De Anza College’s spring event, A Taste of History: Spring 2021: Hope Takes Shape, featured Asian American and Pacific Islander musicians, poets and artists – celebrating the power of the arts and humanities in sharing and preserving our diverse stories and languages, and giving us opportunities to hear one another.
The program included a “Hoisan-Wa Talk Story” performance with the award-winning Del Sol String Quartet and poets Genny Lim, Flo Oy Wong and Nellie Wong.
Singer/ songwriter Lolah presented original songs in Vietnamese and English, and musicians Satish and Ashish Tare performed a tabla percussion piece.
Artist Juliana Kang-Robinson preview the Hope and Solace public poetry project with Cupertino Poet Laureate Jing Jing Yang and youth poet Alaina Gupta. There was a special message from musician Michael Franti, and a tribute to longtime college and community supporter Jim Jackson.
New Public Art Project: “Hope and Solace”
In a new form of campus-community outreach, the Euphrat Museum of Art has installed a series of colorful banners along segments of Stevens Creek Boulevard and Stelling Road – sharing a sampling of art, poetry and three-word phrases about hope with anyone who passes by.
“Hope is the rose that rises above the thorns of human ignorance and hatred,” reads one, quoting San Francisco poet Genny Lim.
Each banner is 8 feet tall and features a colorful image topped by a three-word phrase on one side, with longer messages from a variety of contributors on the reverse. The Euphrat worked with Cupertino Poet Laureate Jing Jing Yang to gather contributions from accomplished poets as well as students from De Anza and local K-12 schools.
Euphrat coordinator Diana Argabrite said the “Hope and Solace” project is an effort to share art and poetry with the surrounding community, while the college campus is still mostly closed because of COVID-19 restrictions.
De Anza College: Banners Offer Messages of Hope (Posted on July 6, 2021)
The Mercury News: De Anza public art project aims to give ‘Hope and Solace’ (Published June 7, 2021)
Sunnyvale poet Flo Oy Wong’s poem “As a Petal of Hope Takes Shape” is a central inspiration and featured on a lead banner: “As a petal of hope takes shape… it feels like golden silk stitched to goodness of humankind.”
“Normally commercials face us saying buy, buy, buy,” Oy said. “As artists and poets, we are giving food for the soul, to think with compassion. It is essential our public spaces contribute to an expression of our souls beyond our facades.”
Artist Juliana Kang-Robinson designed the banners using Pojagi-inspired motifs and bears drawn from her own artwork. Pojagi are Korean wrapping cloths made from scrap silk, a reminder that when diverse parts come together like a patchwork, beautiful things can happen.
“I believe art and poetry should be in every shared public space,” Kang-Robinson said. “It’s what reminds us of our shared humanity, something we need today more than ever.”
