Paneled by Mel Hsu, DonChristian Jones, and mayfield brooks (pictured left-to-right)
Pay-What-You-Wish
Laurel Hill West
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How might the practices of caretaking, grieving, and creative expression intersect? Join Philadelphia Death & Arts Festival artists Mel Hsu, mayfield brooks and DonChristian Jones for a conversation about caring for aging parents. While different for everyone, caretaking can be a profoundly meaningful, difficult, and transformative experience–from providing at-home hospice care to having important conversations about a loved one’s wishes, navigating changing relationships, processing grief, managing self-care and finding community support.
The artists will discuss personal experiences in caretaking roles and how those embodied experiences have informed their creative work. Afterward, join a cozy space for informal and supportive group exchange about any of your own caretaking experiences.
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Mel Hsu (she/they) is a sonic painter of impossible worlds. As a multi-instrumentalist, Mel often ventures from her classical roots as a cellist into unexpected, cross-disciplinary collaborations. Rooted in Philadelphia, Mel’s restless spirit finds adventure across time zones and oceans as musical and administrative support for others who inspire them. Mel is a spreadsheet nerd, a slow reader, and a shameless instigator of kitchen dance parties.
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is a postdisciplinary artist and social sculptor whose practice blurs the boundaries between visual art, music, performance, and social intervention. Working across media and modes, his work engages architecture, community, and futurity—often emerging from spaces shaped by surveillance, abandonment, or resistance.
Raised in Philadelphia and based in New York, DonChristian’s early years painting inside Rikers Island and other carceral institutions ground his work in both aesthetic experimentation and civic urgency. His installations, soundworks, and performances have appeared at The Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, The Shed, New Museum, and Brooklyn Museum, among others.
In 2020, he founded Public Assistants Inc.—a radical mutual aid network and community design studio that reimagines urban space as a site of liberation, care, and creative infrastructure.
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mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.