Crying Room
Requiem for a Stranger will be accompanied by a healing space called "The Crying Room," created and facilitated by Oakland-based artist Mariah Rankine-Landers. The Crying Room, a womb-like enclosure intended for safe processing of feelings of overwhelm, will be installed in an adjoining gallery and available to patrons after the performance of Requiem for a Stranger. The Crying Room has been installed previously at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2018 and at Oakland Museum of California in 2019.
"Contemporary society has a complex relationship with grief. We withhold, stifle, hide, stuff, and minimize our sorrows at worst. At best, we process, allow, feel, and transform through grief. Finding solace in the arts, we can experience the opening of portals that allow us to know and tap into unexamined spaces in our personal and collective psyche. The Crying Room is a location dedicated to the process of grieving. It is a desire for a site-specific public area to aid the emotional responses that our beingness can experience when we soak in and allow art to commune with us at the highest level." ~Mariah Rankine-Landers