THE YAYA BOX PROCESS
I. The Spark
In 1991, I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. That fall, I began my Master of Arts program as a graduate assistant. I was creating a great deal of hands‑on artwork, always aware that I had yet to choose a thesis project. What follows is what led to the creation of the first YaYa Box Project.
Sometime in 1992, I watched a television movie that mentioned a tradition called the YaYa Box. In this tradition, significant people, places, and events in a woman’s life are represented on the outside of a box, while her internal thoughts and feelings are expressed on the inside.
For months afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about how this concept might become the foundation for my thesis exhibition. I invited six women who were significant in my life to participate: N, my art history professor; Y, my fellow graduate student; M, a longtime friend whose life had been intertwined with mine for years; G, my intuitive astrologer friend; S, my therapist who was deeply engaged in dream work; and J, a friend navigating profound grief and self‑reflection. The number seven has always held meaning for me, so I would join them as L, the seventh participant.
The process grew out of my deepening interest in filling in women’s personal and collective histories — helping them (and myself) discover their true selves. My research traced the tradition to the Caribbean and likely goes further back to Africa. “YaYa” also means “grandmother” in Greek, which feels fitting. The tradition involves painting important elements of a woman’s life on the outside of the box, while the inside reflects her inner world.
II. The Gathering
A week after I explained the project to my Art History professor, she said the box process was the last thing on her mind at night and the first in the morning.
I was thrilled by the enthusiasm of the women involved. G was already searching for a box before I had even finished explaining the idea. Each woman I called reacted similarly — their minds were already racing ahead, imagining possibilities.
Y immediately knew she would paint the inside of her box. Of course — she is a painter. S told me she had been doing extensive dream work, and that the project “boggled” her mind. She said she would need to write about it. M had ideas swirling before we had even finished our conversation.
J, however, struggled. She insisted she had nothing positive to put on her box. She said that for every good thing, she had more sad things. She imagined her box as exceedingly small, enclosed inside a large black box. My only parameters were that the box should not be precious in scale — not something held in the hands or lap — and that it must have a lid. I wondered whether her ongoing therapeutic work made this process feel overwhelming.
III. The Friction
Five of us met at Fazoli’s on a Sunday afternoon — M, J, Y, S, and me. N and G couldn’t attend. We ate lunch and talked.
Y repeatedly steered the conversation back to the process: “So, about the box…” She asked pointed questions about logistics and responsibilities. J continued to voice negative comments about her box and her life. After listening to this several times, I finally said it would be impossible to fit the names of all the men she had been involved with on a box that small.
Later, thinking about how fragile she seemed, I called to offer her a way out of the project. She was distant and upset, especially about the comment regarding the men’s names. She felt we believed that was all she was about. I explained that my point was simply that none of us could fit our lives in a shoebox. After a couple of days, things felt better between us.
She asked what she could put inside the box. I told her I felt her sister — who had died two years earlier — would be represented both inside and out. I also reminded her of her deep love for the quilts her family made and suggested she might include a piece of one or use a quilt pattern in her design.
IV. The Descent
J went to Florida for two weeks of rest. During that time, I became increasingly aware — both intuitively and through conversations with the other women — that most of us were undergoing major internal shifts as we examined our lives so closely. I began to think I should have warned them about the emotional hazards involved. As uplifting as it is to celebrate the people and places we love, such intense self‑examination inevitably brings painful memories to the surface.
Interestingly, when we began, everyone except J was energized and positive. J wanted to participate, but she was deeply negative about her life and what she believed she had to show for it. After her trip to Florida and several counseling sessions, she returned with clarity. She told me she planned to buy a blanket chest and to place inside it quilts belonging to her grandmother, her sister, and herself, along with meaningful letters and clippings. She felt more at peace, moving from harsh self‑judgment toward acceptance.
Just as J reached a good place, the rest of us entered the difficult stage she had started in. We had uncovered enough pain that feelings of depression, guilt, and shame were coloring our evaluations of our lives. We were uncomfortable, to say the least.
V. The Shift Toward Process
M and her daughter had moved back to Indiana from California in June 1992. M was the first person I thought of for the process — our friendship, dating back to 1983, had always been rooted in introspection and self‑discovery. But in April 1993, she returned to California. At first, we planned to continue her box long‑distance, but as time passed, that seemed less realistic.
It became clear that this project was far more about process than anything I had previously created. Since my undergraduate years, the tension between process and product has been a central question in my work. In the YaYa Box Project, the process felt overwhelmingly more important.
Women have lived for centuries within a dominant patriarchal structure — bound to external time constructs, values not their own, and systems that require the surrender of power. I wanted this project to unfold naturally, following its own rhythm, guided from within rather than imposed from outside.
VI. The Letter
When the women had selected their boxes, I sent them a letter to help them with their process. I have included it here.
