a movement to reclaim + celebrate women's initiations
AUDIENCE TESTIMONIALS
I am honored to be reborn tonight.”
Profound 🙏🌹 thank you for creating this journey of deep ritual and healing.
For sharing so much depth of storytelling through so many mediums.
I was touched deeply on so many levels this evening."
- M. Serina
I took my 8 year old daughter and it was probably the most powerful experience we’ve ever shared together. We left feeling inspired, empowered, connected, in a trance-like state of deep reverence and gratitude. Thank you for nourishing us with this indescribably beautiful and sacred experience. ❤️
Love and breadth, connection and gratitude beams in and through these walls and in the walls of our cellular bodies – one to another. The exchange Is a gift to remember."
The abundance, voluptuous spirit of healing, self-hood, sisterhood- so generous, healed + healing OUR FUTURE + OUR PAST + OUR PRESENT.
Thank you each deeply for your Love.”
I am grateful for the privilege of witnessing & participating in this ritual. For feeling both the pain of history and the balms of sisterhood & creativity. For an opportunity to honor 3 miscarried babies, and sisters – young, elder, and all. My heart is open My body flashes hot. Brava to you all. Us all. To life.”
This experience was a rite of passage in sharing the Heart & Womb
of all women of all time.”
It was so incredibly ... powerful and moving. The wall to wall beauty and sharing and deep welcoming. Thank you, each of you for all you have given here!" - T. Bridge
Well I don’t really know what to say – I’m only 12. I have so much more life that I can’t wait to live.”
Taking in all the many rites in the house – I feel expanded + opened to so many other experiences + like the world is fuller + filled with breath, song, rhythm + color.”
Standing in the room with pictures of women, surrounded by women, all of these women who have created more women, to be a part of the women of the world,
to realize we are together.”
This Rites of Passage brought me to the feet of some of my worst fears & reminded me of the strength I carry & the blessings of the Ancestors that I walk with and the Abundance of love that will always surround me. Gratitude. Asé”
All of these things are our rites; all of these things- we already know;
all of these hold power and allow us to flow effortlessly through the unknown.”
Being held by the rich soils of women of color. May a life of honoring them be born.”
Sometimes my rite of passage is still stuck at the door where grief and loss live.
Tonight brought me a step closer. Thank you.”
I am leaving with a sense of deep spiritual community.”
Thank you for this beautiful weaving of story, voice, image, music, plants and crystals. Walking through this amazing performance was a rite of passage in itself!” - J. Browdy
Rites of Passage reminded me of my choice to hold or release. My elders loved me asked of me to look at my deep rest. I am deeply moved within into a place I haven’t traveled. I am love. I am here. Thank you Goddess. For these women.”
A village way of life."
- S. Kulman
A gorgeous and deeply moving experience....Louise Gluck begins a poetry book, “The Wild Iris”, with “At the end of my suffering, there was a door”. I feel that sentiment mirrored in what many of the women here have shared. Thank you all for what you’ve shared and for this virtual opportunity to walk through it!"
- M. Clarisse
The heavens are smiling. The ancestors are breathing a big sigh of delight.
You did the work of a 1000, rest for as many nights." - C. Tom
Thank you for creating a space to feel vulnerable & be deliberate with
each emotion & experience.”
Incredibly powerful. I feel so humbled and honored to be able to witness these very personal journeys.
So grateful to be able to be in ceremony with you all.”
Trust what births belonging. Because you belong. Know you are beautiful as you are, no matter what you do in life – you are belonged to this earth.”
I remember going to see Rites of Passage in with my mother, who is now 86. It was a meaningful experience to go through the house with her and be able to talk afterwards about all things pertaining to being women. I have always been able to talk freely about everything with my mother, and yet, there were some new things we were able to talk about after seeing Rites of Passage. I am very grateful for that. Those much-needed conversations between women are just one of the many reasons why this project is so important.
Bringing all of who we are into the open, ensuring that ALL women are included and capturing the many different layers and perspectives of being a woman, and even what that means in today's world, is such an exciting and important thing to be doing now. " -K. van Ginhoven
So many artists under one unified vision was such a beautiful gift to unwrap.
Each room a galvanizing invitation into the poetic realities of our inner lives."
-.H.D. Fisch
I never truly acknowledged the fact that I was female until about the 2nd room,
and realized maybe it's not so bad after all."
SOVEREIGNTY."
ARTIST TESTIMONIALS
We met only to create this project. But we walked into a familiarness, knowing one another across tribal timezones, ancient & foreign to this calendar's ability to record. We made a new village, one of caring for one another, from knowing the path we each traveled to arrive in the house of Rites of Passage."
-Sokhna Heathyre Mabin, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator & Performer
Rites of Passage reminded me that it's possible to have a liberated community
where we can be open, vulnerable, and witnessed with love.
I am forever grateful for this healing experience and the community I now have through this museum!"
-Devyn Harris, 20/20 Vision Pro-Creative Team Member & Performer
Rites of Passage was exactly that for me. I came in knowing that I was in a deep healing process and that this project was going to push me forward in it, but I had no idea how or what that really meant. While at Rites of Passage I felt like my truest self; stepping into roles and holding space in ways that called me forward and required me to stretch. I know I am different now, and the energy around me in my life is different too. I really do feel like I stepped through a portal and came out with a new sense of myself and this next chapter of my life. The sharing, the witnessing, the profoundly powerful rituals, the sisterhood I didn’t even know I had been missing, these things have changed me in the most beautiful and heart-wrenching ways, just as a rite of passage should.
