Indian Summer Arts Society appoints Alisha Lettman as this year's Culture Lab: Artist as Healer
Project to provide the community-engaged artist, herbalist, and vocalist with funding to explore relationships between traditional healing and the natural world
Alisha Lettman.
INDIAN SUMMER ARTS Society, the organization behind the annual Indian Summer Festival, has announced community-engaged artist, herbalist, and vocalist Alisha Lettman as its 2024 Culture Lab: Artist as Healer.
The multi-year initiative provides a Greater Vancouver-based South Asian artist of any discipline up to $45,000 in funding for collaborative work with fellow artists, mentors, medical professionals, and members of the wellness community, with the goal of finding connections between art and healing.
Throughout her five-month residency, Lettman will unite two different age demographics, youths and seniors, with healthcare professionals in an exploration of how South Asian traditional knowledge can impact climate change efforts. Her practice will embody ways of the past—medicinal plant knowledge, diverse music and art traditions, and land-based learning—to propel a cultural heritage-inclusive future. The Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre’s Medicinal Garden, located within the historic Punjabi market neighbourhood on the unceded territory of the Musqueam and the Squamish peoples, will be ground zero for Lettman’s multi-sensorial discoveries.
“This project weaves together ritual and remedy, music and medicine, cultivating a living garden of healing where people can gather,” says Pawan Deol, executive director of Programming for the Indian Summer Festival, in a release. “Alisha is proposing that health is a collective pursuit, that it must be attained in the context of our communities, with our neighbours and families, and honouring the natural world at all times. In this way, the earth becomes the canvas and the source for deep medicine.”
Lettman’s mother is from Sindh, Pakistan, and her father is from Jamaica. Through the City of Vancouver, she is artist-in-residence at the Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre’s Medicinal Garden. Using her knowledge of western herbalism plus Ayurvedic and Afro-Caribbean ethnobotany, Lettman nurtures anti-oppressive communities with land-based projects. As a performing artist, she has showcased her music and poetry at the Vancouver Mural Festival, Vines Art Festival, and TD Toronto International Jazz Festival.
Last year marked the first edition of the Indian Summer Arts Society’s Culture Lab: Artist as Healer project. Yogacharini Maitreyi, the inaugural Artist as Healer, led a five-month research and solutions lab that culminated in the creation of an educational documentary film, public event, and panel discussion.
More details are at the Indian Summer Arts Society.
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