Join Creative Assembly member LaVonna Varnado-Brown and Brooklyn based artist Jennella Young for a creative experience with bookbinding. Explore how women have stitched together culture and community across time and space.

This program for adults ages 18 and up threads together concepts of bookbinding, using needle and raffia, taking inspiration from works currently on view in New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations.

This program is free, but advance registration is required.

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LaVonna Varnado-Brown has worked as an installation artist, artist advocate, teaching artist, and tutor in and around New Orleans and with Beginning with Children, a Brooklyn–based college and career preparatory program). Varnado-Brown creates mixed-media visual art engaging with Afrofuturism, history, the divine feminine, and floral motifs. Varnado-Brown explores Afrofuturism as a cultural aesthetic to navigate the intersection of art and history and inspire action in the now by creating space for joy. Varnado-Brown finds inspiration in the community through facilitating workshops that create intentional space to engage in creative grounding practices that raise our spatial awareness and kinesthetic responses to one another and our environment.

Jennella Young is a Brooklyn-based painter and mixed-media artist. Her work elevates the voices and lost stories of women of color and draws from magical realism’s tradition of complex, beautifully operatic tellings of the history of the Atlantic Slave Trade and colonization. Her practice includes an emphasis on portraiture—primarily of Black and Brown women from archival photos—and incorporates watercolor, acrylic, ink, pastel, bookmaking, and journaling. Young holds a BA in Psychology from Lehigh University, an MA in Counseling Psychology from New York University, and has completed advanced graduate coursework in art history and library and information science at Pratt Institute. Over the years, she has merged her academic background with a vibrant creative practice, enriched by continued study at the School of Visual Arts, Educational Alliance Art School, Center for Book Arts, and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia. Young has developed city-wide initiatives that expand access to arts, mentorship, and youth programming across New York City. She is a 2024 Create Change Fellow with The Laundromat Project and has collaborated with institutions including the Apollo Theater Oral History Project, Weeksville Heritage Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the New York Historical Society.