The summer solstice marks mosaiceye’s 8th BIRTHDAY and the river’s 1 year anniversary
Over the last year, we’ve been cultivating an oasis within The River, our membership space for creative changemakers around the globe.
And now, through community-building, collective contemplation and collaboration, some of The River’s members have created a zine and EP on the theme of OASIS…
THE FLOW
Arriving & grounding together
MOSAICEYE’S 8-year EVOLUtION
presenting the oasis zine
Artist panel + Q&A
giveaways & closing
hosts
JESS GUTIERREZ
is an educator, artist/designer, arts curator, and community connector. Jess believes everyone should have access to create and express through art. She actively seeks ways that she can engage people in meaningful creative expression and build bridges across communities through active engagement, curation, workshops, and collaborations with other local creatives.
Chetna Mehta
is a granddaughter of Indian and South African diasporas. Her greatest muses lately have been the planet, the energy of ease, queerness, body wisdom, honesty, grief, spiders, and freedom. She founded Mosaiceye Collective in 2017 as a private therapeutic practice and has been enchanted and humbled by how it has evolved over the years.
PANEL ARTISTS
Sara Ghebremichael
engages song, poetry, and banjo rhythms as her main outlet for creativity these days, as well as the magic of imagery to help others unlock their inner wisdom. She believes that coming into awareness of our soul’s voice enlivens, invigorates, and brings our world into greater resonance.
Sara spent much of the last decade performing with DC-based funk & soul band Everyday Everybody (fka AZTEC SUN) and sharing her own live set of jazzy bluesy rootsy originals at house shows, open mics, summer festivals, and other gatherings. As an extension of her focus on the voice as instrument of expression, Sara is developing her talent at voice acting and audiobook narration.
@saragbanjo and Bandcamp
Melissa Vargas
is a queer Latina single mother holding a bachelor's degree in sociology from the State University of New York Institute of Technology and a master's degree in Public Administration from the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 2022, she also earned a Certification in Holistic Nutritional Coaching with a specialization in Maternal and Child health.
Melissa is dedicated to co-creating spaces that celebrate, heal, and liberate Afro-indigenous mothers and their children within the Latino diaspora.
Furthermore, Melissa integrates her spiritual-cultural practices into her work as a form of resistance against colonial influences and to foster more radical healing spaces for Black and Latina mothers. She believes that approaching this work with such dedication and awareness is a way to honor the women and mothers who have paved the way.
Olivia Hunte
is a Black queer femme feminist storyteller. As a social work scholar, Olivia is dedicated to disrupting systems of oppression while centering pleasure and healing. She is currently a doctoral student engaged in community-centered research with the intention of developing liberatory theoretical and practice frameworks.
When she is not galavanting the halls of academia, Olivia can be found nurturing relationships and pouring into her creative practices. Olivia curates the literary zine, Intersections, as an avenue to amplify counternarratives and capture the active reimagining of possibilities beyond the confines of oppressive realities. She does so with the steadfast belief in the transformative powers of storytelling.
