Initial Thoughts: A Correspondence

We’re excited to announce our newest series, To Get to the Other Side: A Correspondence, will be showcased @thefrontnola in New Orleans, May 2026! Huge thank you to @creating.dejamojo for giving us this great opportunity!

We’re honored and grateful to @crosstownarts for the opportunity to showcase a body of work we are proud to call, “BLEEDING TOGETHER: A Correspondence” May 2025, stay tuned!

NEW SHOW ALERT 💫 Join us on August 30th Trolley Night for the opening of ‘Initial Thoughts: A Correspondence’ by @_a_correspondence ! This will be our first show since the pandemic and we couldn’t be more excited!

To Get to the Other Side: A Correspondence 2026 Thank you to all who came out to our opening to share this special evening with us. Special thank you to the fellow artists we were able to share this space with @sly.watts @what_are_the_wild_waves_saying @is_ing @thefrontnola as well as @creating.dejamojo for offering us the opportunity to showcase and explore this series. Thank you to @willapuswallapus with @crosstownartssharedart for once again helping us execute this work. And of course, we owe a lot to @cm0lina for giving us the nudge of encouragement we needed to accept the offer presented to us. Our work will be on view at The Front through June 7th. Check out our artist statement below. To read the poem in full titled, Nest, by Abby Meyers @your_goomah check out the highlight in our bio! To Get to the Other Side is a collaborative body of work which considers safety as both destination and condition. The work emerges from lived experiences shaped by violence, including sexual and domestic abuse, and a generational history of displacement and emigration. In this context, safety is not a certain endpoint but a horizon pursued through distance both physical and temporal, conviction, and survival instinct. Using compositional clusters of found images and confessional free verse poetry wheat-pasted on wood panel, this transit toward sanctuary is considered through proximity and intersection. Each walking figure has been lifted from its own unique and ambiguous context. Their stories—however we may understand them—are reframed or reimagined as they interact with one another and become part of a collective condition, interwoven through fields of first-person memory. By presenting the poem in fragments on the figures’ silhouettes, it becomes another member of this crowd of characters, nodding to the interiority of the people depicted on these panels. This work is a crossing of paths as each of us engages in our own movements towards our own refuge; the providence—both seen and unseen—that guides where our bodies go and why; and the record and remembrance of these steps as they accumulate across time.

This upcoming Saturday will open our new shows. In Room 4, member @creating.dejamojo will be showing artists Andres Arauz and Abby Meyers. This show is titled, To Get to the Other Side: A Correspondence. The medium used is wheat paste on wood panel. @_a_correspondence To Get to the Other Side is a collaborative body of work which considers safety as both destination and condition. The work emerges from lived experiences shaped by violence, including sexual and domestic abuse, and a generational history of displacement and emigration. In this context, safety is not a certain endpoint but a horizon pursued through distance both physical and temporal, conviction, and survival instinct. Using compositional clusters of found images and confessional free verse poetry wheat-pasted on wood panel, this transit toward sanctuary is considered through proximity and intersection. Each walking figure has been lifted from its own unique and ambiguous context. Their stories—however we may understand them—are reframed or reimagined as they interact with one another and become part of a collective condition, interwoven through fields of first-person memory. By presenting the poem in fragments on the figures’ silhouettes, it becomes another member of this crowd of characters, nodding to the interiority of the people depicted on these panels. The work considers the crossing of paths as each of us engages in our own movements towards our own refuge; the providence—both seen and unseen—that guides where our bodies go and why; and the record and remembrance of these steps as they accumulate across time.

50 people, one GIANT COMMUNITY COLLAGE ⚡️ huge thank you to @your_goomah and @ae_arauz from @_a_correspondence for leading the charge for this beautiful collaborative work at @memphislibrary . This event was made possible by @memphislibraryfoundation .

Join @your_goomah and @ae_arauz —the artist duo known as @_a_correspondence —to create a giant community collage together. You can make your own separate collage, too! ⚡️ RSVP at likereallycreative.com/chargedup ⚡️ CHARGED UP is a new event series from Like Really Creative in collaboration with @memphislibrary . This 6-event series will focus on creative wellness through the Four Codes of Creative Energy framework developed by @zackorsborn : Community, Craft, Clarity, and Condition. Each event will include take-home materials to help build a creative practice on your own. CHARGED UP is for everybody, even if you don’t consider yourself a “creative” or “artist.” Free. Made possible by the @memphislibraryfoundation .

Passed a piece we put up on Madison Ave recently and wanted to share the way it’s progressed. This one has taken on a few different lives; notecards passed back and forth on our porch and in our home studio, a mural in downtown Memphis and another version that lasted less than 24 hours under red lights at a park in New Orleans, wood panels on view at Crosstown Arts, and now this stripped down poem hanging over Madison and BB King. We’re always fascinated by the ways a paste gets edited after we walk away from it by time and weather, by people interacting w it, and by the goings on of the neighborhood in which it’s situated. The plywood we pasted on has been removed and new windows installed. All that’s left here is this sentence—a poem that previously presented a question and proposed and answer has been whittled down and now it reads as a question with no answer, a warning.

this week we took our work off the walls at jack robinson. we are beyond thankful to everyone who came to the opening, it was beautiful to share our first show together with yall. special enough to share in this practice just the two of us, but it’s beyond meaningful and humbling to get to share it with friends, family, strangers, artists we admire deeply, brand new babies, etc etc etc. especially grateful to everyone who helped us put it together - @dotersweetly and @el_niablo @robinsongallery for allowing us to show our work and helping us get there @willapuswallapus and @noahtm @crosstownartssharedart for so much guidance with ideation and execution @gabrielleyasmeen for stopping by and beautifully documenting the end of our opening @libby.decoded for her amazing assistance at the gallery @annaleemarie , @heresmynewaddress and @dotersweetly for looking over my writing and providing such thoughtful feedback @menaarauz for driving up from new orleans for the night so we could share our first show with a beloved member of our family

we are at the center of one another’s art practice and our shared art practice is at the center of our relationship. being that both of us make work that is quite personal and confessional, we feel very connected to and protective of our contributions to the collaborative works we make together. it ain’t always easy, occasionally even leads to disagreements. sometimes our two pieces don’t quite fit together and one or both of us is forced to compromise to create compatibility. it’s a wild exercise, a process we’ve had to refine. i’m fascinated by the ways that bringing very personal art to each other to create a cooperative body of work can lead to deeper and wider understanding of my partner, more compassion and listening, maybe it even sharpens our ability to conflict with each other

poetry was previously only a passing interest, and then following a long period of concurrent and compounding trauma, it became compulsory, something i needed in order to survive. i was alone in colorado, in an abusive relationship, reeling from a rape investigation - just me and my dog. he couldn’t talk back - but the page sort of does. i would read back what i wrote and learn things about myself i hadn’t yet told me. my first and most crucial correspondence is my own private relationship to poetry. a couple years later, that practice expanded after i met andres. we grew to know each other, our process expanded, and we began a correspondence together. this survival relationship i had with the my notebooks became something i shared with him. i tell my secrets as i write, and then i pass them to him, he does the same with different materials, and then we marry them, and put them on a wall in the wild where anyone can listen in.