‘Crystallizing Our Call’ sculpture planned for Ashland Creek Park
By Debora Gordon for Ashland.news
About 150 people attended the Juneteenth “Crystallizing Our Call” Celebration Picnic at Ashland Creek Park on Sunday. The three-hour outdoor community event served as celebration of Father’s Day as well as Juneteenth, and also as the official fundraising launch for the permanent public art installation, “Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing our Call,” a sculpture slated for installation at the park.
The artwork will be based on the winning design by local artist Micah BlackLight, who, along with Cassie Preskensis and “Tia” Candace Younghans, coordinated the day’s events.
Members of the public who responded to the call “to celebrate freedom, fathers, community and art that catalyzes healing” could make use of an arts table set up for children and adults to create artwork while enjoying music by local performing artists, including musicians, a dancer, stilt walkers and a girl reading aloud from a book.
The day began with a brief comment by Aaron Ortega about how, he said, frequent “territorial acknowledgements” of being on stolen land seem “generic.” He went on to give a brief history of the original peoples who had inhabited what is now known as Ashland.
The program also featured spoken word, music, and dance performances by Asante Scott, speaker; Ashreale McDowell, dancer; Plan Be, with musicians Cyrise Beatty Schachter and Stefan Schachter; Lara Olamina, musician; Lxor and Felipe Luz, musicians; and City Councilor Gina DuQuenne and Marvin Woodard, the Equity Coordinator for Racial Justice at Southern Oregon University, engaged in a story exchange.
‘Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call’
BlackLight, one of the primary event organizers and the artist who created the design for “Ancestor’s Future,” said afterwards he felt, “Incredibly thrilled, heartened and deeply optimistic.”
He said he hopes the event will help “begin the work to live in actual community,” and added, “We are intending to ensure a Juneteenth every year.”
His sculpture design, as explained on the BASE (Black Alliance and Social Empowerment) Southern Oregon webpage, includes a winged figure as an allusion to angels or angelic beings; “a book etched with names of Black and brown people who have fallen, so that we are reminded to do all that we can to make these cycles of violence cease … while giving us a glimpse of that which is possible”; and an empty space in the chest “to express that his heart and ability to love is limitless ….”
“I loved it; I came home, my heart was so full, it was perfect,” Preskenis, another of the event organizers, said afterwards. Reflecting on the afternoon, the member of the Public Arts Advisory and Say Their Names committees said, “I wish more people would have come, but the flow of the day, it was so beautiful. It was so community-oriented, it was a natural progression. It was a huge success. It was two and a half years in the works, planting the seed; it felt very exciting to see it.”
“We work well together,” said Younghans, who became the producer and project manager for the event. “I feel really good and lovely and warm and relaxed and happy about it. I just loving weaving community together and bridging the disparate branches of community.
How you can help
For more information about “Ancestor’s Future: Crystallizing Our Call” and to make a donation, go to the Ashland Parks Foundation webpage at ashlandparksfoundation.org/crystallizing-our-call/.
“The public art piece is intended to be a community-catalyzing process and weave us together. By inviting the artists, I got to lift up artists of color, so they could make an offering to the community, so they all got to weave this thread. It’s a beautiful thing, helping us see the beauty and wisdom we carry inside.
“Over the course of the year, we will hold fundraising events for the public art piece and, by next Juneteenth, ideally, the fabrication will begin. And then by that following Juneteenth, for sure ‘Ancestor’s Future’ will have been unveiled.”
The Say Their Names Collective is working, Younghans said, “to mark the moment of the official launch of the fundraiser to show what we want to co-create — a community of belonging in which all are safe, welcome and brave. It’s never a beginning; it is a continuation of the good work that heals and unites.”
Debora Gordon is a writer, artist, educator and non-violence activist who recently moved to Ashland from Oakland, California. Email Ashland.news Executive Editor Bert Etling at betling@ashland.news or call or text him at 541-631-1313.
