crafting thanks in 2013

This year, I was thankful for...

1. My friends for donating to my I Think I Can campaign to raise money for a great organization that serves homeless youth. Thanks to the campaign, I raised $300.00 for At the Crossroads, gave up sugar for five months, and lost 15 lbs. Now, seven months later, after a breakup, a death in the family (more on that later), and many hours of Mad Men and Parks & Recreation, I am right back where I started. Luckily, the ITIC campaign is rolling into the station again, so I guess I'd better hop on board and make it year-long this time.

(On a side note, as a public health practitioner I have to look at the unfathomable amount of salt-sugar-and-fat-filled objects labelled as food to which we are visually exposed  and seduced to consume. I would love, as a public health performance art piece, to go to Trader Joe's, take out all the products that have refined sugar, put them in neat piles in the parking lot, take photographs of what remained in the store, and measure what proportion of the shelves remained empty sans sugar, and then do the same for salt and refined flour. I suspect it would be something like 75% of the store's products out in the parking lot, with only produce and raw nuts left inside.)

In lieu of structural changes to remove sugar from my environment, guilt and money work as cues; here are some of the thank you cards I made for friends who donated to my 2013 I Think I Can campaign:

Hank

Sarolta

Daliah (Front)

Daliah (Interior)

 2. Revolutionary artists like Ruth Asawa for integrating community, family, and politics into her work while transcending all of those things to make beautiful art. I was good friends with her grandson in middle school and remember him telling me she had designed a fountain in Ghiradelli Square, but I only later understood the true importance of her work to San Francisco and to my own life. Asawa survived U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans to become an influential artist, feminist, and advocate for arts education. She was a member of the board at SCRAP, where I first tried my hand at sewing after stuffing cotton prints and corduroys in my pockets during hours of sorting through donations of fabric and other recycled art supplies. She also helped found the School of the Arts, where I studied theater in high school, and which was recently renamed in her honor. Her famous Ghiradelli Square fountain showed a mermaid breastfeeding her baby, an unabashed depiction of female power and celebration of joy, motherhood, and life. According to the New York Times obituary for Asawa, the fountain "set off a freewheeling debate about aesthetics, feminism and public art." Given the need for laws allowing breastfeeding in public, the relevance of her work continues.

R.I.P. Ruth Asawa, one awesome lady. 

Card for Ken Cuneo on the death of his grandmother, the artist Ruth Asawa

3. My family, for coming together to remember the loss of my father. His death, after seven years of being missing, is a long story I will tell another time. But I was grateful for the opportunity to mourn with family, and for their support in making his memorial possible.

For my sister

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my uncle and aunt

For my brother, Eliyahu (artwork by Nikki McClure)

For my brother Sacha (linoleum cut by Melissa Klein)

4. Finally, I am grateful to my friends and coworkers for giving me love, entertainment, and support. And so I thanked them this year during the holidays (and cleared out a worrisome number of accumulated jam jars) by making  my first-ever batches of candied almonds and granola. (Thanks also to holiday duct-tape!)

For Britt and Erock

May we all live with ease and well-being in our hearts. 

Happy New Year!