Tag: Emotional Baggage Cart Parade

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Join Me at MAFA 2025: Weave, Unburden, and Heal

This month, I’m bringing the Emotional Baggage Cart Parade to the MidAtlantic Fiber Association (MAFA) Conference, and I’d love for you to be part of this transformative, hands-on public art experience.

📍 Millersville University, Millersville, PA
📅 June 26–29, 2025
🔗 More Info →

We all carry emotional baggage—grief, stress, trauma, worry. While it shows up differently for each of us, the weight is real. How we carry it—or release it—shapes our path forward.

The Emotional Baggage Cart Parade is a living, evolving public sculpture and a communal ritual. At MAFA, I’ll be leading a participatory art session where you’re invited to weave your story directly onto a full-size shopping cart using provided materials—or you can bring meaningful objects of your own to integrate into the piece.

Through open dialogue, I’ll share the inspiration behind the project and invite you to reflect on what you’re carrying, what you’re ready to release, and how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for healing.

Public Art Project: Emotional Baggage Cart – Unburden, Weave, Connect, Heal

🧶 Weave your truth
🧳 Unpack your story
🤝 Connect with others
💫 Heal through art

This isn’t just about making art—it’s about making space. Space for empathy. Space for release. Space for transformation.

Come contribute to a collective sculpture that symbolizes our shared journey of resilience. Together, we’ll turn invisible weight into visible solidarity.

See you in Millersville. Let’s unburden, weave, and heal—together.
—Theda

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Summer 2025: Weaving New Futures

This summer, my work travels across states and seas, gathering threads of memory, identity, and community in a series of exhibitions that speak to love, resilience, and the emotional labor we carry.

The Future Belongs to the Loving
Now through – July 31, 2025
MAPSpace | 6 N Pearl St, 4th Floor, Port Chester, NY
mapspace.art

Love, in this exhibition, is not a soft whisper but a radical act. The Future Belongs to the Loving gathers voices from artists committed to compassion as resistance. Tender Crown is a sculptural meditation on the intimate rituals of Black hair care—where tenderness and tension coexist. The work evokes the memory of tight braids and firm hands, each parting and twist pulling not just at the scalp, but at identity itself. Beauty here is not effortless; it’s labor, discipline, love, and pain intertwined. This crown remembers the sting, the throb, the scalp still tingling with memory.

FIBER 2025
May 10 – June 19, 2025
Silvermine Galleries | 1037 Silvermine Rd, New Canaan, CT
Opening Reception: May 17

Fiber is language—resilient, tactile, expressive. At FIBER 2025, I join fellow artists in celebrating the breadth of contemporary fiber practices. My work here, Blackity Black Blanket ladder provides a visceral portrayal of navigating the relentless barrage of microaggressions, highlighting the absence of comfort. The ladders adorned with zip tie blankets symbolize my endeavor to ascend beyond microaggressions, yet the weight of these interactions impedes upward progress.

Theda Sandiford Studio Tour / Ecopark Walk
June 19, 2025 | 11am – 2:00pm
Sky Garden Gallery Retreat | Kingshill, St. Croix, USVI

For those on island or visiting, I invite you into my studio at Sky Garden—an oasis where art, ecology, and ancestral memory intersect. Walk the grounds, see where I gather and process materials, and join me in conversation about land-based creativity and healing. RSVP recommended for this intimate, immersive experience.

Fiberart International 2025
June 20 – August 30, 2025
Brew House Arts | 711 S 21st St #210, Pittsburgh, PA
Opening Night: June 20 | 4:30 – 8:00pm
Artist Gallery Tour: June 21 | 11am – 12pm

An international survey of fiber’s future, this juried exhibition is a touchstone for textile artists worldwide. I’m honored to exhibit among a visionary group that is pushing the medium’s boundaries. My work here, Polyurethane Paradise: Rainforest Rhapsody reflects on the environment and sustainability and is inspired by the lush vegetation found on my rainforest property in St Croix USVI. I wove single-use bottle caps into vines and flowers to replicating the vibrant colors and intricate patterns of vines, orchids, Heliconias, and Birds of Paradise that surround me.

