written by Jennella Young

Last year, LaVonna Varnado-Brown and I teamed up to lead a tour of the Wangechi Mutu exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art for Kolaj Fest. Since then, we’ve found different ways to collaborate—sometimes in New Orleans, sometimes back in my home of Brooklyn. Whenever we connect, something creative and unexpected always comes out of it.

This spring, we came back together at NOMA to co-lead a bookbinding workshop inspired by New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations. The session was part of the museum’s Free Community Day and brought together a beautiful mix of artists, community members, and curious folks who just wanted to try something new.

Before we got started, LaVonna gave a gallery tour of the masquerade exhibition. It was a grounding way to begin—learning about these intricate, powerful masks made from local materials. It struck me how much transformation was at the heart of mask-making—a kind of spiritual alchemy. In many ways, we were about to do our own kind of alchemy with old books, reclaimed paper, and thread.

I love bookbinding—especially using recycled materials like old books, magazines, mail, and even scraps of my own old artwork—because it gives them new life. Much of my artistic practice is about lifting up the voices and stories of people who’ve been left out of traditional books and historical records. So bookbinding becomes this powerful metaphor: a way of literally stitching ourselves back into the pages we were left out of or erased from.

There’s always something incredible about witnessing participants help each other during a workshop —offering encouragement, sharing tools, brainstorming creative ways to use what they’d learned. One woman told me afterward she was going to visit her mother that weekend and ask her to pull out keepsakes—old articles, lace scraps, receipts—and show her how to bind them into a book. That moment stayed with me. It spoke to the generational, intimate power of stitching memory into form. I wish I could follow up with her and see what they created!

I also love when artists from different disciplines bring new perspectives to workshops like this—like Carl, a fellow resident who works with bees, which got me thinking about the ways our materials and practices could intersect.

There’s something about stitching and sewing that’s long been coded as feminine in Western culture. It’s a practice that crosses cultures, ages, and communities—something many of us grew up seeing or doing in some form. So taking those same techniques and using them to bind books—objects that have often belonged to the powerful—feels like a quiet way of stitching ourselves back into spaces we were left out of. It’s a way for women and people from underrepresented communities to quite literally stitch our lives, stories, and memories back into history.

There’s something exponentially powerful about making art in community. It asks us to slow down, reconnect, and re-ground ourselves. It centers our shared humanity and opens up conversations and possibilities that would be hard—if not impossible—to spark in isolation. These kinds of spaces help us imagine and nurture a better world.

I’d love to do this workshop again, perhaps with time to fill a page or two in the books, or even create a collaborative piece. I’d especially love to create space at the end for folks to share what they made. It’s those small moments—those stitched-together stories—that stay with us long after the workshop ends.