Throughout Jewish history, exile, trauma, and migration have often fractured family stories—leaving behind silences, secrets, or fragments half-remembered. This four-week creative workshop invites participants to explore how these pieces can be lovingly examined, reclaimed, and transformed through writing and art. In a safe, supportive environment, we will recover the hidden corners of our personal histories. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on long-held family narratives—or the absence of them—and explore how repair can be an act of storytelling, healing, and artistic creation. 

Each participant is encouraged to bring in meaningful personal items: copies of family photographs, letters, recipes, small heirlooms, and use them as springboards for short writing exercises in class. These reflections—whether a paragraph or a page—will form the foundation for visual collage works of art that combine memory and material.

Instructor: Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban American writer and conservator of sculpture and historic architecture. She is the author of Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005; In Situ Press, 2016), a nonfiction history currently under television option, and Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House, 2023), a Kirkus-starred narrative that intertwines the science of conservation with her family’s double exile from Eastern Europe to Cuba and the United States.

Her work explores themes of damage, repair, exile, and cultural memory, and spans nonfiction, memoir, fiction, and theater. Other writing credits include the short story “Empress of the Waves” (Una Isla en Luz), the play The Encanto File (Women’s Project and Productions, 1991), and essays in LitHub, Hyperallergic, Miami Herald, ArtNews, Preservation, and Jewish Book Council. A graduate of Brandeis University and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, she was the 2009 Rome Prize Fellow in Conservation at the American Academy in Rome, and is a frequent speaker on contemporary art, preservation, and Cuban culture.

Instructor: Ruth Askren asks the questions that lie at the intersection of people and nature. What is our place within it and out of it? She paints landscapes with this intuition, in Southern California and wherever she travels in nature. 

She graduated from Art Center College of Design and taught art for eleven years at the elementary and middle school level in Los Angeles. 

She is a member of the Allied Artists of the Santa Monica Mountains and Seashore and the Malibu Art Association, doing shows with them several times a year at annual art fairs which take place at King Gillette Ranch National Park in Malibu, at Malibu Lake, at The Village Green in Pacific Palisades, and several other coastal venues. 

Her work has been shown at Joshua Tree National Park Art Association, San Bernardino County Museum, the Santa Paula Museum of Art, Malibu City Art Gallery, and purchased by the City Hall of Chula Vista, California.

Besides painting, Ruth works across multiple artistic disciplines including the art of collage and mixed media.