Join Lynne for this week’s edition of Money, I’m Home as she is joined by Pamela Alderman, a local artist committed to helping heal others through art.

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0:00:06.9 Lynne Jarman-Johnson (LJJ): Money, I’m Home. Welcome in. I’m in Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union, from finance to fitness, we have it all. And today, we have something that is so unique because we’re going to talk with you a little bit about how you can channel your inner artist, and there’s someone local that’s doing something that is so amazing for our community and for great causes, Pamela Alderman. She is an artist and facilitator. She’s also co-owner of a phenomenal organization that is helping teach education through art to young people. Pamela, thank you so much for being with us today.

0:00:41.1 Pamela Alderman (PA): Oh, hey Lynne. It’s a thrill. It’s great to be back behind the microphone with you, thanks for having me.

0:00:48.1 LJJ: It’s been years, hasn’t it?

0:00:49.0 PA: I know, it has.

0:00:52.8 LJJ: I’ve watched you, I watched way at the beginning, when you had really first started with taking your talents and helping others use those talents to become even better individuals, tell us a little bit about your journey, how did you start and where did the passion come to really put yourself out there to help others?

0:01:11.4 PA: Yeah, thank you so much. So the passion came from my childhood. My parents divorced when I was growing up, and so I know brokenness, I know loneliness, I know feeling detached and isolated, and I think I didn’t realize it then, but it’s really the foundation of my art to connect with those who are hurting or who are broken. And so my art is all about healing, it’s about providing hope for others, and I think it just was born out of my own childhood wounds, and now I just have this tremendous passion as an adult, helping others, no matter what their age, no matter what their challenge has been, but helping them to take steps towards healing and towards recovery, because there is hope on the other side of whatever the challenge is. For my art career… So, I raised our children, our four children over the course of 25 years, and then the oldest one started leaving for college, so I kind of entered my art career in my mid-40s, which was sort of a late start.

0:02:08.7 PA: Yeah, and so at that same time, ArtPrize came on to the scene in Grand Rapids, and that’s a really large… Most people from Grand Rapids know what it is, but this large international art competition where the world’s greatest art award, the financial award for the winner, and about 1500 artists participate and ArtPrize grew in popularity to where a half a million visitors started coming to Grand Rapids for this three-week event that takes place in the fall. So it’s a very highly competitive event, and of course, as an artist in my mid-40s, just restarting my art career, it was a big step, but the first year I had a little tiny painting in a little tiny venue, but it was a start, but the second year is where the American Heart Association connected, asked me to represent them with my art, to do a story of one of their survivors, which was Natalie Ruggeri, and back in 2010, and it was called the Woman in Red, and I just represented Natalie’s heart survivor story and how she overcame an obstacle in her teenage years and how she’s now promoting women’s health and heart health.

0:03:27.3 PA: And so the city just really responded to that painting, I got into the Amway Hotel, so I hit a big venue of where we have a lot of foot traffic. So, my piece got seen by thousands of people, and that started out my ArtPrize career that year, because then I was in the Amway hotel another seven years, and they just kept giving me more and more space, and I did stories of children with autism. I did Metro hospital, a cancer story. All of a sudden, I was just kind of on this fast track to success in my ArtPrize career, because I was connecting with the audience through interactive art, and people loved that, they loved the interactive art, they loved an opportunity to be part of ArtPrize and they loved the opportunity to somehow write a hero’s name, or write or wish a prayer for a child with autism or a child in need, or another year I did a Let Go installation where 70,000 people wrote a Let Go note, crinkled it up and tossed into my sea painting, which was like tossing their Let Go into the sea. So, the popularity of my pieces just kept growing and growing, and then people just kept flooding into my exhibit spaces every year.

0:04:41.2 LJJ: Here’s what I find so fascinating. Your website is really robust, and if anybody is listening and thinking to themselves, “Boy, I would really love to find out how I can let go or how I can heal,” Pamela, the things that you’re doing in the community with workshops and healing and art is absolutely fascinating, a quick question for you. I remember growing up and I would say to myself, “Well, I’m not an artist,” and so then I would shy away from creating art, here you start in your 40s. You are a living testament that art is for everyone. And that you bring people in.