Dear YaYa Box Women:
My artwork has been concerned all along with the fragmented, survival quality of women’s
lives. I am concerned with revising and completing women’s personal and collective
histories to heighten their self-esteem, strengthen their sense of identity, and release their
personal and collective power.
I became aware sometime last year, through a television movie, of a tradition which
involves portraying significant influences from a woman’s life on the outside of a box, and
depicting the essence of the woman (feelings, memories, etc.) on the inside. For months, I
have been working on a way to produce a meaningful installation of art based on this
concept.
I believe the project that I have described to you on the telephone is important,
meaningful, and significant. The importance, meaning, and significance become more
obvious to me every day – and the process we are all living through since the project began
is the most fascinating, mesmerizing process I have experienced. This is ART!
I imagine you have already done a lot of thinking. I know you have begun sorting and
classifying your thoughts about the project/box. Please read the following material and see
if it helps clarify any gray areas, or it will create many more, and that will be good.
Think about the following:
PEOPLE CARS SHAPES PLACES SCHOOLS
EVENTS COLORS OBJECTS ANIMALS
TOYS SYMBOLS PATTERNS HOUSES
POETRY SONGS MUSIC FLOWERS
Bubble lights on a Christmas tree represent a significant caretaker from my childhood, and
are my visual symbol for her.
A four-poster bed with pineapple carvings on the posts is my grandmother.
The word Shanghai stands for 3+ years of my life, and a myriad of memories – from
devastating to sublime.
Catholicism was an extremely significant part of my childhood, and a church could be that, or a Catholic nun could be my grade school.
Scrap quilts are my favorite grandmother because I long for the quilts she made from my
outgrown clothing. Those beloved quilts have long since disintegrated.
Patterns from clothing, furniture, floors, walls, ceilings, draperies, etc., all stand for people
and places important to me.
The symbols you choose for some experiences may trigger intricate, involved, multisensory memories. They should be chosen with care. You will want to think about whether
to use universal symbols for some things, or your own private symbols.
I know it has been painful, in part, to take a close look at your life. I admire your willingness
and courage to do that. Bear in mind that we would not be who we are today without each
of the experiences that have made up our lives.
Words could be an important part of your box, or not. It is your choice. When you feel you
have exhausted your creativity on your lists, symbols, words, hierarchy of importance (big,
small, medium, etc.), contact me if you want to brainstorm about what you have. I will
be happy to help you finish planning how to use your material. Keep in mind you could use
collage, paint, glue, woodburning, carving, nailing, stapling, etc., to decorate your boх.
Later, after everyone is comfortable with where they are going, we will have a slumber party for everyone to become better acquainted and to commiserate/congratulate each other
on our collective journey.
I appreciate all of your efforts more than you know.
I’m glad we’re in this together. (Life, and the Project!)
VII. The Unfinished Passage
As the project continued to unfold, life shifted in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Before I could bring the YaYa Box Project to completion, I moved out of state. The move interrupted the momentum of the work, and the thesis exhibition I had envisioned never materialized. Without that culminating exhibition, I did not receive my Master of Arts degree in studio art.
What I had planned was vivid and deeply rooted in my artistic sensibility. I imagined the exhibition taking place in a wooded area in the country — a natural, quiet space that would hold the boxes with the reverence they deserved. I wanted the boxes displayed on tree stumps, each one grounded in the earth, surrounded by the living world that had shaped so much of our internal and external lives.
The location I had chosen was intentionally set apart from where visitors would park. I wanted there to be a physical and psychological transition — a walk through the trees, a gradual shedding of the everyday world — before entering the installation. The journey into the woods was meant to mirror the journey inward that each of us had taken while creating our boxes.
Although the exhibition never came to be, the process itself remained the heart of the project. The work we did — the introspection, the unraveling, the courage, the connection — was the true thesis. The absence of a formal exhibition did not diminish the depth of discovery we experienced together. In many ways, the project lived exactly as it needed to: unfinished, open‑ended, and profoundly transformative.
VIII. The Legacy of the Unfinished
Although the YaYa Box Project never reached its intended exhibition, its impact did not diminish. In many ways, the absence of a final, public “product” revealed the deeper truth of the work: that the heart of the project was never meant to be the boxes themselves, but the transformation that occurred in the making of them.
The process had already done its work. Each woman had stepped into a kind of internal clearing — sorting, remembering, grieving, reclaiming. The project asked us to look closely at our lives, and in doing so, it opened doors that could not be closed again. Even without a formal installation, the journey had shape, weight, and consequences.
The YaYa Box Process remained unfinished, but not incomplete. Its legacy lives in the questions it asked, the truths it revealed, and the quiet, powerful work it set in motion. Some projects are meant to be completed. Others are meant to be lived.
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. I was told by several women that 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 believe in 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.