For LA Design Weekend, Downstream Prophecy: What Serves The Current Canvas
Rivers teach us about selective preservation—what flows forward, what settles into memory banks, what carves new channels through time. For those of us gathering at Folk Lounge to explore embroidery as cultural practice, this natural editing process offers a framework for examining how we carry forward ancestral knowledge while releasing what no longer serves our collective becoming.
Photo by Diana Light on Unsplash
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Dream new patterns with kindred spirits!
Join upcoming events. 〰️ Dream new patterns with kindred spirits!
This guide serves as a participatory framework for Downstream Prophecy workshops, designed for events where community members engage in collective embroidery as cultural practice. Drawing from river restoration research and Indigenous water knowledge, the following outline supports facilitators in creating contemplative spaces where participants can explore the meditative rhythm of cross-stitch, mapping their emotional topography through needle and thread while contributing to a larger collaborative textile.
Guests
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Darío Herrera is a multidisciplinary historian and community organizer from Northeast LA whose work is grounded in a desire to understand, question, and propose new definitions of heritage in marginalized communities. As Community Programs Manager at Clockshop, he oversees Take Me To Your River: A Cultural Atlas of the LA River, a three-year project mapping the collective history of Northeast LA communities through oral histories and interactive storytelling.
Clockshop is a Los Angeles-based arts nonprofit that works with artists to deepen the connection between communities and public land, building a shared vision of a future based in belonging and care. Founded by filmmaker Julia Meltzer in 2004, the organization produces free public programming and commissions contemporary artist projects, centering working-class communities of color through collaborations at Los Angeles State Historic Park and Rio de Los Angeles State Park in partnership with California State Parks.
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A celebrated cultural event producer whose work has illuminated Los Angeles for the past twenty years. She has produced everything from large-scale public festivals to intimate literary salons, including eight years as Production Manager for the iconic Día de los Muertos celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Through her studio, Cherie Creative Company, and at Frogtown Arts, she curates programs like The Frogtown Artwalk and Stories, Poems & Songs—inviting people of all walks of life to connect through creativity, arts and culture along the LA River.
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Description text goes here
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An artist, photographer, and digital creative based in Los Angeles. She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design in 2017 with a BFA in Web & Multimedia + Photography. Drawing inspiration from cycling, hiking, and backpacking adventures, she creates work that bridges commercial and fine art practices. Her clients include Youth to the People, tokyobike, Hedley & Bennett, Anthropologie, AWAY, and the LGBTQ Center of Los Angeles.
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A is a fourth-generation textile artist based in California and founder of the Mixed Stitch. Rooted in her Northwestern Iranian and English-American heritage, she creates original designs that weave together tradition and innovation. Her work honors ancestral craft while reimagining it through a contemporary lens.
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Born in Vladivostok, she is of Armenian and Russian heritage and has traveled the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. With a background in luxury fashion, wearables, and human-computer interaction, she is a seasoned multidisciplinary design leader, blending creativity and innovation with global teams.
Her artistry spans textile arts, leatherwork, painting, and illustration, grounded in her MFA in Human-Computer Interaction (California College of the Arts) and a Fashion Design degree (Oregon State University). A trained facilitator, she is passionate about fostering community, collaboration, healing, and shared learning. As the founder of Folk Lounge, Shagoh is dedicated to uniting people through the exploration of ornamentation and sacred symbolism across cultures.
LA Design Weekend is a weekend-long celebration of LA's sprawling, spectacular design scene—broken down into bite-sized, neighborhood-based experiences. LADW is a hands-on, community-driven experience that welcomes everyone to step behind the scenes and into the spaces where creativity really happens. This year, honoring the resilience of the creative community while spotlighting the makers, spaces, and ideas that continue to rebuild, reimagine, and inspire.
* Explore the LA Design Weekend website to learn more about new events, tours and salons!
Canvas - 30m
Downstream Prophecy is place based and community centered contemplative workshop, that mirrors how rivers naturally edit landscapes—carrying some things downstream while depositing others on banks, carving new channels while filling old ones. Working with turquoise tulle and cross-stitch embroidery, participants create stitch lifeforms that appear suspended in aquatic space, honoring the eternal flow of memories and ecosystems, release and renewal.