0:05:21.7 PA: Yeah, yeah. So right, so I do these large public installations, but I also do smaller workshops with specific groups, girls who have been sex-trafficked and maybe are in the Kent County Circuit Court System, or survivors of domestic violence with the prosecutor’s court. I do smaller workshops and schools with… Maybe at retirement centers. It’s all ages. I might be in a Montessori school, it’s all ages, it’s people who have all fears about art. And maybe their third-grade teacher told them they’ll never be an artist, so then they kind of believed that, but I just start small and I just try to plant seeds of excitement and passion. And I show them how to use the materials. We have small steps, incremental steps, I help build their confidence with… By encouraging them. And really, it’s just have fun. Just experiment.

0:06:17.0 PA: And so for ArtPrize this year, we ended up… Michael Hyacinthe and I ended up teaming up together, and we’re co-curators of Veterans Memorial Park, and we invited 21 veterans to show their artwork with my artwork that was also being shown there. And some of the artists, these veterans, they hadn’t really never done any art. And so I just started them small. They came to my house and they came to my garage, I showed them how to use art supplies, I gave them a practice canvas or practice paper, and I said, “So you can’t make a mistake, because we can just throw this away,” and just kind of help them grow their confidence just a little at a time. Maybe we made a smaller one, so it’s just an 8 x 10. Okay, now for ArtPrize, let’s do just what you just did, but now we’re going to blow it up to 3 feet x 3 feet. And so, it was exciting to see them grow in their confidence, and it was exciting to see how they felt so good about what they created, and the audience responded so warmly that they probably want to do it again, which makes me so excited.

0:07:21.1 LJJ: When I researched you… And Pamela, we’ve known each other for years, so it was really actually fun kind of going through a little history book for me. It was really fun. The other question that popped into my head. With all of the topics that you focus on, which are so critical, from refugees to veterans, as you just spoke about, bully prevention, community heroes, healing brokenness, is there anything that… Maybe one or two items or people that just touched you where you really realized, this is bigger than me, this is bigger than art?

0:07:55.0 PA: Yeah. Right away, the Congolese women. I just felt chills go through my body. Someone asked me to do the Congolese story. I didn’t know anything about Congo. It took me 15 minutes to figure out where Congo was on this huge map that we have hanging in our garage. And I started researching the story of Congo, and my eyes were open, and my heart was open to this ginormous story. And then I find out 20,000 Congolese refugees now are resettling in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And so, this sponsor put me in touch with some of these refugee families, and then some of them agreed to let me interview them for ArtPrize, to let me paint their portraits for ArtPrize. S,o I started going into their homes, I started going to their church services, to their parties. And I spent a year with these people. And I was so amazed. I would learn, Okay, eight million people in Congo have been… Just the genocide, had been massacred. It’s like, What? Where is the world response? My heart just kind of rose up.

0:09:04.5 PA: And two million women have been systematically raped as a weapon of war, where the militia soldiers come in and just decimate a village, and they rape all the females, including the female children. And they don’t even do that, but then they also destroy the genital area of the woman so she can never reproduce. And you’re just… I was like… I just couldn’t imagine it. And now I’m talking to these survivors of something so horrific, and I’m going to their church services, and they’re dancing and singing with all their hearts. And I’m thinking to myself, if this happened to me, I lost my husband, I lost all of my children, or myself and my daughter had been raped, could I sing and dance like that? And they became these icons of strength, these pillars of valor, these heroes, have gone through this… Like a fire, a blazing fire, and then the courage that I saw. I was so touched by these women, I thought I’ll never be the same. How do they do it? How do they have this strength? How do they have this resiliency? I was amazed.

