The Art of Remembrance with Cempasúchil 

When: November 1st, 2026

Time: 3:30 - 5:30pm

Where: 435 South 5th Street, Brooklyn NY 11211 - Studio #1

In this plant and color study, we’ll commune with Cempasúchil (Aztec or African marigold) and explore natural dyeing as a ritual practice of remembrance. We will ground in the spiritual significance of this plant ally and explore its medicine with our senses. Touching, smelling, tasting: communing. Working then with silk and the fresh plant matter, we’ll create a textile for intention and connection as we move through the many portals of memory, grief, and transformation that this time of year invites in. 

Working with silk, we’ll explore natural dyeing as a ritual practice in conversation with Cempasuchil (marigold). Allowing the plant to leave its color and essence on the cloth. A textile for intention, remembrance and connection. 

Individual offerings: 

Nelise: bundle dye with marigold (powdered or dried petals), while it’s steaming we can move into the medicine exploration. 

Jasmín: Communing with marigold, meditation with the fresh plant, what do we smell, feel and taste? De-petaling together and drinking cempa tea. Plants introduced from a cultural / social perspective, color as medicine and some medicinal uses. 

Your Teachers

Nelise Charles Bey

Nelise is a textile artist, printmaker, and natural dyer living and creating in Brooklyn, NY. Her aesthetic is colorful and pattern-filled, a play on her Caribbean roots. Nelise works mostly with silks and other natural fibers, in which she dyes and silkscreens. She really enjoys being outdoors on a hike, foraging (mushrooms, wild edibles, flowers), and identifying local medicinal herbs that are available throughout Brooklyn and New York State.

Jasmín Durán

Jasmín Durán (she/they) is a clinical herbalist, community educator, urban grower and care practitioner based in unceeded Lenapehoking territory (NYC). Communing closely with plants, urban gardens, storytelling and immigrant communities, their work is focussed in the remembrance of ancestral healing practices, technologies and traditions in the immigrant diaspora. Today you can find her facilitating herbal workshops, vending and sharing in community under her herbal project, Meztli medicinals.

The Fifth Room

This workshop is a part of The Fifth Room workshop series co - created by Krystal Frame of Sustain Frame and Cara bringing together instructors, artists, and community to explore transforming grief through ritual and craft-based practices.

Drawing on John Coltrane's The Coltrane Circle, the mathematics of jazz, and Five Element theory, the series explores the alchemical theme of Solve et Coagula — to dissolve and reform. We believe grief works in a spiral, leading us through transformation but never quite back to the place where we started.