Featured Artist - Ada

As an Afro-Latina woman, orphan and former foster child, Ada’s first experience with creativity was largely as a writer. Writing poetry helped Ada make meaning of her early childhood trauma which included the loss of her family, language, and culture as well as the displacement she experienced growing up in foster care. Since Ada’s early school experience with art didn’t encourage coloring outside the lines, she grew up not believing herself to be artistic.

Despite this discouragement, Ada’s first flirtation with the Muse began in her teens, as a jealousy she secretly harbored towards artists during visits to the museums with her foster parents who were courting their own Muse.
Having aged out of foster care and being on her own at 17, without the privilege of support that so many of her peers had, Ada realized that getting an education was a way of going beyond race, class, and her childhood traumas. After completing both her Masters and Doctorate in Social Psychology. Ada unknowingly defied the statistical outcomes which most children face who are raised in foster care.

Having established her psychology career, Ada’s creative drives returned to the visual arts as it did for many people, during the pandemic. Utilizing the forced solitude of the times, Ada faced her fear of Art and began a rewarding relationship with the Muse and her art.

Today, in addition to creating her own art, Ada is a Human Potential Educator and Consultant in her own private practice in the Greater Philadelphia area. Working with artists of various mediums. Ada supports them in reclaiming and sustaining a relationship with their own nature and creative process. As an awareness, nature based, process oriented practitioner, Ada’s work facilitates and requires a relationship to her imagination and innate artistic affinity. It is this avocation; each day, to answer the call of the Muse, to become an artist and to live daily her artistic nature, that is her greatest joy and challenge.