Hiro Lerman
Link: https://fb.watch/4tPbzucaNx/
He [Hiro] picked this to share and he wanted to tell everybody that art is very important to him because he can’t communicate very well and he doesn’t understand a lot and he can’t understand words, but he can understand art. And so he wanted to share this with you.
Good Afternoon, my name is Lex Lumiere, I am a #CitizenArtist for the United States Department of Arts and Culture (#USDAC). Due to the #WinterStorm causing electrical outages and other inconveniences in #Texas, we had to adapt our #StoryCircle to a more intimate interview style for the 'Peoples State Of The Union 2021' address. Tonight you will meet my friend Alda, a immigrant from Cambodia and gifted 'Holistic Medicine Healer' as we discuss our vision of #America and Democracy 100 years from now in light of #CoVid19; what do our communities look like moving forward?
Sandi Lerman
LINK: https://fb.watch/4tP2clhdct/
I recently joined a course called 40 Days to Transformation, just a course online, a Zoom course. I really wasn’t sure what it was going to be, but it ended up really being a course about connecting to your heart and connecting to who you are as a person. It was all about meditation and just finding that center and really having a daily practice, which you know, I’ve done in the past, but this was just really, a really powerful course. And all the people in the course, I just felt very connected to everybody there, and I started this practice of doing daily meditation.
And it’s been really, really helpful to reduce anxiety, because this has been such an anxiety-producing year I think for all of us. It was such a creative, and it involved the arts, some of you may have heard of him, his name is Justin Michael Williams. Amazing artist, he’s a recording artist, but he’s also a meditation teacher, inspirational speaker, but he’s very involved in social justice work and a lot of other things. But just the way he brought music into it, we did a really cool session at the end where we wrote a song as a group. We wrote a song together, it was a creative, collaborative songwriting session and it only took about fifteen minutes for us to write a song together. Just really creative ways of using Zoom to connect with using the arts and using meditation and it was very inspiring. So that’s my story about creative connections during this time.
MICHELLE MCPHEETERS
LINK: https://fb.watch/4tOYvqbt3p/
So when the pandemic started, right at the very beginning, my mother-in-law, Melissa’s Nana, she was playing oh Bunco and a dice game a couple times a week with friends of hers. And then once the pandemic hit, we had to, you know, we told her you can’t do that anymore, you guys have to stay apart from each other. So she understood and so, I think it was Melissa that decided that we could play the dice game by phone just doing a conference call. So we started that, which was really fun, it was just family that got together on the phone but was able to connect. And then Melissa had the great idea to get her a tablet.
Now, remember, she’s 92 years old and doesn’t have a computer. So Nana wasn’t real happy about the idea but she said yeah we’ll try it. So we got her the tablet and a hotspot and I got it all set up for her, taught her how to use it. And she was so excited to be able to see everybody’s face when we were finally able to connect. Because it had been, you know, she knew it was going to be a long time before we’d see each other again. We also, on Thanksgiving I went over and we connected with family and at Christmastime she went a little crazy, pretty much the first time she ever ordered online I helped her with it, but getting Christmas presents for everyone, it was quite fun.
I just can’t imagine going through this time without being able to connect with people like this. So if this had happened ten years ago, I think myself and probably a lot of people would be having a harder time. Just having the technology to connect and be able to see each other even though we can’t be with each other.
It was an honor to be a part of the US Dept of Arts and Culture today by speaking on a live interview and being asked to write a poem of what my vision/hope for America would be for a 100 years from now. With a few references to other poets and our team, I wanted to share this with you too to get you thinking of what you want your legacies to build towards.
Thy will be done in 2121
Time to rise again
We’ve done this before
Our past set us free
speak truth, Forever more
A Hundred years have passed now
We are a different breed
Our grandparents showed us how
To uphold our morals and creed
In Kindness, Love, Compassion
Respect, Honor, Unity,
Massive Action , Leadership
Mixed with inclusivity
Courage in our hearts
We do not know fear
Strength flows in our minds
Our breakthroughs so near
Peace and health consume our land
Our visions can not fail
From Heaven to Capitol Hill
Ethics will always prevail
If we should die today
Let them know it’s safe
What they almost lost too fast
We put in its right place
If anyone should wonder
how we got it done
Learn from their past mistakes
Reset your story, day one.
