“Gathering in the Grief: Visualizing, Healing, Living With, and Honoring the Lost” Workshop with Creative Assembly Resident Artist Horton Humble
Thu, October 16th at 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Grief is both personal and shared; it comforts yet isolates, silences yet speaks. Through art, ritual, and remembrance, grief declares: this mattered, this hurts, this was loved.
On Thursday, October 16, from 5 to 7 pm, join us in NOMA’s Lapis Center for the Arts for a workshop led by Creative Assembly resident and visual artist Horton Humble, moderator Robin Pharo, visual artist Veronica Caseras Lee, musician Ruben Watts, and licensed marriage and family therapist Khara Scott-Bey. Participants will collaboratively create a large-scale cereal box artwork using materials linked to the five stages of grief, illuminating how grief shapes creative expression and lived experience.
Workshop leaders will also share perspectives on how grief influences art—through a painter’s palette, a musician’s notes, and New Orleans’ cultural traditions such as the funeral procession and Second Line.
This program is free and open to all. No registration is required for this workshop.
About the Workshop Leaders
Horton Humble
Horton Humble (b. 1970, New Orleans) is a self-taught painter and sculptor whose work explores themes of resilience, identity, and cultural memory. His debut series Debris (2007) used wood from Hurricane Katrina’s wreckage, followed by Transit Urban (2008), created during travels across Africa.
Time in Lisbon (2012–2015) inspired The Lisbon Series and his first work in ceramics. Returning home, he co-founded Level Artist Collective and later completed The Guardian (2017), a public sculpture for the Helis Foundation’s Poydras Corridor project. His work has been exhibited internationally, including the Outsider Art Fair in Paris and solo shows in Marseille, and regionally at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Humble continues to create large-scale, expressive canvases while leading workshops and community projects in New Orleans. Horton has permanent pieces at the Ogden Museum and Luciano’s Benetton Imago Mundi Collection in Italy.
Robin Pharo
Veronica Casares Lee
Veronica Casares Lee, born in Michoacán, Mexico in 1974, is a multidisciplinary artist. She studied at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) and earned a scholarship to attend Pratt Institute. From 2000 to 2008, Veronica was a resident artist at Haven Art in Port Washington, New York, contributing significantly to the creative community. In 2008, she and her family relocated to Michoacán, Mexico, where she shifted her focus to working primarily with ceramics and painting, infusing her work with the cultural richness of her homeland. In 2016, Veronica moved to New Orleans, where she currently resides and passionately pursues her art as a full-time artist, capturing the essence of the city in her diverse and evolving body of work.
Ruben Watts
Ruben Watts is a New Orleans-based percussionist known for a style of drumming played in New Orleans usually associated with the Black Masking Indian tradition. Over the years, he has expanded this style to include other percussion and hand crafted instruments.
Ruben plays with a group called Public Relations and New Orleans Folkloric, which pays tribute to the ancestral Heroes and Sheroes of our culture. He has played with groups including the Creole Osceola Mardi Gras Indians, Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., Percussion Inc., Casa Samba, and cousin John Boutte, to name a few.
Khara Scott-Bey
Khara Scott-Bey EXA, LMFT (she/they) is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a focus in art therapy based in New Orleans. Scott-Bey is also a liberatory life coach, an artist, and a community organizer. With over 20 years of experience in mental health and art therapy, Khara’s work blends African theology, social justice and embodied practices to support people in cultivating liberation, authenticity, and wholeness. She is the founder of Live to Become Art!, a healing and creative platform rooted in the belief that through the act of creating, we transform. Learn more at www.livetobecome.com.
About Creative Assembly
Launched in 2021, NOMA’s Creative Assembly residency promotes community engagement by welcoming artists to collaborate throughout the year with the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibitions, and programs. Creative Assembly Cohort members are provided funds and museum support to develop artistic projects and public offerings, like programs and workshops.
Learn more at noma.org/learn/creative-assembly/.