Unseen is a studio workshop series exploring the lives, methods, and significance of women artists who made some of the most powerful and innovative work in American art history — and were systematically overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten anyway. Each week centers on a different artist or group, asking not just what they made, but why they made it, how they made it, and why it still matters.

This is not an art history lecture. It is a making experience. Participants spend each session in conversation with one artist's life and work, then create their own original piece in response — using materials and approaches inspired by that week's artist. No prior art experience is required. What's required is curiosity, a willingness to try, and an interest in the question at the heart of every session: whose work gets remembered, and why?

Presented by Heijeu Arts. Led by teaching artist and researcher Heidi Jeub, whose graduate work at the University of Minnesota examined the systemic barriers that keep artists from rural and underrepresented communities out of the historical record.

Alice Neel spent decades painting the people no one else thought worth painting — her neighbors in Spanish Harlem, pregnant women, gay men, civil rights activists, her own aging body. She painted with radical psychological honesty: her subjects look back at you with full awareness that they are being seen. She didn't get a major retrospective until she was 74. She died at 84, finally recognized as one of the greatest American portrait painters of the 20th century.

Studio: Participants create a portrait of someone from their own life who deserves to be seen — rendered with the same unflinching honesty and dignity Neel brought to every subject. Medium is open: drawing, paint, collage, marker.

Discussion: Who in your world has never had a formal portrait made of them? What does it mean to look at someone — really look — and put them on the page? What does portraiture give the subject that photography doesn't?