PARTICIPATORY INSTALLATION SEPTEMBER 16–26, 2026 | WED–SAT 12–2 PM: Amanda KM: as ppl carry them will unfold in and outside the galleries at Lawndale Art Center over the next year. In the first part of the project, the public is invited to join the artist in a collaborative-quasi-installation-recording-booth in the Grace R. Cavnar Gallery.

Corners of the gallery are activated with objects and images that remind us of those who came before us. Guests are invited to leave an object on a table for the duration of their visit or longer. A sound booth records visitors’ voices as they speak about practices they are carrying that continue to live inside them, whether enacted or not.

Amanda shares, “In my mother’s Houston kitchen, my grandmother circled incense seven times around my mother’s head and mine. Then, we stepped over it seven times. Practices like this are commonplace in my family. They share a resemblance with gestures performed as part of a healing ritual complex called zar. Zar offers a way of thinking about practices that are carried through time, space, and bodies, and reconfigured depending on what’s around and what’s available.