0:10:13.3 LJJ: It absolutely makes you really capture life and capture your own inner hopes and dreams, especially when you hear of tragedies that then can be healed or are in the process of healing through art. Especially when you think, Oh my gosh, you couldn’t possibly heal from that, and yet, you’re watching the joy in front of your eyes. Hey, Pamela can you also kind of just touch on COVID? I think with the pandemic that has hit, the interaction that people were so accustomed to, that has to change how you worked a little bit.

0:10:52.7 PA: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. That’s an excellent question. So relevant. So, kind of a couple of different things. So that first year of COVID, we’re all kind of reeling, it’s brand new, we’re all trying to figure out what to do. Things are shutting down, and personally, I was feeling so isolated, so alone, so I thought, “Okay, as an artist, what can I do to move towards people, but safely?” So, I started this kind of smaller neighborhood exhibit where I bought 600 luminary… The bags with the candles, and I went around to 25 neighbors, knocked on their door and then stood at a distance, and asked if I could put these luminaries in their yard and line the edges of their yard along the road edge. And I have to admit, I’m ashamed to admit that several of these neighbors I had never met, even though I’ve lived here 25 years. And so I was like, “Sheesh. Sorry, I’ve never introduced myself before. It took COVID for me to do this.” And everyone said yes.

0:11:55.7 PA: And so, it became these 600… I wanted to do something that brought hope and healing, even if it was on a small level, even just in my little neighborhood. And people got so excited about it. They came out, and some of them from a distance, they helped set up the little luminaries in their yard. And when… Some shed tears, some people came and drove their car to see it, even though compared to my other exhibits where it’s so many people, this was so much smaller. And one of my sons, he was home for COVID, so he helped set things up, my husband was in the garage filling the bags with sand, it was like a little family project. And at the end, it was a rainy day, and so you pick up the bags and all the sand would fall out and I thought, I can’t leave piles of sand in the neighbor’s yard, so another neighbor came out with a snow shovel and helped me pick up all the sand, and I thought we came together the best we could, even though it was a pandemic. And we just… We were all trying to still figure out how do we do this safely, how do we do this where we’re not so alone and how… And just kind of spark hope in one another.

0:13:01.3 PA: Another thing we did for our workshops, is we tried to continue with workshops, because we believe just so important. So, with my Kent County Veterans Services workshops, I made art bags and I left them on my front porch, and then a Kent County Veterans Service representative would come grab the bags from my front porch and then deliver them to veteran’s homes on their front porches. And then I did classes with Zoom, or in some cases, I filmed classes, like for Holland Home, so they could go on YouTube and watch my class on YouTube. So, we just had to kind of pivot and just be ready and be adaptable. We had to adapt to a new situation, but figure out how can we still move forward, how we still connect with people, how can we still use art as a healing tool?

0:13:50.2 LJJ: Wow. Well, Pamela, for those who want to get involved, whether that be as an artist or maybe there’s a company or an organization that has… You’ve sparked the imagination of what we can do together and what employees even can do together, colleagues to heal through art, to create fascination and inspiration. How can people get in touch with you?

0:14:16.7 PA: So, there’s a couple of ways, you can go to healing in arts with an S, healinginarts.org, and there’s a message, a way to message me there. You can go to Instagram. I’m Pamela_Alderman, A-L-D-E-R-M-A-N, and you can message me from Instagram, or you could go to my Facebook page and message me from my Facebook page, and we can just figure out what are you interested? How can I encourage you? And how could I serve you? And we can find fun, creative ways to just inspire hope and inspire healing in others.

0:14:56.4 LJJ: Well, Pamela, thank you so much. I love the fact that you use the word serve. We feel very strongly at Consumers that our role is to be servant leaders, and you are a testament to that in our community. Thank you so much.

0:15:12.0 PA: Lynne, thank you so much, it’s been great talking.

0:15:14.8 LJJ: Hey, if you have a topic or a person just like Pam, who is so fascinating, just send it our way and we’ll nab them for Money, I’m Home. I’m Lynne Jarman-Johnson with Consumers Credit Union. Thank you so much, Jake Esselink for your production skills. Everyone have a fabulous week.

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