I curated an art show about motherhood. Doing this show was part of my healing process that I started in therapy (see this post here). Here's a little more info on the show: "As I’ve been navigating my new role as “mom,” I’ve been fascinated with how diverse the trek to motherhood can be. Some of us struggled and cried for years to be a mother. Some of us accidentally were thrown into motherhood and rose to the challenge. Some of us didn’t struggle or weren’t surprised, but had other unique hardships and joys along the way. I was inspired to curate this art show based upon some of our motherhood journeys, while also raising support for other mothers – “mom-ing” is hard enough, y’all! The works in this show revolve around, depict the essence of, or tell a specific moment in the life of these artist/mamas." I invited the artists to donate a percentage of their sales to the Milagro House and 100% of the proceeds from card sales went to the Milagro House as well. Guests to the art show were invited to peruse the Milagro House's wishlist and bring along an item to help another mother in her motherhood journey. I really wanted this show to support and encourage moms! The first show was hosted at Main Street Mount Joy in May featuring the work of 11 artist-mamas. We added 4 more mothers and moved the show to Folklore Coffee & Co. in Elizabethtown for the month of June. In the end, we raised $165 for the Milagro House, along with donations of wipes! I was so encouraged by how much the show grew in such a short period of time - from 16 works by 11 artists to 34 works by 15 artists in less than a month. It felt contagious and seeing the spark of creativity reignited in these artists was amazing. I'm so thankful to everyone who played a role in seeing this show's success and I can't wait to see what next year holds for us! Below are some images from both show locations.
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This is going to get personal. And maybe heavy. In May of 2017, when I was 30 weeks pregnant, someone shot into our home - straight through our newly painted nursery and into the back of our bedroom wall (we were unharmed). The week that followed this incident was full of doctor evaluations (to make sure the stress of the shooting didn't cause any harm to my baby) and police investigations in and beside our home. My OBGYN, in an effort to calm me down in her office after the shooting, told me, “Honey, women get pregnant and give birth in war-torn countries - you will be ok.” Those words really stuck with me and made me realize that my situation sucked, but there are other women doing this motherhood thing in far worse conditions than I. So, I started to document the events after the shooting using photography as a way to try to grapple with my loss of control over the period of time I expected to be nesting. 6 weeks later, I started therapy and the week after that, I gave birth to our son, less than 24 hours after we had finished painting the nursery for the second time. My therapist, knowing that I was an artist, encouraged me to use art to help me process everything. We stayed away from any news media about the event; however, I knew that I needed a safe way to put my story out there as soon as I could so that I wouldn't feel like a victim of my circumstances anymore. In October of that year, the PA Governor's Awards for the Arts came to Lancaster, and the city of Lancaster had lots of special opportunities for artists to get involved. I decided to make and enter a piece that visually discussed how I felt about entering motherhood with PTSD into the Untitled Lancaster 10x10 show at Levengoods. I remember I picked up my 10x10" panel after our second court date since the incident. It was definitely difficult to balance being a new mom while working on this piece, but PTSD kept me up a lot of the night when I should have been sleeping anyways, so I wasn't really missing out on anything to get the work completed in time for the show. I have to say, it felt really good, but also very scary, to put myself out there like that, but it definitely needed to be done. I think I'm going to continue to use art as part of my healing process and mental health
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