Fernandes is helping Fred Hutch do that as the latest artist named in the Public Art & Community Dialogue Program.
Sponsored by the Fred Hutch Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Core, the program is a new initiative that provides an opportunity for artists, employees and the broader Washington state community to be in dialogue about solidarity and the pursuit of equity in research and health care.
The program’s first call was to Black artists across the Pacific Northwest, Uganda and South Africa, where Fred Hutch has established research programs. South African artist Mark Modimola was selected and a banner with his painting was installed on top of the Yale Building on the Fred Hutch campus on June 21, 2022.
Fernandes, chosen to represent Indigenous artists and communities, unveiled his artwork on campus on October 10, Indigenous Peoples Day; it replaced the banner with Modimola’s artwork. Future artwork will represent the Asian and Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities.
Fernandes’ artwork was done in a traditional coast Salish style, he said.
“I wanted to make sure there was cultural accuracy in the way it was done and presented,” he said. “Some elements of the art may be a split image, one side a mirror of the other side, kind of like life. There’s a duality to life, that idea of having a balance of one side reflecting the other.”
Inspiration for the piece was drawn from an online Storytelling Circle Fernandes led on August 23 with Fred Hutch employees and community members. Fernandes shared a traditional Klallam story involving a young boy known as “Slow One” (due to his inability to run) and the nearby Wolf People who helped him overcome this challenge. The story was followed by breakout groups and a larger group discussion regarding the story’s meaning.
“Medicine in the form of stories is medicine from our ancestors,” Renville said during her presentation. “It’s literally power and strength and love from our ancestors in a form that’s impossible to quantify.”
And literacy, she went on, is actually a newly acquired human skill.
“Storytelling predates literacy and even language,” she said. “It’s an old, old form of communication that gets tapped into and it’s still how we communicate emotionally. Our mind says we don’t need stories anymore — we have science and facts — but your psyche still needs to make sense of life and experiences with a deeper story. And storytelling does something to us physically as listeners. It relaxes us as we listen. That’s healing and medicine.”
Fernandes said it’s essential that western medicine does not ignore the spiritual and emotional aspects of a cancer diagnosis.
“When I saw this opportunity, it resonated with me as a storyteller,” he said. “Fighting disease is not just a decision your brain or body makes — you have to get your spirit and emotions ready to fight, as well. I wanted to share that perspective with others.”
Fernandes said he incorporated elements of the original story, as well as the discussion around it, into the artwork he created.
“I wanted to create art that included the little boy, the wolves, the invisible plants and the boy’s face after he’s transformed from scared and lonely boy to confident,” he said. “The art will help people recall the story. And then they can tell that story to other people.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