MidAtlantic Fiber Association Conference – Emotional Baggage Cart Parade
June 26 – 29, 2025
Millersville University | Millersville, PA
View Exhibit Info →

We all carry invisible weight. The Emotional Baggage Cart Parade transforms that weight into visual metaphors through shopping carts wrapped in stories. This interactive exhibit invites reflection, empathy, and communal healing. Come see how individual struggles become collective strength—one cart at a time. MAFA has day passes available, come through so we can connect. Register here.

Wherever you are this summer—Port Chester, New Canaan, Pittsburgh, Millersville, or St. Croix—I hope our paths cross. Please let me know if we can meet up this month.

—Theda

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Emotional Baggage Cart Parade for Kids

Day 1: At The Miami Children’s Museum

What happens with a couple hundred pick out colored ribbons and pipe cleaners based on their “feelings” and tie them to little person shopping carts?

Day 2

Expressing our emotions took on new complexity when finding a clear spot to affix a ribbons onto the cart.

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Emotional Baggage Cart: Unburden, Weave, Connect, Heal


Join me this weekend at the Miami Children’s Museum for in a dynamic, hands-on public art experience centered around my Emotional Baggage Cart series. Through an open dialogue, I will share the inspiration behind the project and explore the emotional weight we all carry.
Community members of all ages, are invited to weave directly onto a kid size shopping carts using a variety of provided materials—or bring personal objects to incorporate, making the piece uniquely meaningful. This collaborative process encourages reflection, healing, and connection, allowing participants to contribute to a collective artwork that symbolizes the shared journey of managing emotional burdens.
Together, we will transform individual stories into a powerful public sculpture, fostering community, empathy, and artistic expression.

Where: The Children’s Museum of Miami

Address: 980 MacArthur Cswy, Miami, FL 33132

When: 10:00am-6:00pm

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Reflecting on the Emotional Baggage Cart Parade at Art in Odd Places Festival

I’m still on cloud nine—and a bit exhausted—after the Emotional Baggage Cart Parade, which took place along 14th Street in Manhattan from October 18-20 as part of the Art in Odd Places (AiOP) Festival. For three days, this public art initiative invited people to acknowledge and lighten the psychological burdens we all carry daily. Ordinary shopping carts were transformed into mobile art installations, offering a powerful visual and interactive metaphor for the emotional baggage we accumulate.

Over 500 participants came together to confront and symbolically release their own burdens, creating a profound experience of communal healing and empathy. As I edit stories for a series of videos showcasing the interactions and personal stories from the event, I am deeply moved by how this project resonated with so many.

My deepest thanks go out to the incredible parade team—without you, none of this would have been possible. April Tracey, Ivy Brown, Amy Andrieux, Anne Choi, Ulysses Williams, Gigi Matthews, Maria Ross, Farai Chideya, Cheryl Mack, Bryant Small, Valerie Huhn, Susan Evans Grove, Lucy Rovetto, Donna Kessinger, Maria & Shalik Thomas and family, Ivy Brown Gallery, Kangaroo Courier, and CustomSashs.com—thank you all for your invaluable support and contributions.

A special thank you to Patricia Miranda and Christopher Kaczmarek, curators of Art in Odd Places 2024: CARE, along with Curatorial Manager Valentina Zamora, Producer Robin Schatell, and AiOP Founder & Director Ed Woodham, for providing such a thoughtful and inclusive space for art and community.

Stay tuned for the video series that captures these moments of shared release and resilience. Until then, I’ll be reflecting on the magic that happens when art becomes a space for connection, healing, and transformation.

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Emotional Baggage Cart Parade Kicks Off Today

Join me this weekend for The Emotional Baggage Cart Parade at the CARE Art in Odd Places Festival! This unique public art experience invites you to witness and engage with a visual metaphor for the emotional burdens we all carry. I’ll be roaming the streets with my transformed shopping carts, offering an interactive opportunity to explore and release your own emotional baggage.

Catch me at the following times and locations:

  • Friday, October 18: 12:00-2:00pm, roaming Avenue A to 3rd Avenue along 14th Street
  • Saturday, October 19: 12:00-2:00pm, roaming University Place/Union Square West to 7th Avenue along 14th Street
  • Sunday, October 20: 12:00-2:00pm, roaming Seventh Avenue to Eleventh Avenue or the water along 14th Street

Come say hello and experience this moving installation as we transform emotional weight into art. See you there!