About Our Community
Yoni Mudra Art Gallery (YMAG) is a yoni-centered art and community hub promoting mental and physical wellness through yoga, dance, meditation, and somatic and spiritual healing.
YMAG hosts regular in-house and community-led art workshops, public lectures, and intimate conversations. Its art gallery and gift shop are dedicated entirely to the yoni anatomy, which, in Sanskrit, means vulva and sacred womb space.
Public lectures and conversations focus on yoni-centered topics including bodily autonomy, sexual autonomy, mental, physical, and sexual health, and embodied self-expression and empowerment. Yoni Mudra Art Gallery is an inclusive space that invites conversations from all people who associate the yoni with their lived experience or who want to understand the yoni and its power better.
Raison D'Etre
The Yoni Mudra Art Gallery's central mandate is to treat the curation of vulva and vagina-centered art with the highest level of reverence and sophistication, to be a go-to location in Canada and internationally for serious art buyers of this art genre, and to act as a community center for individuals and collectives of any gender seeking to better connect with, understand, and celebrate yoni embodiment and the divine feminine.
The Gallery seeks to act as a counter-balance to profound social imbalances in our current world. We live in a highly patriarchal and masculinist society whose architecture and roads are defined by hard lines and surfaces, work and business environments marked by competition, linear thinking, projected ambition and action, and a ‘survival of the fittest' work ethic. This is the energy of the masculine, which serves many important functions in our world, but has come to dominate and undervalue the presence of feminine energy which involves softer lines and contours, a greater desire for receiving, nurturing, slowing down, and collaborating. Women widely report feeling that they must be masculine in order to survive in a masculine world which often leaves them feeling exhausted, emotionally dysregulated, and disconnected from themselves.
We have specially curated the spaces in the Yoni Mudra Art Gallery to embody divine feminine energy which our customers and visitors, women and men, often describe as “calm”, “peaceful”, “grounding”, “light”, and “healing”. The soft lines of the yoni art, the vulva-inspired shelving and décor, the crystal energy, the water trickling in our fountain, and the pink and red furniture and upholstery help women and vulva-owners feel validated and emotionally disarmed. We are seeking to build the centrifugal forces of our art programming beyond the experience of sex, intimacy, and reproduction, to value the vulva for its own sake.
As it pertains to their vulvas and vaginas, women and vulva owners writ large are stuck between the discourse of ‘not good enough' where their natural forms are considered problematic and often denigrated for their folds and fluids, and voraciously consumed by the discourses and imagery of the ubiquitous pornography industry which values their embodied existences only as far as they can be objectified and commodified for mostly male gratification. In the latter case, much of that imagery is monolithic, white privileging, digitally altered, or involving women who have undergone surgery to fit some imagined, ideal aesthetic of folds, tidiness, and color. This corrosive industry has had a terminal impact on the psyches of women who manage existential feelings of shame and inadequacy that impair their sense of self-esteem and self-worth. This industry also affects the psyches of men who are groomed to be monetary receptacles siphoned for soulless corporate profit and consumers of never-ending and never-satiating content that ultimately leaves them angry, depressed, and in need of significant psychological rewiring. The trickle-down effect of these dynamics into relationship and family interactions has profoundly negative society-wide social and financial consequences.
We firmly adhere to the view that public education and art-centered advocacy surrounding the vulva and vagina, opening up opportunities for our local community and visitors to learn about the embodied experience of living with a vulva and vagina, help to heal the wounded feminine and help to nurture healing in the wounded masculine. Rejecting these negative dynamics, the social fragmentation and gender disharmony as a fait accompli (necessary fact), this project is much bigger than vulva art curation and wellness programming because it seeks to ground and strengthen the connections between men and women and provide a venue for honest conversations, re-evaluations, and social healing.
In 2016, I travelled to Kenya to conduct academic field work and met young Kenyan-Somali women activists who were trying to change the minds of their elders on the practice of female genital mutilation/ cutting (FGM/C). The Somali community has a 98% prevalence rate for FGM/C and usually conducts the most extreme form of this practice, infibulation. During a second trip to Kenya that year, I also met a survivor, Maryan Sheikh, who was running for political office in Northern Kenya. We struck up a friendship and seven years ago, I asked her to collaborate with me on an album against FGM. I later applied and was awarded Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts grants for the project. After I got the grants, I had money to bring on more artists.
There is currently twelve of us, a well-known rapper from the Gambia who has won awards for her music activism in support of gender-equality, Awa Femcee Bling, a rapper from Nigeria who is a tour de force poet, Oyereyi, Maryan herself who completed a track telling her story, a vocalist and composer from Malaysia, Ashikin Anwar, a rapper from Georgia in the US, Cole Mize, and amazing music producers from Gambia, Nigeria, UK, US, and Canada. The album is called, 'Budding Orchid Apartheid' and was globally distributed in May 2025. The orchid is the flower of the vulva. The album addresses FGM, but also defiantly celebrates women's sexuality. The album includes rap, singing, and spoken word backed by soul music. The primary reason that FGM is practiced is to control women's sexual experiences and to discipline women to cultural mores.
The first-hand accounts of this practice are utterly harrowing. 11,000 girls per day are cut across the world in 32 countries. There are over 230 million women and girls living today who have undergone cutting in some form. This happens in Canada, and for Canadian girls during the summer when they are taken to their home countries to be cut. My work on this project has galvanized my interest in protecting and honoring the vulva. Four years ago, I started making and selling abstract vulva art. Through my visual art, I began to build friendships with other vulva artists.
Within this community, there are several well-known and well-respected artists. Inspired by a fellow artist from Australia, Katie Lloyd, I decided last summer to open a bricks and mortar art gallery dedicated entirely to the vulva. Women across the world widely report feeling shame and inadequacy about their vulvas. One of the central objectives of this space is to help us, as a society, move away from the monolithic forms presented by pornography, and the ubiquity of the male-gaze that defines for women what is desirable and acceptable, and to normalize the diversity of women's vulvas. I do think that we are slowly getting ready to have these conversations. Most of the vulva art that will be exhibited is made by women artists, some is anatomical, but mostly abstract, and mostly presented without a connection to a body. It is important to me that given the ubiquity of pornography that the gallery does not recreate those visual representations.
In addition to original and print art, the gift shop has vulva-inspired jewelry, soap, candles, crystals, decorations, and pottery. Our community space can be booked for activities such as yoga, dance, meditation, activism, breast-feeding, etc, and our fully renovated basement can be booked by art teachers to run workshops for modalities such as stained glass, pottery, macramé, painting, etc.
This will be an inclusive space. The story of this gallery started with #FGM advocacy, but there is space for anyone living with a vulva in this world to be centered and heard.
Melissa Finn
Background: Melissa Finn is the Founder and Curator of one of the only bricks and mortar art galleries in the world permanently dedicated to the vulva/ yoni, Yoni Mudra Art Gallery in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Prior to opening the Gallery, Melissa worked as a researcher of transnational activism, youth studies, citizenship, militarism, and feminist labor and entrepreneurship studies at the University of Waterloo and was a sessional instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Founder's Story
Our Team
Behind Yoni Mudra Art Gallery is a passionate collective of artists, visionaries, and community builders dedicated to creating spaces of healing, creativity, and connection. Each member brings their unique expertise and heart-centred purpose to curate soulful experiences. Get to know the people who make the magic happen.
Gallery & Cafe
In-House Practitioners
Email: melissa@yonigallery.ca
Phone: (226) 977-3416