upcoming grant deadline: 05/15/2024
Lovella Calica uses art making, especially writing, as a way to heal and survive life experiences. She writes and shares to offer awareness, analysis, resistance, and hope. As a tool to emotionally connect, her artistic practice contemplates issues of sexual abuse, the history and violence around colonization and capitalism, war, loss of loved ones, confusion and frustration with gender, racism, and sexism. Lovella published her first book of poetry called Makibaka: Beautifully Brave in 2006 and printed a few hundred copies to give away free to veterans, friends, and family members. A significant portion of Lovella’s work is with veterans. In 2006, she founded the Warrior Writers Project, which provides opportunities for creative community and artistic expression among recent veterans and current service members, many of whom have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. She also documents them through film, photography, and audio, along their journeys after/outside the military; facilitates writing and art workshops; edits books of their writing (with two published thus far); organizes exhibits of their artwork; and coordinates performances. Lovella is a facilitator/participator in the Writing Circle and co-founder of Tatlo Mestiz@s, a collective of Pilipin@ American artist/activists, which creates multi-media performances addressing issues of gender, grief, assimilation, displacement, and colonization among others. Her photographs have been exhibited locally and nationally. She has also been co-coordinator and performer for Mantra and Poems not Prisons, which were open-mic series’ in Philadelphia.