Exhibition
Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room
06/22/16-09/18/16
Exhibition-Related · Exhibition-Related
Guided Meditation for Black Lives Matter
“Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room”: Care Sessions
Cover Image:
“Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room,” 2016. Exhibition view: New Museum
As a response to recent violent events, the series of “Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room” care sessions has been expanded to include a weekly guided meditation in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Tea will also be available in the exhibition’s apothecary during each session.
All meditation sessions are free and open to the public. Space is limited, and RSVP is required to attend. Please reserve a spot by writing to waitingroom@newmuseum.org with “Meditation” and the requested session date in the subject line (for example, “Meditation, Saturday July 23”). Reservations will be confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis.
Participants will be admitted and tea will be served at 10 a.m., and guided meditation will begin at 10:30 a.m. All sessions will be led by Mona Chopra, except for those occurring on July 23, August 27, and September 17, which will be led by Aimee Meredith Cox. Please note that there will be no guided meditation session on September 3.
Chopra writes: “In these sessions, participants will be led through meditation practices rooted in the Buddhist tradition to help in settling, soothing, and healing our stressed hearts, minds, and bodies. By cultivating patience, calmness, and clarity of thinking, we can, as Pema Chödrön notes, ‘soften what is rigid in our hearts.’ By helping to bring us closer in touch with our own humanity and the humanity of others, meditation enables us to be sources of increasing peace in the world.”
Mona Chopra is a board-certified and licensed acupuncturist who integrates hypnosis, yoga, and meditation into her therapeutic work. Chopra is also a meditation instructor at the Interdependence Project, a multi-lineage, secular Buddhist center in New York. She believes that getting to know the nature of our minds and continually working to soften and open our hearts are among the most powerful strategies we have available to us to bring about deep healing and enduring freedom. For more information, please visit peopletreewellness.com.
Aimee Meredith Cox’s professional dance experience includes performing and leading master classes as a member of Ailey II. A tenured professor at Fordham University, where she teaches courses in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology, she is the author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2015), which is based on eight years of fieldwork at a Detroit shelter for women and girls. Cox trained with the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and is also a certified Stott Pilates advanced mat instructor.
Sponsors
“Simone Leigh: The Waiting Room” is made possible by support provided by the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund.
Artist commissions at the New Museum are generously supported by the Neeson / Edlis Artist Commissions Fund. Artist residencies are made possible, in part, by Laurie Wolfert.
Further exhibition support is provided by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
Special thanks to A Blade of Grass.
