A sandwich is not a gun. A hairbrush is not a gun. A wallet is not a gun. In this workshop, artist Cara Levine encourages participants to give presence to objects that have been mistaken for guns by police officers in civilian shootings, calling out their not-gun-ness by sculpting their shapes in clay. The gathering, cohosted by Ekaette Ekong, offers a nonjudgmental space to site the issues of this historically dense and complicated crisis within our own bodies and stories.

Cara Levine lives in Los Angeles. She is an artist exploring the intersections of the physical, metaphysical, traumatic, and illusionary through sculpture, video, and socially engaged practice. She is currently a lecturer on the sculpture faculty at Otis College and an instructor at Exceptional Children’s Foundation in Inglewood, California, working with adults with developmental disabilities. She received her MFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2012. Levine’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Wattis Center for Contemporary Art in San Francisco, YoungArts Miami, Art Basel, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.