Literally Crawling Workshop – *MIND MAPPING* (intuitive poetry comics)

*MIND MAPPING*
(intuitive poetry comics in private)
with Mars Ramirez

What does your brain do when you’re not listening to it?

Together, we will learn about using our sketchbooks as a daily devotion of personal storytelling. Looking at the intersection of word&image, and the ways that some artists use the poetics of image alone, we will distill what is most important for each of us. Then looking inward, we will find what feels good, and find our stories to tell.

1 part lecture and 1 part studio time AN INTERACTIVE SLIDESHOW; participants will walk away with many new exercises to do in their sketchbooks, and a new way of thinking about making intuitively in private.

Sun Nov 7th as a part of Literally Crawling Virtual Lit-Crawl 2021
3:30pm PST/ 4:30pm MST/ 5:30pm CST/ 6:30pm EST

Register to attend: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/literally-crawling-workshop-mind-mapping-with-mara-ramirez-tickets-189287061697

$12 Donation – All donations will go towards paying the instructor for their time and expertise shared with us during class.

About the Instructor:
Mars Ramirez is a nonbinary artist, educator, and caregiver making comics in the Bay Area, California. Their comics and animations are mainly autobiographical and somewhat experimental, and concern matters of intimacy, trauma, and healing. They play with abstraction and the action of mark making as a means of distorting (and in doing so, clarifying) their own experiences through the filter of emotion and memory. These stories range in content: existentialism, climate grief, gender, and childcare are some of the topics that have emphasis.

In addition to their work as a nanny, artist, and teacher, Mars is also a collaborator. They are ⅓ of the founders and organizers of FREAK COMICS, a comics collective that self publishes anthologies and independent work, as well as organizing community events for comics lovers, and traveling internationally to table at book fairs and comic festivals. They work with Chapter 510, illustrating stories that middle schoolers have written, and volunteering time to live draw along with stories elementary students are weaving out of thin air. They also work with Poster Syndicate, a local printmaking group that brings art and design to many different movements, in hopes that their message can be seen and heard more loudly. They help organize two different mutual aid projects across the Bay Area, from Bay Bridge Solidarity, prioritizing the needs of their unhoused neighbors, to I.A.F.S., an independent, up and coming, horizontally taught free school that “prioritizes mutual aid and democracy in order to foster art and learning in the wakes of SFAI’s closure, the Coronavirus Pandemic, the intensifying crisis in higher education, rapid climate change, and worldwide movements for economic and racial justice.”

Find their work https://planetmars.earth/
and https://www.freakcomix.com/