You're invited to a free workshop about beginnings ✨

Join me for a pop-up online retreat about playing with thresholds

Hello,

As a thank you for being a subscriber to this newsletter, you are cordially invited to attend The Art of Beginnings, a free pop-up workshop about playing with thresholds. 🎉

Date: Saturday, January 27

Time: 2pm EST, for one hour (convert to your timezone)

Location: Zoom

Who: This workshop is free for subscribers of the Museum Gaze newsletter, as a thank you for supporting my work!

RSVP 📩

• If you are subscribed to this newsletter, you can register here:

• If you are *not yet* subscribed to The Museum Gaze, click the button below to sign-up and you’ll get the workshop registration link by email:

If you’d like to invite a friend to the event, here’s the link to share the details (with thanks!):

How does it feel to begin something new? How do you hold both where you've been and where you want to go? What is your relationship with thresholds?

The Art of Beginnings is an informal online workshop—a pop-up retreat—for readers of The Museum Gaze to come together and reflect on the sensations of beginning something new. Through a series of creative exercises inspired by museum visits, we'll play with new ways of paying attention to the moment of crossing a threshold.

Beginnings are liminal spaces, where the past meets the present to weave the future. This can be disorienting. The gift of this disorientation is the invitation to reorient, to figure out where we are and choose the way we want to go.

Let's welcome in the new year by befriending beginnings, in community.

“A Bigger Splash”, David Hockney, 1967, acrylic paint on canvas, Tate

This retreat might be right for you if:

• You want to cultivate creativity, imagination, and play

• You feel exhausted and need some space to yourself to reflect and dream

• You enjoy museums, or

• You do not enjoy museums

Materials you'll need:

• A few pieces of blank paper (any kind will do: printer paper, fine watercolor paper, a spiral-bound notebook, the back of pharmacy receipts...)

• Writing instrument(s)

• A room of your own, as much as that may be possible

• ✨ Optional: an idea for something that you’re about to begin that makes you feel big feelings

Museum Workout, Image: Paula Lobo / The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Why am I offering this workshop? I could wax poetic about wanting to enter the new year with intentionality, or how the approaching terminus of my PhD program is making me feel a lot of things about beginning the next chapter of my life, but the real answer is

the idea came to me on a walk in the woods,

and that’s a voice I am practicing taking seriously.

I loved running my workshop about looking at life like art in Philly this fall, and I’m excited to experiment with translating an in-person experience to a digital format.

I hope to see you there!

Meet the Facilitator

Marina Gross-Hoy (she/her/elle) is a Museum Studies PhD candidate and writer based in Québec. She writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to lived experience. Her newsletter The Museum Gaze explores how observing our lives with the same embodied gaze we use in museums can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment. Her writing has appeared in Khôra, Mothering Spirit, and Anthrow Circus. You can find her at marinagrosshoy.com and @marinagrosshoy.