body image

Bear Witness to Your Body:
A 31-day Writing and Art-Making Journey towards Body Positivity

Body positivity is ultimately a personal journey, but it doesn’t have to be done alone.

Join us for Daily Art-Making and Journaling Prompts, 2 ZOOM Workshops, readings, affirmation, and motivation, with a Discord Channel to meet others on this journey, all designed towards discovering and loving your (and every) body.

Daily prompts, October 1-31
ZOOMS: Saturdays, Oct 5 and 26 — 2-5 pm EST

$120 –or $30 a week

We are given myths and distortions about our bodies, our sexuality, our desires from many places: our society, our religion, our parents, our significant relationships, our experiences. These are messages and myths we then “embody” and take with us. Our bodies “don’t belong, don’t fit in, take up too much space.” Chairs are not big enough, clothes are not affordably made to fit us, airplane seats, theatre seats cannot contain us. We are continuously asked to control and contort our bodies. Or perhaps our face is not what others want to see, or our hairstyle, our fashion—not acceptable. We are too short, too thin, to ungainly, too much– and while we try to fit in, we “fail” to hide ourselves enough. What is an acceptable body in public? In private? What’s acceptable sexual behavior? How has an unspoken need for acceptance shaped our ideas of our body? How do we begin to own, respect, and love our bodies again?

We are already given plenty of ways to think about our body–but we need to see those body image messages, confront them, and replace them with true, accurate concepts of body image through our own study.

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Often, it takes a lot of work to reshape, re-craft our physical expectations and embrace our unique bodies, genders, sexual expressions. We must change our eyes, our perceptions, our beliefs. One way to re-vision our bodies again is through art-making– painting, sculpting, music, dance, writing, photography, etc. I wrote about this in my essay, “A Fat Lot of Good That Did: How an Art Studio Transformed My Eyes,” originally published in Fat & Queer: an anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives (eds. Morales, Grimm, Ferentini. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2021). I learned a lot about my body and myself through art-making, through photography, and later through daily watercolor art. That daily practice also improved my art making skills, and my body acceptance, tremendously.

This class will take inspiration from Classical Art to contemporary art, from Bouguereau to Boudoir. Daily, you will be invited to create art with a pen, a brush, a camera, with writing, or song, or dance, to understand the body you have better, to understand others better, and possibly to understand ourselves better.

We can bring JOY back to our bodies and our minds.

Based on the concept of thirty day art challenges to improve skills, you will receive email prompts, from October 1-31, with links that lead to our Discord channel—with a piece of classic or contemporary art and a short reading and prompt, asking you to think about the art, or the story surrounding the art, and inviting you to choose a way to creatively express your response to the prompt—through making art, photography, or writing (or dance, song, etc.). When you are finished with this month, you will have 31 expressions that you created that are in direct response to your personal exploration of bodies. You do not have to use yourself as a model. You do not have to share anything private that you are not ready to share.

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Jerome Stueart

(TW: this essay contains frank discussions about sex, sexuality, body image, religion and being queer.)

(a previous version of this essay originally appeared in Fat & Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives, ed. Morales, Grimm, Ferentini. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2021.)

I had a little art studio for one year. A place for all my paints, my canvases, my artistic dreams. A place to be alone, to create masterpieces, to rock out to music, to be myself, to grow and learn.

Then, a year later, the art studio was completely erased, as if it had never been there.

All the walls were taken down; the room became a much larger gallery. You couldn’t find it if you didn’t know where it had been. If you didn’t know my window, you couldn’t see any fingerprint of where I had been.

While the studio was there, that brief year, it changed my life. It gave me a better understanding of my body — something I had never really seen before. It gave me back my sexuality — something taken from me by evangelical churches. It let me see myself as a work of Art — something I never would have believed.

While I struggled to create art, the studio worked on creating me.

For decades, Front Street Studios in Dayton, OH, had used an old Singer Sewing Machine factory as living space for artists. A set of imposing red brick buildings, some two story, some three, with giant fifteen foot windows, sat next to a very active set of railroad tracks, with a river not far away. Over a few decades, the old factory had gone to seed, become unlivable, a place for drug deals and fire hazards. A few years before I got there, it was taken over by new management. The new owners cleaned it up, bought out whoever was still there, and turned it into studio spaces for artists, with open studios twice a month where people from Dayton could come through, wine in hand, and visit your studio and buy your Art. The new owners brought in live bands outside, sold burgers and hot dogs on those open studio days. You’d never have known the place was abandoned and trashed just a few years before.

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