Unveiling Hope Quilts

Behind the Artwork

A Healing in Arts Collaboration with Girls Court

Hope Quilts project on display

Quilting has been part of American history for many generations. Quilts carry narratives, family connections, and lifelong traditions, but they also reflect feelings of love and originality. This Healing in Arts project, with artists Pamela Alderman and Kameko Madere, draws inspiration from the quilt patterns passed down from generation to generation through the women quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and honors their art. The work encourages participants to see all people like individual quilts, sewn together by the fabric of hopes and dreams.

Hope Quilts project workshop
Hope Quilts project workshop

Our History with Girls Court

Each year, since we first connected at the Let Go ArtPrize exhibit in 2017, Healing in Arts has facilitated an art workshop with the incarcerated teens at Girls Court and Judge Patricia Gardner. This year California artist Kameko Madere, one of my fellow graduate students at Azusa Pacific University and a Healing in Arts board member, created the concept for this particular project. We held the first Hope Quilt workshop in Michigan. As we passed out the art supplies—fabric, wooden panels, and glue—to the teens, the probation officers, and the judge, one of the girls said, “You give us so many options to choose from.” At Healing in Arts, we try to provide ample art materials to make each participant feel valued and included. We want to communicate that we care about each person through our words, our actions, our attitudes, and the art making process.

Hope Quilts project workshop
Hope Quilts project workshop

After a fun evening of creating the Hope Quilts project, a few of the teens gave this feedback:

The art project relieved any stress I’d had.
It was something positive I got to do and be creative.
Being able to be creative in a different way than normal.
It was fun.

Something to Think About

How can you use your passion and talents to inspire or encourage others?

 

Healing in ArtsHealing in Arts creates art experiences to build hope, care, and connection in under-served communities, including special needs kids, incarcerated teens, sex trafficked youth, First Nations people in Canada, veterans with PTSD, and the elderly.

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Healing in Arts Team Spotlight: Meet Aubrey Lim

General

Aubrey Lim

My first encounter with Healing in Arts was in 2013, when I folded a couple of hundred paper cranes as a high school student for the Wing and a Prayer exhibit. When I heard stories about the thousands of people who wrote wishes and prayers and added them to the art exhibit, I thought it sounded like such a beautiful experience. Being creative and honest are two things that can feel scary but also be life-giving. So, I felt impressed with an art exhibit that moved people to share their honesty and creativity.

Last year, I got to experience the Healing in Arts’ Let Go exhibit in person. While standing in front of the large panels of blue and white wavelike fabric collage in the Kent County Courthouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I teared up. The artist’s statement reminded me that we all carry resentment, shame, guilt, and sadness. The work prompted an opportunity for visitors to let go of something specific. The let-go notes from children and adults created a sense of communal courage, and I made a mental note of my own. What a sense of relief as I imagined releasing my issue and allowing it to wash away in the tide.

This experience helped me understand how art acts as a catalyst for healing and growth. I volunteer on the Healing in Arts board as the treasurer and assist with the administrative behind-the-scenes. I live in San Francisco and work as the operations manager for a fine-dining restaurant.

Meet Pamela

Behind the Artwork8 Comments

Voices project 2022

Pamela started painting as a ten-year-old, when her mom enrolled her in an adult art class. Her dad taught her how to draw on paper napkins after dinner. Decades later, her artwork expanded from individual paintings to include participatory art with a focus on healing and resilience. Drawing on Pamela’s own journey towards restoration, following the breakdown of her parent’s marriage during her childhood, these responsive projects help foster community through art, creativity, and storytelling.

After raising four children, Pamela reached one of her life goals and completed her master of fine arts degree from Azusa Pacific University, forty years after her undergraduate work. Overflowing with creativity, innovation, and passion, Pamela hopes to complete another twenty years of work before retiring.

Pamela Alderman Art

Hometown Hero painting in progress

In 2006, Pamela launched her art business out of her garage studio. After several years of hard lessons and failure, Pamela closed her online store with art prints and art cards. She pivoted to accepting a limited amount of commission work each year and creating interactive community-based work. With this change, Pamela Alderman Art took off. Year after year, while exhibiting her work at ArtPrize, a large art event held in Grand Rapids, Michigan, her audience kept growing. People felt drawn to her hands-on projects.

Her first interactive public installation, called Braving the Wind, focused on cancer survivors. For the project, she prepared 1,500 interactive note cards for audience members to write notes. Those supplies lasted for three days. Over the next two weeks, her husband and mom scrambled to buy more note cards. By the end of the event, 20,000 individuals had written note cards to remember their loved ones battling cancer.

A couple years later, more than 20,000 people wrote wishes and prayers for children in need at Wing and a Prayer. Each year her interactive installations, based on sex-trafficking, bullying, or letting go, continued to expand with 50,000, then 65,000, then 70,000 participants. But Pamela openly shares the secret behind her work at her public speaking events: “My prayer team and I circle the location for my next art project every month for a year leading up to the following exhibit. My business model isn’t complicated. Every year I follow the same steps of prayer, hard work, and integrity. God continues to grant success and the audience continues to grow.”

