Helen Tseng Residency for
Healing and Creative Arts
Helen Ming Tseng
Helen Tseng, healing and creative artist, began sowing and growing community in Ithaca and the greater Tompkins County region as soon as she arrived to study at the Finger Lakes School of Massage in 2000. Her frequent invitations to play and explore with joyful curiosity gained her many deep and lasting friendships in our community and introduced many to the healing potential of our own bodies through touch, movement, and energetic awareness. A fierce advocate for equitable justice, Helen was extremely outspoken in defense of those without voices- children, nature, and those suffering from oppression. She utilized her gifts in healing arts to give care to many who could not afford the perceived luxury of a massage or Biodynamic cranial sacral therapy. Helping others move through pain and suffering was one of her greatest gifts.
The Helen Tseng Residency for Healing and Creative Arts will dedicate a month-long residency to honor and celebrate Helen's legacy by sponsoring creative healing artists to lead projects designed to continue cultivating community and healing through meaningful work and the therapeutic arts.
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Gabrielle Schenck
Gabrielle Schenck is an interdisciplinary artist based in Bloomington, Indiana. She holds a BFA in painting from Indiana University and has exhibited her work across the country. In 2024, her work was featured in Manifest Gallery's 20th annual Emerging Artist Exhibition. Gabrielle's practice primarily focuses on painting but often incorporates drawing, sculpture, and fibers techniques into her pieces. Her work delves into themes of vulnerability, memory, and perception, transforming everyday objects into surreal and emotionally charged compositions. Gabrielle seeks to challenge conventional notions of reality, inviting viewers to engage with the fluidity and complexity of their own experiences. During her time at Sunlit residency, she will explore the relationship between place and living memory through her project BRIGHT BELIEF, a series of paintings and drawings honoring Sue-Je Lee Gage. She aims to capture the essence of Sue-Je’s life and work by creating dynamic compositions of people, places, and objects significant to her legacy in Ithaca.
Kate Moon
Kate Moon is a self-taught visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY who uses an illustrative style for exploration of new ideas. Like many artists, Kate feels her work seems to emerge of its own volition. With curiosity and openness, she employs meditative practices to help her create work that is often uplifting and informed by the dream mind that inspires her art. Her craft spans cartoons, zines, silkscreen prints, sculptures and paintings. She is working on a comic called "Lies About Owls," an absurdist tribute to owls, their scientists and photographers. Kate attended Finger Lakes School of Massage in Ithaca, where she met Helen Ming Tseng, sharing a long and passionate friendship and collaboration in Thai massage and art as Helen became interested in painting. The study of healing arts developed her intuition and changed her relationship to being in a body. While at the Residency she will create at least 20 small mixed media paintings, journal in comic form on the residency experience, and take photographs. She shares her work on Instagram @katemoonart.