- Amy Alaman, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator & Soul Support Mama
What can I say. How do I give words to an experience with so much dimension and texture.
Being a part of this project has changed my life and I feel has shifted so much in the world of that house, the women and spirits that filled it. I am forever touched by the openness and authenticity of what occurred in that house and the spaces we inhabited as a collective during that time. This includes the year leading up to Rites of Passage in which I encountered myself in a way I have never done before. Having the space and time to dive into the depths and heights of what it means to be a being on the Earth as the moment, one of water, fire, air and earth, was something I so deeply appreciate, having space to define through presence,
the sacred simplicity and complexity of life as a healing being was and is precious."
-Sunder Ashni, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator & Performer
I had the opportunity to see myself very clearly through the community. We worked as a mirror for each other, we saw our strengths, wounds and gifts. I was able to understand that I am whole - that my love for art, music and healing have the same mission in my life, and that they are tools to achieve my purpose. I found the community that I always dreamt about - full of empathy and unconditional love. The environment was perfect to heal, rediscover myself and open myself even more to the gifts of life. I am a different woman after this experience. I am very grateful for having been part of this beautiful project. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
-Marina Dominguez, 20/20 Vision Pro-Creative Team
Rites of Passage was a life shifting gift for myself and a gift of healing to my past and future ancestors.Through our collective grief rituals and rites of passage performances, I re-claimed my joy, and my mother's joy, and my grandmother's. Through the ancient grief that was invited to be grieved, an ancient joy came back home to stay. Through all the magic we collectively conjured, I remembered the artful beauty of being a human BEING. what it means to be alive, whole, messy, divinely imperfect, and TOGETHER, singing, laughing, crying, sharing, healing, co-creating, to the drum, to our own heart beats.
It was a gift of coming back home, to belonging"
-Sarah Varichon, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator & Performer
I felt a deep sense of connection to the community of artists/cure-ators involved with The Rites of Passage Project but also to our ancestors and future generations as we collectively birthed and embodied this grand vision. There was a sense of time travel that has stayed with me, where all at once we witnessed, shared, and traversed through an abundance of life’s portals. The historic house of Whitney Center for the Arts became a temporary site of home and belonging, where we grieved and celebrated together. Being a part of this project focused on Women of Color was an eye-opening experience and functioned as its own rite of passage."
-Manon Bogerd Wada, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator
ROP shifted my understanding of what community building looks like at the intersection of creative practices. Oftentimes in my experience working in creative spaces, I have felt very isolated, competitive, and misunderstood. ROP helped expand my viewpoint by offering a space that I had never imagined, a space where we could come together using ritual, vulnerabilities, and our storytelling practices to see each other more clearly. As a Woman of Color, it helped me gain a deeper understanding of my cultural and ancestral identity, and guided me to feel a larger sense of belonging and placehood."
-Nicole Combeau, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator, Performer & Artist
Rites of Passage was a gift to my spirit and creativity. This was one of the most spectacular residencies I have been a part of. The loving female energy, the team work of the support team and range of ages, races and vision for the rooms was uplifting and like no other experience in my life."
- Cheryl R. Riley, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator & Performer
I am entering into my next rite of passage as a non-binary womxn of color and am so grateful for this experience to ground and inspire me to live fully in my values and who I am authentically. I’m excited to be working on a deeper level, beyond the superficial at the intersections of art, healing and social justice.
-Yura Sapi, 20/20 Vision Cure-ator
Like encountering a rare gem, being part of Rites of Passage was a deeply profound experience I will take with me forever. I am still digesting it all, so don't have all the words I wish I had to express myself. But, I want to say thank you for the opportunity. I gained a large family I am so in love with. I will look back at this fondly for years to come.
-Anias L'Amour, 20/20 Vision Performer & Artist
I am eternally grateful for such a vast and profound window into the collective experience that is womanhood. The effects of this project, both personally and collectively, have continued to reverberate long after its completion."
-Kristin Grippo, 2013 Cure-ator
Rites of Passage invited us to TAKE UP SPACE - with our stories, our art, our memories, our collections....It was an honorable taking."
-Suzi Baum Banks, 2013 Cure-ator
A rite of passage marks a transformation, and lasts for the rest of your life. It is sustenance, to be fed upon when needed. Simply having gone through Rites of Passage set off something, still alive in me. It shifted the lens I have on the rest of my life.”
-Meg Agnew, 2013 Performer
We carved our stories onto the walls of each other's hearts. Wrote ourselves into movement, inventing rituals we had never seen to honor each other's history, to light the pain, taste the dried fruit that had stained our pasts, framed out smiles."
-Nancy Rothman, 2013 Performer
I felt my work BELONGED in that house."
-Cynthia Atwood, 2013 Cure-ator
It was magic. I went through every phase of my life every night.
The house was alive; it still is - when we tell the story."
-Barby Cardillo, 2013 Stage Manager
