What are the opening hours?

Friday 5pm - 7pm Saturday 9am - 7pm Sunday 9am - 7pm

https://www.mariposacenterdenver.com/

The Accessible Artery, 4704 Harlan Street, Suite 200, Denver, CO (2026)

10/02/2026

Calling Denver metro area clinicians of all sorts that work with individuals who benefit from sensory supports!!! My brother and sister in law lovingly provided a beautiful space for the disability community in Denver for the last 5 years. They recently closed their doors and are now selling all the equipment. Check it out and please share widely!!
Sensory Gym and Office Equipment Sale!

We’re selling our sensory gym equipment, therapy items, MSE equipment, furniture, electronics, and more! Whether you’re a therapist, school, organization, or family, there are lots of great finds available from trusted brands and discounted!

📅 Please visit only during the hours posted on the flyer.

💳 Payment: Exact cash, Venmo, PayPal, or Zelle accepted. No holds without payment.

10/02/2026

I get to go to the art therapy conference this month with some help from Art Therapy - AATA! I was selected for their 2026 New Professional Scholarship, and I’m really grateful for the support.

I’m heading to Charlotte in a couple of weeks and have already spent quite a bit of time figuring out which sessions I want to attend. There are several focused on working with neurodivergent children and teens that I’m particularly excited about. I’m also looking forward to spending a few days with other people who get excited about art therapy!

Thank you to the American Art Therapy Association for helping make this possible. Charlotte, see you soon!

09/28/2026

What does it mean to be a culturally aware, identity-affirming therapist?

For me, it starts with understanding that I do not walk into the therapy room as a neutral person. I am a white therapist. I bring my own experiences, assumptions, privileges, blind spots, and cultural learning with me.

I practice cultural humility.

Cultural humility means I am responsible for understanding my own cultural position, staying curious about yours, noticing power and systems, and being aware of the assumptions I bring into the room so I can examine and address them.

I recognize intersectionality.

It also means recognizing intersectionality. Race and ethnicity are part of culture, but they exist alongside other identities and social locations. Family, community, language, religion, disability, neurodivergence, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic experience, and other parts of identity overlap and interact. Those intersections shape how people experience relationships, safety, belonging, stress, opportunity, and the world around them.

I honor and listen to the lived experiences of others as the expert in their own lives.

Cultural competence is not about memorizing facts about groups of people or believing I can become an expert in someone else’s culture. It means listening to people as the experts in their own lived experiences while continuing to build the awareness, knowledge, and skills I need to work thoughtfully across differences.

I question what gets treated as the default.

With children and families, that means questioning my own ideas about what behavior, communication, development, parenting, or family life are “supposed” to look like. I want to understand the values, relationships, experiences, and ways of making meaning that a family already brings with them rather than treating my own frame as the default.

I do not treat identity as something to minimize or correct.
Identity-affirming therapy means those identities are not something I am trying to minimize, correct, or make more comfortable for someone else. They are part of the person in front of me and part of the context I need to understand.
I stay curious about the meaning rather than assigning it.

As an art therapist, this also matters in how I approach images, symbols, materials, and creative choices. I cannot assume something means the same thing to another person that it means to me. The person who made the art remains the expert on their own experience.

I am always continuing to learn, and then to make changes when new information gives me a better way.

This is not something I get to check off as completed. It is an ongoing practice of listening, learning, self-reflection, accountability, curiosity, and repair. I am going to make mistakes. My responsibility is to acknowledge them, learn from them, and make a genuine effort to repair when I can.

Image descriptions:
Image 1: A wall displays several student self-portraits created on transparent sheets, showing a variety of figures, poses, clothing, colors, and backgrounds. A light blue band runs across the lower portion of the image with the text, “What does cultural humility look like in practice, for me?” The words “cultural humility” are highlighted in blue.
Image 2: A close-up of one student self-portrait shows a figure wearing a purple hooded jacket and shorts, standing with one arm raised in a hand gesture. Text alongside the portrait explains that these self-portraits were created by middle school students in one of my former art classrooms during a lesson inspired by Kehinde Wiley. It notes that students mixed their own skin tones and chose how to represent themselves through gesture, clothing, symbols, and background, and that the lesson continues to shape how I thinks about identity, representation, listening, and cultural humility.

