Meet California-based Artist Kiona Medina
Kiona Medina is a mixed media and performance artist based in Concord, CA. She also hosts arts therapy events in the Bay Area. You can learn more about her on her website.
CATHOLIC ARTIST CONNECTION: Where are you from originally, and what brought you to your current city?
KIONA MEDINA: Born in Barranquilla, Colombia. My family and I moved to California due to my Dad's job. I have lived in the Northern California, Bay Area ever since.
How do understand your vocation as a Catholic artist?
I respond and engage in my relationship with God through all my senses and find it vital to participate with others in the same way with my faith—Mass involves all my parts! Catholicism is a fully embodied experience, from eating God, to understanding prayer as relationship with my voice, movement and creation. I have an MA in expressive arts therapy so the use of the arts of tools of expression and trauma healing are also very vital in having a holistic relationship with God.
Where have you found support in the Church for your vocation as an artist?
I currently work as a coordinator of respect life and social justice for my diocese and this position allows me to offer “heartshops,” which are my combinations of creativity, mental health and faith. I was able to offer these in New York a few years ago through a religious community that offered retreats. Other religious communities and inter-diocesan connections have made it possible to share my offerings. The challenge in California is networking with other artists.
Where have you found support among your fellow artists for your Catholic faith?
I do a lot of creative movement and theater practices with non denominational groups to learn tools for social change and personal healing. There is a local group that uses "theater of the oppressed" and other drama therapy tools that are helping me engage marginalized faith communities.
How can the Church be more welcoming to artists?
The reframing of the use of the arts as tools for prayer, evangelizing and healing has been liberating for many traditional Catholics. Heartshop participants have moved to drum beats and engaged in mural making and acted out basic gestures in bibliodrama or addressed trauma healing through movement and their relationship with God and each other changes. These positive changes in their communities is a approach to social justice that is preventive and restorative.
How can the artistic world be more welcoming to artists of faith?
The art world is known as an elite bubble for the talented and the gallery goers. We self-exclude when we stick to that mindset and artists of faith self-exclude when we neglect our primal need to move, to scream, to scribble, to walk to a basic drumbeat and forget how all those forms of expression to God is also prayer. Let's spread that message instead: The art of relating to God with all of our parts is prayer.
Where in your city do you regularly find spiritual fulfillment?
St. Benedict in Oakland is a predominantly Black Catholic community that offers gospel Mass and the incredible gift of their music and dancing.
What is your daily spiritual practice?
I eat Jesus everyday :) and I chat with Mama Mary through the Rosary in my morning commute. I go on retreats with the Verbum Dei missionary community and the community of Lazos de Amor Mariano/Bonds of Marian Love.