“It’s been a huge honor showing my work in Phoenix during the 2015 Super Bowl and at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,” says Pamela. “But I’m just as content creating a unique fine art piece with a few incarcerated teens from Girls Court or the profoundly handicapped children at Pine Grove Learning Center. Whether my audience is 70,000 people or seven individuals, I put the same intense effort into each art piece. I love to be around other people, and I love to create art. With a combination of the two, I love my work!” For her next goal, Pamela hopes to write a book about her healing art journey.

Healing in Arts

Youth for Christ Stories project

In 2016, ten years after starting her art business, Pamela’s mentor urged her to start a nonprofit. For the first several years, a local business man, Marvin Veltkamp, generously hosted what Pamela calls, “Healing in Arts,” under Libertas Foundation. Last fall, seven years later, Healing in Arts became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Pamela describes it, “Along with my creative team, I create interactive collaborative art projects.” This work fosters creative care and resilience with community groups, including cancer patients, Congolese refugees, children on the autism spectrum, sex trafficking survivors, and veterans struggling with PTSD.

These various interactive projects cultivate a sense of community by demonstrating the value of each and every person. Participants respond to the transformative power within these hands-on projects while exploring relevant topics and how to be part of the solution. Pamela says, “Because of our donor support, many experience release and gain a sense of new beginnings in our collective journey towards growth. Amazingly, my childhood trauma ended up fueling this volunteer creative work years later.” Art serves as the catalyst for personal and corporate healing.

It is Pamela’s dream to put another fifteen years of sweat equity into Healing in Arts before handing it off to younger women of color. Currently, Healing in Arts board members form a diverse creative group that crosses boundary lines of skin color and generations and locations with a single mission of empowering people and inspiring hope through collaborative art.

Butterfly Kaleidoscope project

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Destressing

Behind the Artwork

Let Go - Community Wellness project for Kent County Victim Witness program

With life’s ebb and flow, we sometimes may feel like we’re drowning in the sea of disappointment, defeat, or despair. But if we are willing to accept change, transformation can occur. Once we muster the courage to let go of whatever is dragging us under, a lifeline of hope reaches back through the breakers to keep us afloat.

Let Go - Community Wellness project for Kent County Victim Witness program Let Go, a collaborative project with the Kent County Prosecutor’s Victim Witness Unit, promotes wellness and resiliency. During the workshop, individuals wrote Let Go notes as a way to release anxiety and negative thought patterns. After writing, some individuals talked about their hurtful experiences or even shed a few healing tears.

Next, participants glued the notes under layers of transparent fabric, creating a wave pattern in their small, personal painting. The therapeutic art process symbolizes the release of daily concerns and devastating losses into the water. Following the workshop, we combined the individual paintings into a larger collage piece to encourage others struggling through domestic violence or the tragic loss of a loved one.

Let Go - Community Wellness project for Kent County Victim Witness program

This community-based project gives voice to our pain and encourages the reconciliation of emotional conflicts as a means to de-stress. Though the act of letting go may not be a simple, one-time event, even small steps of forgiving and leaving the past behind can activate healing. As a result, many participants experience freedom and a sense of new beginnings.

Redemptive Art

Behind the Artwork

Swatches of red denim for use in Red Jeans Redemption project

The catalytic response from visitors surrounding my ArtPrize work caught the attention of the internationally known artist Makoto Fujimura. In 2014, Mako wrote, “Pamela Alderman’s installation The Scarlet Cord at the Ford Presidential Museum is attracting thousands. Her work of paintings combined with participatory, Yoko Ono-like installations hit home, and the lines for her exhibit grew longer every day. What Pamela experienced, and what ArtPrize made possible, is an extraordinary success by any measure.”

Through Mako’s insights, I have continued to expand my work, which taps into the healing power of art to help individuals flourish. He also helped me hone my creative interests and messaging. Mako’s contribution has made a major difference in my community-based art by helping the work to advance beyond ArtPrize.

Before meeting Mako, I had packed away my paint brushes for fifteen years. Instead of art, it was a time for spiritual grounding, while learning how to apply positive life principles in everyday ways to benefit others. Now, as an artist, I’m using what I learned then to support friends, neighbors, and strangers through my redemptive art.

Robert Schumann, a German composer, said an artist’s duty is “to send light into the darkness of men’s hearts.” As an artist of the soul, I’m learning how to cultivate exhibits that focus on empathy and compassion. Such work addresses our universal brokenness, but it also reflects a bit of my own story.

At thirty-four, I found out the most powerful man I knew had suddenly died. Enormous grief pulled me out to sea like a riptide. Wasn’t I too young to bury my father?

After my dad’s death, I finally realized I had this white-knuckled grip on how I wanted my life to work out; I wanted a storybook family that goes sailing on Sunday afternoons. My childhood dream capsized, though, when my parents divorced and my family broke apart. I found myself drowning in the deep water, trying to control the wreckage and stay afloat. Those pain-saturated decades, the parts I can talk about and the parts I can’t, seep out through my art.

