Tickets
General Ticket: $25
Member Ticket: $20
Dear Grownups, it’s time to find joy in bleak times! Welcome designer, educator, and play expert Cas Holman as she shares insight from her newly released book Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity. Holman is joined in conversation by the visual artist Liz Collins, whose colorful, textile-based works and installations often reflect notions of play and connectivity. Following the discussion this dynamic duo invite you to a spirited Q&A as well as a book singing.
Drawing on psychology, history, art, and design, Playful makes a powerful case for the vital necessity of play in our lives and its essential importance to adults’ mental health, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Playful weaves together inspiring stories and eye-opening research into the emerging science of play. It shows us how adopting a playful mindset is crucial in helping us overcome fear of failure, embrace new ways of thinking, destress, reset, connect with one another, and grow our creativity at every stage of our lives. Come play!
Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity by Cas Holman with Lydia Denworth will be released by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on October 21, 2025.
CAS HOLMAN
Photo by Jenna Jones
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Cas Holman is the founder and chief designer of the toy company
Heroes Will Rise and a former professor of Industrial Design at RISD. Cas travels the globe
speaking about playful learning, the design process, and the value of play in all aspects of life. She has shared her perspective in workshops and seminars with teams at Google, Nike, LEGO Foundation, Disney Imagineering, and art museums around the world. Some of her designs include toys like Rigamajig and Geemo, as well as play experiences at the High Line and the Liberty Science Center. Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity by Cas Holman with Lydia Denworth will be released by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, on October 21, 2025. Cas lives in Brooklyn and designs from her studio in the Catskills, New York.
LIZ COLLINS
photo © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023
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Liz Collins is an artist based in New York City known for pushing the boundaries of art and design in innovative and experimental work in fabric, yarn, and other materials and techniques associated with textile media. Whether in the form of textile, painting, drawing or installation, Collins frequently explores the dichotomy of structure and entropy—qualities inherent to textile that speak to the fissures present in broader architectural, political, and social structures.
Collins’ work has recently been on view in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, and in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, curated by Lynne Cooke and presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In July 2025, Collins opened a mid-career retrospective at the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, with an accompanying monograph published by Hirmer.