- Elva Trevino
Kevin McPheeters
Link: https://fb.watch/4tOTX4Bzu-/
So relating this to COVID-19 is part of the challenge for me here. At the beginning of this pandemic, it reminded me and other people in one of my communities, because I feel like I belong to a few communities, but my other gay friends, this reminded us of the AIDS epidemic when it first began. There was a lot of misinformation, a lot of disinformation, and a lot of struggling just trying to figure out just what this was going to mean for our lives.
There was a lot of bias and, I think generally, kind of...hateful disagreement in the midst of this. When I was in San Francisco living during the AIDS pandemic that was begun in the early 80s there, one of the most powerful things that I saw was the AIDS quilt being created as kind of an outlet for people’s grief. It is one of, to this day, one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. To see the construction of different quilts, there was a spot on Market Street in San Francisco that was like an art center to construct. They had fabric, they had sewing machines, they had people directing people to help them create the quilts. It was an amazing outlet for people to remember people who had died.
And to see that laid out, ultimately, on the Mall in Washington DC, a number of years ago now, probably twenty years ago, was the last time I think it was fully laid out. Was one of the most remarkable, and moving, things that I have seen. I am hopeful in some ways that there is some kind of outcome to this same pandemic that we are in, that there will be some kind of outlet.
You know, we’ve got half a million people at least affected here; well, more than half a million affected, half a million who have died. So remembering them in some way, artistically, in some way I think, is a really powerful and moving thing.
MELISSA MCPHEETERS
Link: https://fb.watch/4tOQsIWWP2/
Once upon a time, I was five years old. I was in kindergarten and we were doing a worksheet learning about the letter B. And to do the learning about the letter B, one of the worksheets was a piece of paper that had a picture of a bee on it, like a buzz buzz bee, and the assignment was to color the bee yellow. And my peers and I at my table, we were very very concerned about coloring every piece of that bee yellow, just as we had been directed. A few minutes had gone by and the teacher came over because she had expected that we had moved on into the packet, farther than coloring this bee. I don’t remember much, but I just remember that she was upset, she was very disappointed that we were still coloring the bee, and that we had taken her directions so seriously.
I don’t know that that was when my sort of challenge with art started, but my mom would do my coloring assignments that were homework for me, after that point because I was just so opposed to, opposed to doing coloring.
A few years went by and my grandma would take my brother and I to art classes. They were not something I was interested in, I did not look forward to them. It didn’t feel like it came easily to me and so it was just really hard. It came easily to my brother, it came easily to my dad, to my grandfather; they were all artists, are artists. I just did not have a very good relationship with art for a very long time.
So then fast forward to last year, around April-May 2020, and I was working from home. We were amidst the pandemic. A good friend of mine who is an artist, has been an artist since I’ve known him, he encouraged me to just try it. To just try to do some art. And I wasn’t very intrigued, but with his encouragement I finally decided “what could be the worst thing that happens?” I do it and I’m bad at it, and I just confirm what I already knew and that’s okay.
So I didn’t really tell anybody that I was going on this mission to do some art, I think my parents knew and so I got some canvases, I got some paint, and set up some tv trays, and put on Bob Ross. And that was when I painted my first painting!
And I realized that I love art. It has just been really interesting to go from this place where I was not interested in it. I would color with my grandmother, as an adult. But to actually do painting and decide what I want to put on the canvas and what I’d like to see it become and be able to do that has been very empowering. It’s also been something that has been very life-giving for me. And that’s something I’m really trying to focus on in my life is the things that are life-giving and rewarding to me.
So now I have a much more positive relationship with art and it’s just something that means a whole whole lot to me in a way that it didn’t before.
Link: https://fb.watch/4tOIFSI4oL/
Happy March 🌸 As we are celebrating almost a full year in quarantine, Dancewave's Youth Leadership Council wants to continue to advocate for the importance of arts and culture!
Meet fellow YLC member as they share a story about when and why the arts played an essential role in their life! #PSOTU2021 #PeoplesStateOfTheUnion2021 #ArtsAreEssential #ArtKeepsUsSafe #dancemakeswaves
Check out the story in the link above!
