Art in the Café: Aiyana Masla

Our August Art in the Northampton Café gallery is Grief's Choreography by Aiyana Masla

“What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?” — Ross Gay, from Inciting Joy

This collection is an advocate for heartbreak—for allowing our full humanity, the breadth of our emotions; our wonder, our shared vulnerability—to touch us. What if the heart breaks open? What happens if joy is not, in fact, separate from sorrow? When we allow ourselves to recognize our collaboration with and as a part of this radiant, pulsing world? I invite you to pause with me. To come close. To be surprised by what we share, by what is possible.

This collection of watercolors comes from grief-transformation-ritual as painting. From reckoning with loss as a part of this world to which we each belong. As Francis Weller wrote, “Grief led me back into a world that is vivid and radiant.” This is a world in which the bodies of water, animals, trees, other humans, gardens, mycelium, shrubs, stones, are not separate from us, but beholden to us. A world at once violent and tender, in which cycles of death and life occur. A world interconnected. A world in climate crisis. I have chosen to open, through painting, to this intimacy, and to see what emerges. You are invited to join in this research into grief — and the necessity, the vitality, the nourishment that is available in allowing grief to move, transform, and change us. 

My aim with this collection of watercolors is reverence, companionship, and release — opening space for agency, joy, and new possibilities. These paintings are attempts to be more present. To be with both how beautiful, and how heartbreaking it is to be alive. Right now.

Thank you for taking your time with them.

To see more of Aiyana's work, click here: www.aiyanamasla.com

About the Artist

Aiyana Masla is the author of poetry collections The Underdream (Cornerstone Press, 2025) and Stone Fruit (Bottlecap Press, 2020), co-author and co-illustrator of LET’s (Liberatory Education Tools’) T.A.L.K., an LGTBQIA++ affirming and inclusive Sexuality and Gender curriculum for Elementary School, and the author/illustrator of several forthcoming picture books. She sings, gardens, and divests from harm, from disconnect, by practicing rest as often as she can.

Aiyana's art and poems live in various journals and anthologies, and some can be found on her website (www.AiyanaMasla.com). She is in process with a new poetry collection, a queer historical fiction romance novel, a storytelling and performance project with her sister for young audiences focused on climate solutions, and visioning community ritual offerings for transforming grief. Aiyana writes and facilitates curriculum for equity, inclusion, and anti-bias education, dances with abandon whenever possible, and loves ice cream in any season. She works (plays) interdisciplinarily as an artist and educator — as ever, in collaboration.