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TD Community Sunday: Cities Within – A Mandala Workshop with Sheniz Janmohamed

With Sheniz Janmohamed
Sunday, September 5, 2021
 | 1:00 pm
 – 2:00 pm
 | Zoom 

For our September TD Community Sunday, we welcomed artist, educator, and poet Sheniz Janmohamed to lead a virtual mandala making workshop.

Follow along with Sheniz and learn about a mandala and its various manifestations in arts and culture. Draw upon your senses and memories to create your own mandala, imagining your heart as a city. Use shape, colour, pattern and texture to denote landmarks, buildings, parks and roads—all centred around the heart of your city/mandala.

This mandala activity draws inspiration from MOCA’s exhibition Greater Toronto Art 21, which features works from twenty-one artists working in relation to Toronto today. A key question that the exhibition will explore is “What does it mean to centre a community?” Through our mandala making, we can start to think about how we might personally answer this question.

Activity Guide

Artist/Facilitator
Artists/Facilitators
Sheniz Janmohamed is a firm believer in fostering community through collaboration and creativity. A poet, artist educator, spoken word artist and nature artist, Sheniz is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Guelph. Throughout her career, Sheniz has had the good fortune to be mentored by authors Dionne Brand and Kuldip Gill. Sheniz’s first book, Bleeding Light (Mawenzi House, 2010), is a collection of English ghazals that explores a woman’s journey through the night. Sheniz’s second collection of poetry, Firesmoke (Mawenzi House, 2014) traces the inception and annihilation of the sacred fire and explores the meaning of truth and the self, finding them both in form and emptiness. Sheniz has performed nationally and internationally for over 10 years, and her writing has been published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Descant and CV2. She is a regular reviewer for Quill & Quire, and the founder of Questions for Ancestors, a blog that encourages BIPOC writers and artists across Turtle Island to ask questions of their ancestors and provide advice for their descendants.
Sheniz Janmohamed- Self portrait

This event takes place on TD Community Sunday.
TD Community Sundays are made possible through TD Community Sundays by TD Bank Group through its corporate citizenship platform TD Ready Commitment.

MOCA thanks Ontario Trillium Foundation for their support of our Public Programmes and Learning Initiatives.

Image credit: Sheniz Janmohamed

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