First, Breathe: Healing Arts Series is a 4-month movement and arts-based program rooted in creativity, community care, and embodied storytelling. Hosted by Arts + Public Life and led by certified yoga instructor Rhya Moffitt, the project combines culturally grounded bodywork with artmaking practices including poetry, movement, collage, and storytelling.
First, Breathe creates space to release stress, reclaim personal and collective narratives, and rebuild a sense of wholeness and connection. Each session begins with community yoga, followed by an artist-led activity that transforms what the body holds into story, imagination, and possibility.
Offered monthly from February - May, the program is anchored in four phases—RELEASE, RECLAIM, REIMAGINE, REBUILD—a healing arc that moves from letting go of harmful narratives, to recovering suppressed histories and wisdom, to re-imagining possibilities for self and community, to co-creating new visions for the future.
May’s theme is REBUILD – practicing imagination, mutual care and collaboration to create liberatory futures. Yoga will be followed by Mark Making as Meditation, a creative session for all participants led by visual artist Candace Hunter
About Candace Hunter
Candace Hunter (chlee), a Chicago based artist, creates collage, paintings, installations and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Using appropriated materials from magazines, maps, cloth and various reused materials, she offers new landscapes back to the viewer with a glimpse of history and admiration of the beautiful.
A highly respected artist in the Midwest, chlee’s most recent honors include the Elevate Climate Changemakers Award (2022), 3Arts Next Level Award (2021) and the Tim and Helen Meier Foundation Award (2020).
Hunter’s most recent notoriety has come from her Brown Limbed Girls series, which are painted and collaged 20 x 20 inch works, more than 130 and counting, that were born during the covid 19 pandemic and their sole purpose was to depict brown girls in various states of joy. To date, those images have been featured on Chicago billboards. three book covers, two major shows in New Orleans and Oakland and became the inaugural show for the Narrow Bridge Arts Club in Woodlawn.
Being a stalwart fan of the mind and intellect of writer, Octavia Butler, chlee created an immersive exhibition of Butler’s “Xenogenesis Trilogy” and the “Parables” series at the Hyde Park Art Center.