The In Between: Tea Talks
with Lexa Walsh
Join us for our first Tea Talk:
Activists Round Table
Saturday, April 26th, 3:00 to 5:00 pm
To attend this event, registration is required.
The In Between: Tea Talks are series of intimate facilitated discussions over home cooked meals that bring together conflicting populations of artists, activists, workers, Veterans, civilians, and others in a hospitable environment so each may share their positions in a safe yet open and critical dialogue. The goals of the project are to:
Complicate the current good vs. evil/us vs. them narrative while eliciting understanding and extracting nuances from all sides.
Engage in local micro politics while placing these issues in the larger current political landscape.
Create a space for hospitable democracy.
Share understanding about issues affecting our communities to a broader audience.
Lexa Walsh is an artist, cultural worker and experience maker. With a background in both sculpture and social practice, Walsh makes site specific projects, exhibitions, publications and objects, using an array of materials and employing social engagement, institutional critique, and radical hospitality. She creates platforms for interaction across hierarchies, representing multiple voices and inventing new ways of belonging. Walsh has exhibited and performed internationally for over 25 years at institutions large and small, and in public spaces.
Artist Lexa Walsh will facilitate a “Tea Talk” discussion among an intimate group of Veterans and civilians in conjunction with her ongoing artworks based on military decoration and mourning jewelry, Mourning Song. The work invites viewers to reflect on individual and collective grief, loss, and mourning while witnessing the horrors of war.
For the Tea Talk, seated in intimate groupings over a homemade meal, we will discuss the complexities of war; how we find value in certain wars more than others, who is valued, and how this value sometimes changes with time. The discussion will be prompted by sound works made from past interviews Walsh has done with Veterans. We will create content for a small publication to be shared with participants, their families, and the larger public.
Walsh's personal interest in working with Veterans came from her being an anti war activist, and her nephew joining the Marines after 9/11. Her father was a WWII Vet who never discussed it. After meeting members of the Veteran Arts Movement, and conversations with other anti war Veterans, her viewpoint has shifted into a more nuanced place that she finds important to foster. Through her 2022 project “Consolidated Mess” at Marin MoCA, a former military base, she was able to uncover many nuances of Veterans’ and civilians' experiences with war through interviews and community events. The Veterans who participated found value and healing by having these discussions and a truly interested yet critical audience.
Participation is free, with ample hospitality, and a custom, handmade award is given to all participants. This is a dry/sober event.