A night of music, art, and community
We’re so grateful for community-wide support for affordable, accessible art & design programming! About 85% of our budget is funded by individual donors and family foundations, and our Annual Fall Benefit supplies vital operating funds. Thank you to everyone who joined us this year, and to our table hosts, musicians, speakers, and Student Advisory Council members who helped make the evening beautiful. Thank you to all who helped us reach our goal of $40,000 through donations, sponsorships, sales, and pledges!
Highlights of the night included:
- Artful food by Farmhouse Deli
- One-of-a-kind franken-stuffies on our tables, designed and sewn by our SAC
- Table runners, hand-dyed with botanical dyes at our SAC Fall Retreat
- Music by members of Holland High Orchestra
- Original music by Miranda Craig, sung by Miranda, Ayanna, and Lemmi
- Video interviews (by Jack Burk) with 3 of our recent alumni who received full funding or nearly-full funding for higher education
- Encouraging thoughts and reflections by Jaer Medina, Abbie Lopez, and our Creativity in Leadership Award recipient, Kai Dirkse
- Collaborative character design at our tables, as we sought to personify our emotions so as to better tend to them and to one another
Words from our Executive Director:
In gathering together, eating at the same table with others who may not have the same experiences and perspectives as us, in listening and sharing our stories, we are participating in an act of hope and vulnerability, during a time that feels very uncertain and insecure for many.
I know I’m not the only one here who felt that they had the wind knocked out of them last week, with the results of the election. I was at a loss for words.
I believe that language is sacred and powerful. I come from a faith tradition that believes that all things in heaven and earth were created by being spoken into existence. So, I think we ought to listen well and take people’s words and intentions seriously, and it grieves me that we are electing and appointing leaders to the highest offices in our country who joke about authoritarianism and dictatorship, who normalize the use derogatory, inflammatory, and dehumanizing language in describing fellow human beings.
We cannot dismiss the fact that such language affects lives. In just one week since the election, here in Michigan, we’ve seen a group of people waving Nazi flags and saying heil Hitler, heil Trump, in front of a theater during a live production of Anne Frank. In our own community and throughout the US, black and brown students received texts informing them that they must report for duty as slaves. And while I don’t want to dwell on darkness, we must acknowledge that one of the stated goals of the incoming administration is the mass deportation of undocumented people, and this will most definitely affect families in our community.
There is an impulse, in times of grief and shock, when such strong divisions exist in the world, an impulse to cut off, erect walls, to protect our own belief systems by shutting out opposing ones. But I ask you to resist. We need to engage in civil discourse; we need to approach others with humility, curiosity, and respect. We need to listen, share and create side by side. These are values that guide our classes and workshops and it’s a really beautiful thing to see students learning from and working alongside those they might disagree with.
Toni Morrison writes:
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, and no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
We – as artists, designers, engineers, makers, builders – we bind up and mend, we pull apart and reassemble, we look deeply at what is amiss, what is missing, what is dismissed, and call into being new possibilities.
I’ve been rereading CS Lewis’ Last Battle this week, the final installment of his Narnia series. Written in1956 just after WWII, CS Lewis was intimately familiar with social and political upheaval in the shadow of facism. In the Last Battle, the final king of Narnia, King Tirian is bound to a tree, facing death, while Narnia falls prey to the schemes of a power-hungry ape. In great despair, he calls to Aslan, the great Lion to come to his aid and rescue Narnia. When Aslan doesn’t appear, he calls out to the children beyond the world’s end, and they come. It is the children (who are magically transported to Narnia by the hand of Aslan) who have great power and agency to affect change in Lewis’ novels.
And likewise, we have among us and before us a bright future, in these young artists and creatives. They are strong, curious, thoughtful, kind, humble, and incredibly hard working. Their pens and paintbrushes are mighty swords, and I am so grateful to be on this journey beside them!
~ Emily Christensen
Thank you to our event sponsors!
Jack & Kailie Burk