This evolving collaborative topography captures our personal and cultural feelings about navigating change through the rhythms of seasonal transition. Each co-creator contributes their memory, direction, and vision to a flowing tapestry that celebrates the unscripted and organic nature of both human emotion and waterways. The work remains intentionally unfinished—like a river, it continues to become, embodying our collective practice of memory editing and renewal.
LA River
The Los Angeles River winds 51m from the San Fernando Valley to the Pacific Ocean, serving as both the city's forgotten waterway and its emerging cultural lifeline.
Once a wild, meandering river that sustained Indigenous Tongva communities for thousands of years, it was channelized into concrete in the mid-20th century for flood control, transforming a living ecosystem into what many saw as an urban scar.
Today, the river is experiencing a renaissance—artists, activists, and communities are reclaiming its banks as public space, advocating for restoration projects that balance flood protection with ecological revival, and recognizing it as the spine that connects diverse neighborhoods from Frogtown to Downtown. The river carries both the trauma of environmental erasure and the promise of renewal, making it a powerful metaphor for Los Angeles itself: a place where concrete and nature, past and future, flow together in complex currents of change and possibility.
Sacred Ground
We recognize that the land we occupy today is the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Tongva, Tataviam, Serrano, Kizh, and Chumash peoples. We honor their elders, past, present, and emerging, for their continued stewardship of these lands, waters, and communities. As we gather and create here, we are grateful for the opportunity to learn, grow, and live on these sacred lands, and we support the elevation of Indigenous voices and cultures.
“The river was visible only through the veil of personal and family stories, constituting a fragment of social and architectural memory that we attended to on a daily basis to understand the identity of the city and its inhabitants—a deeply traumatized identity that has never been properly analyzed.”
Topography
Opening Questions
What brought you here today?
When you think of water in your life, what comes to mind first—comfort, challenge, or change?
What would you ask nature about carrying forward?
Memory Editing Questions
What personal, family story or cultural tradition feels heavy to carry right now?
What memory from this year deserves to flow downstream with gratitude for your renewal?
When you think of water what adjectives come to mind calm like a rain or stormy like an ocean?
Body & Nature Wisdom Questions
Where does the current call you?
What seasonal rhythm do you crave now?
In what new unscripted and organic ways you can suport your becoming and new directions?
Journal
Use the cotton canvas to journal your emotional topography, what to release and what to deposit. Share the meaning forms, colors and design will express on your embroidery.
rhythm release renewal forgetting remembering erasing recalling hiding editing intention memory care vision guidance downstream deposit banks carve remove channels peaks valleys depth grief joy birth death rising falling navigating flow cascade eddy topography rapids undercurrent confluence headwaters delta channel backwater floodplain streambed bankside turbulent serene rushing pooling babbling sediment deposition nourishing replenishing flooding receding tributary source meander spring wellspring torrent transmission preservation collective community gathering circle blessing honoring witnessing vulnerable authentic truth pride acceptance limitation revealing washing cleansing purifying dissolving softening tenderness compassion healing transformation becoming evolving changing seasons cycles tides currents prophecy future legacy offering surrender holding carrying forward choosing curating digesting embodied intuition knowing unknowing mystery wonder awe reverence silence listening mindfulness breath rest stillness creation destruction building breaking mending repair rebirth emergence diving shallow surface bottom depths heard unheard
Cross Stitch
Cross stitch is one of the world's oldest and most accessible embroidery techniques, created by making X-shaped stitches in a tiled pattern to form images and designs.
Choose 3 colors
Take a stabilizer swatch
Find a spot to sit
Thread your needle
Skip making a knot
Leave thread hagning to show roots
Finish the design of one color to start next
Leave all the threads hanging
As threads emerge from our collective stitching, we carry forward both the visible work and the invisible connections forged through shared making. This practice of memory editing through embroidery continues beyond today's gathering—each thread a choice, each stitch a small act of cultural prophecy, each release an offering to the flowing current of community resilience.
Events
Ready to dive deeper? Join our community of master artisans, cultural stewards, and creative practitioners exploring the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary life. Classes, intensives, and ceremonial gatherings across LA and online for artists, designers, crafters, illustrators, and makers of all backgrounds and levels. Our programs unite ancient wisdom with contemporary practice, cultivating living heritage through embodied craft, storytelling through making, communion with nature, cultural preservation, meditative practice, and the celebration of life's luminous beauty.
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