09/24/2026

What does being trauma informed mean to me?

The phrase trauma informed gets thrown around a lot. It can become something workplaces, schools, and even mental health practitioners say they are without actually changing how people are treated. Performative.

For me, trauma informed care starts with understanding how people adapt to what they have lived through. Responses that developed around stress, danger, loss, or unpredictability often made sense for a reason, even if they are creating challenges now. I want to understand those responses in context and build from the strengths, relationships, and coping strategies that are already there.

With children, I am also thinking about development. A child may not have the words to explain what is happening inside them. Stress can show up through shutdown, perfectionism, aggression, clinginess, avoidance, a need for control, or other behavior that adults may find difficult. What looks like defiance or “bad behavior” can make a lot more sense when I consider what that child’s nervous system has learned to expect.

That changes how I work. I think about pacing, predictability, choice, connection, and whether a child actually feels safe enough for what I am asking of them. I do not need a child to tell me every detail of what happened for therapy to be useful. Safety and regulation come before asking someone to revisit a trauma story.

I am also looking beyond the individual. Systems matter. Relationships, culture, repeated stress, racism, bullying, neurodivergence, family experiences, and the systems around them can all shape how someone experiences safety.
So when a child is struggling, I am usually less interested in “How do I stop this behavior?” and more interested in “What might this behavior be communicating, and what does this person need from me right now?”

Image description: A smiling woman in a bright blue shirt takes a selfie outdoors in a wooded mountain landscape at sunset. Pine trees and a partly cloudy sky fill the background. A semi-transparent dark rectangle overlays the center-right of the image with white text reading, “What does Trauma Informed actually mean??”

09/21/2026

So what actually makes art therapy different from making art for art’s sake or taking an art class?

I’ve spent a lot of my life in all three spaces in a variety of capacities.

Making art for its own sake has its own inherent value, and the artist gets to decide what that value is. It can be shared or private, serious or playful, finished or unfinished. It can have a message, a goal, or none at all.

Art education has its own purpose. As an art teacher, my job was to help students experiment with materials, learn techniques, develop ideas, take creative risks, and understand people, cultures, history, and the world through art.

Art therapy is different. It is a mental health profession that uses artmaking and the creative process as part of psychotherapy. Art can offer another way to communicate, make meaning, or work with something that is hard to put into words.

The training matters too. An art therapist has graduate-level education and supervised clinical training in both art and mental health. A therapist can use art in a session, but that is not automatically the same thing as art therapy.

That matters in how I actually practice with the person in front of me. Art is not just an extra activity I sometimes add into therapy. It is one of the languages I am trained to work in. I think about what different materials make possible, how much structure or freedom they offer, and what might help someone communicate, play, slow down, or explore something in a different way.

So when I bring art into therapy, the materials, the process, and the choices around them are part of the clinical work.

About the images / image description: The “Art for Art’s Sake” slide shows a watercolor sketchbook and paint set outdoors. I made that painting on vacation simply because I wanted to paint, so for me it is an example of art for art’s sake. The “Art Education” slide shows students’ hands using paint and markers during a classroom color mixing lesson. The “Art Therapy” slide shows one of my own layered artworks with repeated handwritten marks across the canvas, created in a very different context as part of my reflective artmaking as an art therapist.

08/27/2026

Yayoi Kusama died on August 14 at 97, and I’ve been thinking about how much I loved teaching my students about her.

I told them that she lived in a psychiatric hospital, spoke openly about hallucinations and her mental health, and still went to her studio and made art every day. She took the hallucinations and obsessive imagery she had experienced since childhood and put them into her work, describing the process of making art as a way of coping with and finding relief from those experiences.

In an interview with curator Akira Tatehata, when he asked whether her work was a kind of art therapy, Kusama answered, “It’s a self-therapy.” Years later, she told The Guardian that living in the hospital made it possible for her to keep creating, saying, “this has saved my life.”

That was what I wanted my students to understand: art was not separate from Kusama’s mental health. It was one of the ways she lived with it.

A person can need significant mental health support and still have a huge, meaningful, creative life.

Kusama kept making art until the end of her life.

08/26/2026

What does being person-centered as a therapist mean to me?

