First Friday Demo & Children’s Day Installation: Menka Desai-Crawford & Sandra Honda

FREE & Open to the public (no tickets necessary)

Menka Desai-Crawford (she/her) will be demonstrating how she embroiders on handmade paper with threads and beads to create depth in a painting. Desai-Crawford will also have her bead and threads collection, tools, and some of her finished artworks for everyone to enjoy.

Interactive Installation

Celebrate Children’s Day with us on First Friday in May! Every year, this Japanese holiday brings wishes of health and happiness to all children. Come add a tealight to help us grow the word “love” one light at a time on the festive Love Over Hate: For Our Children floorcloth! Make and take home a print of a koi (carp), Japanese doll, special sweet or another symbol of the holiday.

Love Over Hate: For Our Children is an interactive floor installation developed by Japanese American artist Sandra Honda (she/her) in collaboration with Eugene Printmakers, a nonprofit, community-oriented arts organization committed to providing education and opportunities in printmaking, letterpress, and book arts. The work brings attention to intention in choosing love over hate in our daily lives.

Learn more about Infinite Possibilities.

Image: detail of Lavender Fields by Menka Desai-Crawford

Menka Desai-Crawford Bio:

Menka Desai-Crawford (she/her) is an Architect turned full-time Artist, currently living in Portland, Oregon and the face behind a small art business called Mantis Shrimp Monocles. She has a bachelor’s in architecture degree from Mumbai, India and a master’s in urban design degree from Pratt Institute, New York. She has been working as an Artist since 2018 and has sold and shipped hundreds of artworks worldwide. Raised in India, Menka has strong ties to her culture which she tries to showcase in her works. She primarily works with alcohol inks, gouache and embroidery on handmade paper. She also makes her own custom float frame and fine art prints in her home studio.

In May 2022, she was a part of a group show in Alberta Street Gallery highlighting the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. In April 2023, she had her first solo show at Lan Su Chinese Garden in Portland, Oregon where she exhibited 9 botanical mixed media works. The theme was to document the spring lowers that were blooming in the garden at the moment, and she made small maps to go with each painting to make the exhibit more interactive. In Fall 2023, two of her artworks were selected to be a part of City of Portland’s ‘Visual Chronicle of Portland’ Collection.

She loves a good composition in everything – whether in paper, in spaces or in imagination and she tries to encase that in her very colorful depictions of birds, plants, sea life, and landscapes.

Sandra Honda Bio:

Sandra Honda (she/her) is a Japanese American visual artist and writer based on Kalapuyan land now known as Eugene, Oregon. She works to elevate less heard voices and stories by invoking historical, contemporary and social narratives. In 2018, she left her career as a speechwriter and scientist to redirect her focus toward using art and writing to interrogate what it means to be Asian and American in today’s America. Informed by the Japanese American experience of ethnically-based mass incarceration during World War II, her drawings, paintings, digital works, assemblages, and installations draw a historical throughline of anti-Asian activities in the U.S. from the 1800s to today. In 2022, she initiated a social practice focused on climate change in which she broadened her toolkit to include sculpture. This climate change-related work draws on her career addressing climate, ocean and science policy through her speechwriting work.

She often collaborates with Taiwanese composer and sound designer Mei-ling Lee to create interactive installations enriched by sound and lighting environments. Since moving to Eugene in 2018, Honda has exhibited (selected) in the Mayor’s Art Show (Eugene, 2020), Arts Northwest Biennial (Roseburg, 2021), Eugene’s Windowfront Exhibition (2022), Maude Kerns Art Center (Eugene, 2022), The Reser Center for the Arts (Beaverton, 2022), the University of Oregon Adele McMillan Gallery (EMU, 2023) and Walters Cultural Arts Center (Hillsboro, 2023). She is a recipient of grants from the Oregon Arts Commission (2022) and Lane County Cultural Commission (2024). She was the first artist selected for two consecutive years of residency at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture (2022, 2023).

Honda was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where her family relocated after their incarceration in America’s concentration camps (Pinedale, Tule Lake, and Minidoka) during World War II.