade Velasquez has designed and implemented curricula, in English and Spanish, for youth in middle and high schools and for adults throughout the United States and in Germany, Cuba, and Spain.
Fanta Camara is a youth organizer from the Liberation Program at the Brotherhood Sister Sol. She has organized youth-led marches, community mutual aid events, and facilitates workshops about the school to prison pipeline, advocating for wellness centers in public schools across New York City.