Person-centered: The person in front of me is the expert on their own experience.

Person-centered means I am trying to know the whole person, not reduce them to a diagnosis, behavior, treatment goal, or presenting problem. I listen, I stay in relationship, I look for strengths, I respect autonomy, and I treat behavior as communication.

AND if I believe the whole person deserves dignity, autonomy, and to be understood on their own terms, then part of being person-centered means I also cannot treat neurotypicality or cisnormativity as the standard they are supposed to reach.

Neurodiversity-affirming: There is not one “right” way for a brain, body, or nervous system to work.

I do that without treating neurotypical behavior, communication, sensory needs, emotional expression, or ways of relating as the default standard you need to reach. So I am not measuring progress by how neurotypical someone can appear.

Gender-affirming: There is not one “right” way to experience, express, or understand gender.

I affirm the name, pronouns, identity, and language someone uses for themselves, make room for exploration without assuming there is one right outcome or timeline, and follow their lead about whether and how gender is part of the work.

In short, I meet people where they are, honor who they tell me they are, and build therapy around the person in front of me rather than asking them to fit someone else’s idea of who they should be.

The goal is to understand the person in front of me and create therapy that works with who they are.

The person should not have to fit the therapy. The therapy should fit the person.

08/20/2026

I’ve been feeling really grateful for the community helping me build my therapy room.

More than once, I’ve arranged to buy toys through Marketplace, mentioned they’re for play therapy, and heard, “Don’t worry about paying. Just come get them.”

And then they tell me about the child therapist who made a difference for their family.

There’s something really special about people giving to my therapy room because they know firsthand what that kind of space can mean for a child. 💙

08/20/2026

For the second year in a row, I’m not heading back into a classroom. No back-to-school prep, no professional development, no start-of-year chaos.

After starting a school year every year since 1990, first as a student and then as a teacher, that still feels wild.

People start talking about school starting and I can feel my body tense up. Those Sunday scaries that somehow lasted all of August start creeping back in. Then I remember: I’m not doing that anymore. My whole body relaxes.

Instead, this August I officially started my private practice as an art therapist, and today I met with my first new client. There’s a lot I don’t know about what comes next, but for the first time in a very long time, that uncertainty comes with hope.

I keep thinking about a memory from my first year at the elementary school that would become my teaching home. I was standing at the top of the stairs of my basement art room, looking out over it and thinking, Wow. This is my classroom. I’m building something here. I knew hundreds of kids would eventually come through those doors, and I would have the incredible privilege of knowing them, supporting them, and being part of their lives.

I’m starting to feel that again.

So much of what I loved about teaching came with me into becoming a therapist: creativity, relationships, working with kids, and the privilege of being trusted with a small part of their lives.

The paintings here were made by some of my former elementary art students. The red building was our school, the place that became my teaching home. The landscape is depicting the city of Madison Wisconsin. And the photo is a photo one of my students took in my classroom. It feels fitting that pieces of what we built together are still with me as I build what comes next.

Career changes are scary, especially when you’ve spent years building a life around what you’re leaving. I couldn’t see this version of my life for a long time.

Starting over, it turns out, doesn’t always mean starting from scratch.

08/11/2026

Who am I as a therapist?

There are a lot of words therapists use to describe how we work, and some get used so often that it can be hard to know what they actually mean.

Five ideas are especially important to how I approach therapy:

• Person-centered
• Art therapy
• Neurodiversity and gender-affirming
• Trauma-informed
• Culturally responsive and identity-affirming

But I don't want these to just be labels on a graphic or buzzwords in a bio. These are big, sometimes loaded terms, and simply saying them doesn't tell you much about what therapy with me is actually like.

Over my next few posts, I'm going to dig into what each one means to me, how it shapes the way I understand people, and what it actually looks like in the therapy room.
Because what matters isn't just what we call our approach. It's how we practice it.

Image description: A light blue graphic titled “Meet the Therapist.” An illustrated image of Kati wearing a paint-covered apron is surrounded by five bubbles reading: Person Centered, Art Therapy, Neurodiversity & Gender Affirming, Trauma Informed, and Culturally Responsive & Identity Affirming.

The Accessible Artery

10/02/2026

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