We wanted to share with you that the collective statement, shared with us by Phi Nguyen, Executive Director at Advancing Justice - Atlanta with and the launch of the #RememberingMarch16 artwork series. Please share the collective statement with your networks and help us uplift the beautiful artwork for our communities using #RememberingMarch16 in your posts.
| Dear Community, Today, Advancing Justice - Atlanta in collaboration with Asian American Advocacy Fund (AAAF) has asked our community to join us in solidarity and hold in light the victims, survivors, and family members of the spa shootings that occurred almost one-year ago on March 16, 2021. In Atlanta, we invited community members to gather at Blackburn Park to practice and cultivate healing together – to allow ourselves a moment of slowness, to surround each other with poetry, art, and music, and to walk together with renewed resolve. I am honored to continue this journey alongside partner organizations from across the country. I invite you to read our collective statement and join us as we recommit to addressing racial, gendered, and sexual violence in ways that build revolutionary communities of care, hope, and love for all. Standing by the Young Girls Peace Monument, I feel both grief and hope. I am encircled by grass and dew, friends, kin, and community leaders, awaiting our collective liberation like the full bloom of the cherry blossoms. In the latest installment of #GeorgiaOnMyMind, our partners at AAAF reflect on the lessons we’ve learned from nature in this past year of trying seasons and remind us that “time is healing and healing is time.” |
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Image Description: This artwork represents healing, showing a curvy brown woman with long dark brown wavy hair outlined in thin light peach colored lines. The woman is reaching up and her body is covered in light purple hand-drawn leaves, flowers and words on her right arm that read “LET NO ONE MISTAKE US FOR THE FRUIT OF VIOLENCE…” and on her thigh, words that read “BUT THAT VIOLENCE, HAVING PASSED THROUGH THE FRUIT, HAS FAILED TO SPOIL IT. - Ocean Vuong.” Behind the woman is a background filled with orange and blue green flowers, stars, and clouds against different shades of purple. This illustration is by Natalie Bui.
I want to close by sharing this powerful illustration by artist and activist Natalie Bui. It is the first in a series of art collaborations that we will release throughout this month. I hope that it inspires you (as it does me) to not let this tremendous loss drown us. In the words of Atlanta’s Youth Poet Laureate, Aanika Eragam,
“These women as vital as water.
Let their memory keep you
Afloat.”
In solidarity,
Phi Nguyen, (She/Her)
Executive Director
Advancing Justice - Atlanta