A word from Adrienne
Hi All, It’s been almost a year since I Started at The COllaborative as Executive Assistant and I feel incredibly grateful to be a part of this creative community.
my 2nd Feature Show is up this Month, so I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and share a bit of my own artistic journey.
When I was a senior in high school, I picked up, at random, an issue of the Cornell Daily Sun that was sitting in the corner of my parent’s basement. The page I flipped to featured an article by Cornell Professor Bruce Levitt. I can’t recall what the article was about or what compelled me to read it, but in it he stated, “The sciences and technology tell us how we live. The arts tell us why we live.”
From as early as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by the point of life — why are we here? Why do we choose to be here once we are here? What is all of this? How can we think about this or think at all as we float through this ever-expanding void, moving about our days in bodies built from stardust? These are unanswerable questions, but I think that art, just as much as science, can help us to get as close as possible to the “un-answerableness” of aliveness.
Poetry was the first thing I found that helped me to make sense of things (even when not much of anything, when you think about it for too long, makes sense). Then, I found the darkroom and realized that images and words could go together. Then, I found collage, and realized that I could stitch together pieces of found things to make meaning — which is how I navigate much of my life.
I went to school for Creative Writing, worked in biotech for 3 and a half years, and during that time found the Collaborative. I remember volunteering at Folks Fest in 2022 and realizing that my heart was in the arts and that I needed to follow my intuition as a creative person. I had my first Feature Artist show in October, 2022, became an Artist Collaborator, and have been on staff since November, 2022. It’s been a joy to have my work come full circle for my October 2023 Feature Show.
The Collaborative’s welcoming community has been instrumental in sparking my career in the arts. I am grateful for the artist interviews I’ve conducted, newsletters crafted, and exhibitions attended in my time as Executive Assistant. I find the correspondence with Youth Artists to be particularly moving and value that our Youth Artist of the Month program allows young people to share their creative vision and voices.
There is no set path to being an artist and I feel lucky to be a part of a community of artistic people navigating this journey together. It’s been an eclectic ride for me to say the least.
In my work, I try to embrace what William Wordsworth calls “the light of common day.” It’s impossible to make it through life unscathed or undistracted by the rush of daily obligations, insecurities and aspirations. Yet, in the quieter hours, I find myself thinking about how we are only here, in ourselves, this space, this moment, so briefly — it is, indeed, all we ever have until we go wherever it is we go next. But, until then, I’d like to live everything — to hear the bass of the car radio in my chest, the role of laughter in conversation, to smell the sun on the sidewalk, or to see the way it hits my window in morning... In this way, I think, the gray of passing days can still be viewed with childlike wonder, yet with the sobering retrospect that things go forward — that the new becomes familiar, but beauty is there if you look, and memory is the stardust that shoots out of the blackhole that is grief.
And we take this weight, and we get on.
I make art because I need to. James Baldwin said it best in Sonny's Blues, "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."
