Rooted in the idea of collective healing bringing together portraiture, personal mantras, and over 300 self-authored stories created in collaboration with women and gender-expansive voices from around the world. Each work carries something deeply personal, yet when experienced together, they form a shared space for reflection, connection, and understanding.
At the opening, Nadya Layla Rasheed, Ambassador to Palestine in Mexico, introduced the project and spoke about the importance of peace and the role that human rights initiatives like the Healing Words Project play in today’s world. Her words added another layer of meaning to the exhibition, reminding us how vital it is to create platforms where stories can be told and truly heard.
More than anything, this exhibition is an invitation to listen, to feel, and to recognize parts of ourselves in the experiences of others.
Healing Words Project
It begins with people. Faces, bodies, words, offered gently, sometimes bravely, into view. Every portrait carries a presence, a lived moment, a quiet or defiant act of courage. This work has never belonged to one artist alone; it lives with those who chose to step forward and be seen, to trust that their stories and their healing matter. The Healing Words Project first took shape in Mexico in 2020, during Un Día Sin Mujeres, as a response to gender-based violence.
In those early moments, women wrote words directly onto their bodies as marks of resistance, visibility, and solidarity. But something shifted. The images opened into conversations, the conversations into stories, and slowly, into something softer and deeper, healing. What started in protest began to move toward transformation.
Over time, the work has travelled across borders, across cultures, into different communities and contexts, gathering more than 2,000 women and gender-expansive voices along the way. At its center is a quiet but persistent belief that language shapes how we carry ourselves and how we understand our experiences. Here, words are not decoration. They are practice. Spoken, written, witnessed.
They loosen what has been held too tightly and make space for something new to take form. Each piece is created through trust and consent, shaped by the person within it. As you move through, it does not only ask to be viewed, it asks something back. To listen closely. To notice what words you live with. To consider what might shift if you chose them differently. Because when one person speaks with honesty, it rarely ends there. It moves, it reaches, it echoes.
Healing Words Project – ‘When one voice heals, it echoes’
Exhibition Dates: March 6th – June 6th, 2026
Museo de arte Querétaro
Calle Ignacio Allende sur 14, Centro Historico, 76000 Queretaro City, Mexico
About ‘When one voice heals, it echoes’
Bringing together years of multidisciplinary work for the first time, this museum exhibition unfolds as a powerful retrospective where painting, drawing, and photography meet lived experience. Each piece is accompanied by a QR code that opens directly into the participant’s story, shared in both English and Spanish through the Healing Words Project and Kate Van Doren platforms, allowing the work to extend beyond what is seen and into what is felt and heard.
The result is an immersive encounter where visual and written language intertwine, and where the viewer is invited not just to observe, but to connect with the voices behind each image. It becomes clear, moving through the space, that the work does not end at the frame, it continues in every story carried forward, reminding us that “WHEN ONE VOICE HEALS, IT ECHOES.”
Kate Van Doren //
Kate Van Doren (American, b. 1978) is a contemporary artist whose realist paintings, drawings, and photography explore the emotional depth of the human condition. Her work holds both strength and vulnerability, shaped by what she calls Empathic Realism, an approach grounded in presence, connection, and care.
Rather than defining her subjects, she creates space for them to be seen and heard, translating their inner worlds into visual form. Influenced by her background as a registered art therapist, her practice brings together empathy, psychology, and collaboration, allowing personal stories to emerge through both image and language.
This approach is at the heart of the Healing Words Project, the global initiative she founded, where over 2,000 women and gender-expansive participants have shared their stories through portraiture and self-authored mantras. Each work is created through trust and consent, centering lived experience with dignity. Her work has been shown across the United States, Europe, and Mexico, and is held in collections worldwide, including the Peregrine Collection sent to the moon. Based in San Miguel de Allende, she continues to balance her studio practice with ongoing community and art therapy work.
