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A Community Reunion: All the Details

To explore what reunion means on both a family and community level, I felt it was essential to design an event that celebrates the beauty and intimacy of families’ reunions within the broader context of what it means for a community to come back together again. How do our individual experiences of reunion and our ideas about community-wide reunion intersect and how can we recognize and celebrate both sides of this post-COVID coin?

My answer to that question is a community gathering that will explore, celebrate and honor this moment in which we find ourselves coming together again.

I invite you to join me on Saturday June 5, 2021 between 4 and 7 pm at Westmorland Park to mark this moment of reunion. The event will include:

• A complimentary family portrait to celebrate your family’s season of reunion
• A mixed media collaborative installation project through which we can all share and explore our thoughts about what reuniting in this moment means to all of us
• An opportunity to gather together and acknowledge our shared experiences of separation and reunion and how they bind us together

Why a community reunion?

A few months ago I started thinking about the idea of reunion. Vaccinations were increasing, grandparents were once again able to safely cuddle their grandchildren, friends were booking plane tickets to see extended family for the first time in over a year and just the idea of hugging friends felt like cause for celebration. And so I put together a special offering that would allow families to document an important moment of reunion in their lives.

But the more I’ve thought about what it means for all of us as a community to come back together again, in ways both big and small, the more I’ve realized that exploring the idea of reunion after the past year that we’ve lived through is bigger than individual families. We are all navigating a way through this inflection point in our lives in which we are saying goodbye, step-by-step, to a very challenging period of isolation and charting a course to reunite again with family, friends and our community at large.