Turn Memories into Art: A Family Story Workshop

Inspired by Nai Nai (2025) and the broader Re-collected series by Chinese American artist Temo, this workshop explores how art can serve as a bridge between memory, identity, and ancestry. Participants will be guided through the process of creating the first layers of a collage portrait dedicated to an ancestor whose story they wish to preserve, reinterpret, or share.

Working with a range of accessible materials, we will consider how fragments like images, textures, and found elements can come together to form a visual language of remembrance. The act of cutting, layering, and assembling becomes a way of engaging with personal and collective histories, especially those that may be partially remembered, inherited, or imagined.

The workshop will open into a group conversation reflecting on family histories, lineage, and the importance of making these stories accessible to younger generations. Together, we will think about storytelling not only as preservation, but as an evolving, creative practice.

This workshop is open to children aged 6 and up as well as adults.

Artist: Temo 特

Temo (b. 1985; Dalian, China) is a quadrilingual artist, psychotherapist, and cartoonist. She spent her childhood in Dalian, China and made her home in Chicago. Her art, too, is of two realms. Her conscious work explores displacement, exile, loss, and longing; her surrealist work dreams on paper. Her collage portraits bridge both. To her, the pieces of a collage resemble pieces of a dream — free associative, layered, with meaning hidden just beyond view. 

Temo was a mediocre Economics graduate of the University of Chicago and a very good Counseling Psychology graduate of Northwestern University. She received foundational training in classical Western and Chinese art from her mother, a noted Chinese Calligrapher and artist. But it was her improv training from iO, the Annoyance, and the Second City that finally taught her, on the eve of her 30s, how to play and create on her own terms.