We Are Not Our Cruxes
We Are Not Our Cruxes was a multi-pronged project encompassing five hybrid community art-making workshops, art-based research, and interactive website. A total of 268 people signed up for the events, either in-person or virtually, with 101 total attendees. 68 attendees were either adult adoptees or former foster youth. While adoption is usually framed as a child-specific issue, it’s a lifelong journey, and the needs of adult adoptees are often overlooked.
adopted, adoptee, adult adoptee, Nicole Rademacher, adoptee Nicole Rademacher, foster care alumni, museotherapy
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We Are Not Our Cruxes

2023–24
Five hybrid convenings, Los Angeles + online; facilitated art-making, curated panels, scholarly/art-based research, interactive web component.
August 2023–June 2024

We Are Not Our Cruxes began from a familiar frame: adoption and foster care are overwhelmingly narrated around childhood, while adulthood is often treated as aftermath. The project asked what changes when adults who were adopted or fostered are not positioned as outcomes of systems, evidence of resilience, or subjects to be explained, but as authors of their own complicated experience.

Across five hybrid convenings in Los Angeles and online, participants moved between facilitated art-making, conversation, and panels with invited speakers. Art-making did not function as illustration, testimony, or psychotherapy; it offered another register through which people could think and respond.

 

The project also included formal research through Loyola Marymount University and an interactive online prototype. Across the convenings, research, and accumulated materials, contradiction was not resolved. The work created temporary structures in which ambivalence, grief, anger, humor, attachment, estrangement, and cultural dislocation could remain in relation without being made coherent.

 

 

Preliminary research from the project was presented in 2024 at the Loyola Marymount University Art Therapy Research Symposium and at the Decolonizing Adoption + Creative Resistance Conference.

 

We Are Not Our Cruxes was conceived and led by Nicole Rademacher and funded in part by the California Arts Council’s California Creative Corps program through the Arts Council for Long Beach.

Convenings

 

November 18, 2023 — Baldwin Hills Branch Library + online
Brian Stanton · Lesli Johnson · Dot Todman

 

December 16, 2023 — Club Creative + online
Angela Gee · Benjamin Lundberg Torres Sánchez · Santana Dempsey

 

January 6, 2024 — Michelle & Barack Obama Sports Complex Community Room + online
Kayla Tange · María Fernanda · Marie Gardom Lam

 

February 3, 2024 — Peace4Kids + online
JaeRan Kim · Julayne Lee · Katelyn Leon Diaz

 

March 16, 2024 — Baldwin Hills Branch Library + online
Badly Licked Bear · Laura Callen · Tia Terefe

 

Remote clinical support for online participants: Heather Gonzales, LPC + Mj Buck, LCSW.

Online home: Acogedor.

Project documentation includes participant discussion of racism, sexual violence, family separation, and loss.