In this participatory workshop, join exhibiting artist Mel Isidor to discover the art of collage in this engaging, beginner-friendly workshop designed to spark imagination and experimentation. Using a mix of found materials, papers, images, and textures, you’ll learn how to layer and compose elements into a visually compelling piece that reflects your personal memory.
Participants will be guided through a short introduction to the history of collaging and an overview of key techniques and approaches. With guided support throughout, you’ll explore composition, color, and storytelling as you cut, arrange, and assemble your own original collage. Emphasizing creativity, play, and self-expression, this session invites you to loosen up, try new ideas, and enjoy the process of making something uniquely yours.
Register for this workshop here »
Registration includes a complementary beverage & light refreshments.
Limited capacity, RSVP required.
Sunday, June 7
2–4pm
Haiti Cultural Exchange
35 Lafayette Ave. Brooklyn, NY
This event is part of the Vizyon Atistik public programming for What Paper Remembers: Marks, Memory and Labor on view until June 7, 2026.
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About the Instructor
Mel Isidor is a Haitian-American mixed-media artist, designer, and urban planner based between Seattle, WA, and Boston, MA. Her work draws inspiration from the built environment, exploring how cities reveal the relationship between people and culture. Mel holds a Master’s in City Planning from MIT and a B.A. in Urban Studies from Brown University—a foundation that brings a philosophical and analytical lens to her practice, shaping both how she sees the world and how she translates that understanding through to her compositions. Her artistic practice combines photography and collage to create layered compositions that merge realism and abstraction—physically and metaphorically connecting different moments in time and space. Using imagery from her own photography, family archives, and public records, she builds scenes grounded in memory and heritage that reimagine familiar geographies through a speculative lens.
Mel also leads Isidor Studio, her design practice dedicated to the intersections of art, design, and urbanism. Across both her art and studio work, she transforms research and observation into visual narratives that deepen our understanding of place and the everyday materiality that shapes it. Her work has been exhibited across the United States through galleries and public installations in Boston, Seattle, and New Orleans, and she has been invited to speak on her creative practice at institutions including Adobe, Yale University, and the University of Southern California. Learn more about Isidor’s work at www. melisidor.com
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About the Exhibition
Through drawing, printmaking, collage, and mixed media, the exhibition considers paper as a material that carries memory, labor, and cultural continuity. Paper absorbs gesture records pressure and hesitation, time, revision and return, while holding traces of the hand and the persistence of ideas. Centering practices shaped by embodied knowledge and movement across place, the exhibition affirms paper not as a provisional surface, but as one that remembers and endures.
Curated by HCX fellow Yvena Despagne and Executive Director Régine M. Roumain.
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Learn more about the exhibition and artists here »
Join the artists & curators for other activations taking place as part of this exhibition »

