Jessica Lynn Whitbread’s practice merges art with feminist theory and community organizing in an effort to encourage critical dialogue and establish networks of support. As a queer woman living with HIV, Whitbread often uses her own body in her work, engaging with audiences in more personal and intimate ways that challenge heteronormative relationships and conceptions of the body. Curator Lauren Fournier describes Whitbread’s Tea Time: Mapping Informal Networks of Women Living with HIV as a “transnational, community-building, cross-media project that functions as an interpersonal space for women with HIV to network, self-advocate, and share their experiences.” The project includes a tea party with the artist, where each attendant exchanges a teacup and a letter they wrote for a teacup and letter brought by another visitor. For its iteration at the Blackwood Gallery, Whitbread’s tea party was hosted on World AIDS Day. The project carved out a space for intimacy, care, and exchange within the institutional confines of the university campus, creating a space for women with HIV to share their stories and connect with each other. The participatory nature of the project, namely the exchange of teacups and letters, further creates a more tangible network of care and communal knowledge by and for women living with HIV. In this way, these objects become tools for community building and organizing, making the Whitbread’s project “less a static sculpture and more an active trace of both past and present tea parties.”