Whether it’s attaching a scrap of red jeans to help raise awareness for sex trafficking, or releasing a personal struggle by writing a “let go” statement, or writing a note to a veteran coping with PTSD, military sexual assault, or veteran suicide—elements of a future 2020 work—each installation creates a nurturing space that invites hope. Because of my past pain, I believe art has a unique potential to touch the deep places within the human spirit, and interactive art, especially art that offers healing, draws people into a place of restoration.

Letting Go

Behind the Artwork

Close-up of hand written Let Go statements

A Daughter’s Story

More than one hundred participants submitted “Let Go” sentences to be collaged onto my ArtPrize Nine painting. But one woman caught my attention when she wrote this statement: “Mom, I’m letting go of my expectations of what our relationship should look like. I forgive you for the pain you caused, and I release you from any responsibility to heal me.”

Her profound statement, “I release you from any responsibility to heal me,” compelled me to contact her to see if she would share more of her story. She agreed. The following vignette shows her progression from heartache to healing. The Let Go journey is always difficult but never impossible.

Mom,

You said I shouldn’t be affected by your decision to divorce my dad. What you didn’t realize was that you not only closed yourself off from Dad, but from me as well. When you shut yourself away in your room and told me not to bother you, I learned that I no longer had a mother to depend on; I had to fend for myself.

When I left for work one day, you changed the locks to prevent my dad from coming in. But you didn’t realize—you locked me out too. Over and over, you chose your “freedom” and your “own” path over me. Your choices cut a deep wound in my heart.

One day, I realized you would probably never apologize; I needed to forgive you, or my bitterness would end up consuming me. I had to accept you for being you, instead of wishing you were some other mom.

Mom, I’m letting go of my expectations of what our relationship should look like. I forgive you for the pain you caused, and I release you from any responsibility to heal me.

Love,
Your daughter

This is one of the stories that inspired the Let Go exhibit.

Note: Some details have been changed to protect identities.

Open Hands: The Story Behind the Story

Behind the Artwork

Open Hands collage of hand trace drawings

Celebrate with us! We reached our first goal of 1000 handprints!

Art is one way, or solution, to work through some of my own dilemmas or emotional scars. My art supports the tension of being in process and moving forward. Over the years, this work has evolved from static art hanging on a wall to vibrant interactive healing spaces involving others.

For example, I created Let Go, which showcased during ArtPrize 2017 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as a positive step to work through a personal situation where I felt stuck—unable to let go of debilitating thoughts and emotions. By being vulnerable and willing to put my work out there, 70,000 ArtPrize visitors joined me on the creative healing journey by writing their own let go notes. The interactive public art helped many work through personal challenges, and countless individuals, besides myself, experienced emotional or spiritual freedom.

My latest work, Open Hands, an interactive traveling art experiment, is no exception. The work, first inspired by Babette’s Feast—a fictional story about a refugee’s plight, is about opening our fists in times of struggle and lending a hand to others. Like Babette, I am learning how to overcome adversity by redirecting my attention to the needs of others.

Writing message on Open Hands drawing

Here’s a bit of my backstory

When I was 19, my parents divorced. Our once bustling home was decimated overnight. My dad physically checked out; my mother emotionally checked out.

During school breaks, I found my childhood home completely empty. While wandering from room to room, each space felt silent—vacant. So, not only was I learning to deal with my parent’s divorce, but now deep loneliness crept into my life.

Sometimes, because of the isolation, I just sat on the floor and cried. The never-ending cycle of aloneness overwhelmed me. Finally, after a few months of constantly spiraling downward, I realized that in order to survive I needed a change. So, I left my Michigan home and moved to Southern California.

At first, the new adventure sparked hope, but I didn’t realize that my deep grief and debilitating depression would follow me all the way to the West Coast. My daily phone calls to my mom often ended with her repeating this mantra: “Get your thoughts off yourself, and do something nice for someone else.”

With nothing to lose, I decided to give my mom’s solution a try. When someone was sitting alone in the school cafeteria, I asked them to join me. When my grandmother sent homemade cookies, I shared them with my roommates. I also ended up assisting a schizophrenic patient during meal times through a volunteer school program at Camarillo State Hospital.

My mom’s wise counsel, at the time, was hard to understand. But looking back, she was helping me learn how to cope. She was teaching me to replace the inward focus on my own negative circumstances with an outward focus—benefiting others. While grieving my broken family was healthy and necessary, my traumatic experiences opened my heart and my art to the sorrows and needs of others.

Years later, I realized that, like me, so many others are stuck in hurtful situations. Brokenness is part of life. Illness, stress, loss, divorce, and suicide continue to interrupt our lives. Perhaps focusing our attention on others won’t solve all our problems, but overcoming the “selfie” attitude will help alleviate some of them.

Open Hands drawing with forgiveness message

Open Hands encourages closing our phones and opening our hands to the needs of others. The work calls for resiliency—growing through adversity, bouncing back, and learning to thrive for the wellbeing of others. Open Hands is about embracing brokenness through redemption and hope—by being part of the solution.

Where in the world is Open Hands? Follow on Instagram to find out and help reach the second goal of 2,500 handprints.