Healthy community

Femina Potens has always had a deep rooted desire to be a part of raising awareness for a healthy community & promoting wellness through art. And the Healthy Community Program at Femina Potens has been a vehicle for us to make that happen.

In 2007, The Queer Cultural Center, Femina Potens, the Shanti Project and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation secured an Innovative Partnership grant from the Arts Commission to stage a series of 20 arts programs in the Castro exploring LGBT health issues such as living with HIV surviving cancer, working in the sex industry, amphetamine abuse and the emerging field of queer senior health care needs.

In July 2008, the Shanti Project and Femina Potens launched a year-round series of writing workshops for cancer survivors and people with AIDS/HIV conducted by award winning authors Ali Liebegott and Kirk Read.

This was an incredibly rewarding experience for our organization. Out of this program we started the first Queer Public Art & Wellness happening called – Outside Looking In. With Outside Looking in we curated artists to create new site specific installation pieces in our gallery store front windows that addressed queer, womens, and trans health and wellness.

Our goal was to create a dialogue around health and wellness issues that are often awkward or difficult to talk about. Art has a way of breaking silence, of creating conversation, and allowing the viewer to see a reflection of ourselves with in the artists own experiences. Through our work at Femina Potens’ Healthy Community program we have been able to have open dialogue around breast feeding, breast cancer ( in men, women, and trans community), Hep C, STIs, HPV, Addiction, Abuse and Rape, Depression, Clinic Resources, Identity, Safer Sex, and discuss ways to make activist spaces more accessible for differently abled community.

For the past 3 years Femina Potens has been collaborating with Lyon Martin Health Clinic and curating works in their clinic to help make the clinic atmosphere more comfortable, friendly, and to ease and educate the patients in the waiting room. This discussion of art curation for Lyon-Martin actually started while I was at the clinic as a patient getting my annual pap smear. And even the thought of art work in the clinic made me a much more relaxed patient.

For photos, press and current and past performance/exhibit information on our Healthy Community program check out these postings: