About Us

Our story began with art and empathy. Rooted in lived experience and community care, our work grew from a simple but powerful idea: to hold space for memories, loss, resilience, and connection through community-rooted art. At its heart is a collaboration between an artist deeply shaped by immigration and loss and a hospice social worker committed to honoring the emotional worlds of her neighbors.

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Together, they launched Altars for Collective Grief an evolving, participatory art project that centers remembrance and shared experience. Rather than confining grief to silence or isolation,

the project invites people to bring photos of loved ones affected by deportation and family separation and place them into mixed-media altars across Southwest Detroit.

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These altars, inspired by cultural and ancestral traditions of honoring the departed, become spaces for remembrance, healing, and visibility.

Through posters, candles, and handcrafted structures, we create environments where grief is witnessed, not overlooked, where stories of migration, movement, and love are honored publicly and with tenderness.

 

Our work is guided by the belief that art can be a bridge between private pain and collective solidarity, and that every family’s story is an essential part of our shared community history.

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This project was born of heartbreak but also of hope. It stands as a reminder that grief can be transformed into community care, and that art has the power to make visible what too often remains unseen. From street walls to neighborhood gathering places, every memorial altar affirms a shared truth: we are here, we remember, and we stand with each other. As we continue to grow, our aim is to deepen connections across immigrant communities, extend this work beyond Southwest Detroit, and cultivate a collective space where memory, resilience, and creativity can flourish.