Renewing the Spirit

Join Marta Pérez García, local artist and bilingual Montessori teacher, for a drop-in family workshop at THEARC. Marta will help us connect to self, community, and nature as she teaches us to make new paper from discarded paper scraps. With accessible supplies like empty coffee cans and window screens, we will create circular sheets of handmade paper to take home, embedding flowers, leaves, and other organic materials into the paper. Using the pulp sculpturally, we will also contribute to a collaborative project to display at Phillips@THEARC, celebrating our potential for renewal and resilience.

About the artist

Marta Pérez García’s Intersections installation, Restos-Traces, is on view through August 28, 2022. Originally from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Pérez García was trained as a printmaker at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, Philadelphia, where she received an MFA. She has been awarded two Public Art Building Communities Grants; one in 2018 for I’m Gonna Get You, a large mixed-media installation on gender violence exhibited at the Reeves Center, and again in 2020. Recently, Pérez García was awarded the 2021 Vita Paper Arts Residency at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. Perez Garcia teaches pre-Kindergarten through fifth-grade art at Latin American Montessori Bilingual Charter School in Washington, DC. .