YAYA BOX HISTORY CHAPTER 9
IX. The Continuing Thread
The YaYa Box Process did not end where I once imagined it would, yet its influence has continued to move through my life in quiet, steady ways. What began as a thesis project became something larger — a lived experience, a shared reckoning, a collective turning inward. Even without the exhibition, the work left an imprint on each of us. The conversations, the unraveling, the courage it took to look closely at our lives — all of it became part of a deeper education, one that no degree could have fully contained.
The vision of the boxes resting on tree stumps in a wooded clearing still lives in me. I can still see the path leading from the parked cars into the trees, that intentional transition from the constructed world into the natural one. That walk was meant to prepare the viewer for what they were about to encounter — a space where women’s lives, memories, and truths were held with reverence. Even though the installation never materialized, the idea of that threshold remains symbolic of what the project truly was: a crossing into honesty, into vulnerability, into the layered terrain of women’s histories.
Years after the original YaYa Box Process remained unfinished, I carried its spirit into my work at the Durham County Jail, where I facilitated an arts‑based recovery group for women overcoming addictions to alcohol and drugs. When the project began, the women arrived in a state of resistance — arms crossed, faces closed, convinced that participating in an art program was a waste of their time. The Artist Outreach Program through the County Arts Council funded the construction of twelve‑inch wooden cubes for each participant. Once the women chose their boxes, something subtle but unmistakable shifted.
During our six weeks together, the transformation was undeniable. When we began the guided imagery exercise, we made a quiet journey back through beloved memories, safe places, and forgotten strengths — the room changed. One by one, the women stepped into the process with a seriousness and vulnerability that surprised even them. Their earlier disgust dissolved into focus, curiosity, and, eventually, pride. The project became a space where they could reclaim parts of themselves they believed were lost.
One woman painted her box a flat, murky “shit‑green” color during our first painting session — a color that seemed to reflect exactly how she felt about herself and her life. By the end of the program, she was painting bright red flowers across the surface, as if something inside her had finally remembered how to bloom. Some of the other women commented on this with enthusiasm, and others joined in. It was a collective breakthrough. Several women said it was always “so peaceful on the pod” after art class. The women had stepped into a different consciousness in class and carried it back with them.
Many of the women painted the names of their children on the outside and the inside of their boxes. I was stunned to realize how many of them were mothers — a truth that carried its own weight, its own grief, its own fierce tenderness.
Valentine’s Day fell during our time together, and I brought a bundle of small pink baby roses to place inside each woman’s box before she entered the classroom. When they discovered the flowers, something softened. They tucked them into the braids in their hair, into the pockets of their jumpsuits, holding them as if they were something precious. I overheard several say they had never received a flower on Valentine’s Day before. That moment — simple, delicate, unexpected — felt like a kind of healing.
The shift reached beyond the group. A female guard, known for her hard edges and unwavering skepticism, began meeting me at the door each week as I entered the jail. She hovered near the classroom, listening from her adjoining office. When the women ran out of hymns to sing during one of our sessions, she quietly opened a desk drawer, pulled out a hymnal, and handed it to me without a word. She stayed mostly in her office, but her voice joined ours from the doorway — tentative at first, then steady, then full. By the end of our time together, she was almost part of the class.
The YaYa Box Process found its completion there — not in a gallery or a wooded clearing, but in a jail classroom where women who had been dismissed and forgotten rediscovered their own stories. The work lived on in them, in the peace that settled over the pod after class, and in the quiet transformation of a guard who learned to hope for their recovery.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Unfinished does not mean undone. Some work continues to breathe, to teach, to echo. The YaYa Box Process became one of those threads — something I carried with me long after the boxes themselves were set aside. What I didn’t realize then was that the project would find its own unexpected continuation, far from any gallery or wooded clearing, in a place where its purpose would deepen and take on a life I could never have planned.
Some projects reach completion in the traditional sense. Others continue to unfold long after the work itself has paused. The YaYa Box Process belongs to the latter. Its legacy is not in a gallery or a forest clearing, but in the internal landscapes it shifted in me, and in the women who walked that path with me.
[wpforms id=”1461″]
Leave a Reply