🔦 Board Member Spotlight
Spring and I met years ago when she decided to spend some of her "free time" helping me sort type in my letterpress shop after taking a workshop at The Bremerton Letterpress Co. I think we fell in friend-love the instant we realized we share the balance of left/right brain that drives most creatives crazy: We love making messes and breaking barriers, but we also love organizing data and shelves and helping each other make complicated ideas make sense. She's also mom to two amazing kids and balances a full time career in healthcare management with graduate studies, pets and her own creative impulses. Her artistic skills have both inspired me and ignited mad flames of why-can't-i-draw-like-her jealousy. Art flows through Spring's veins, and on her skin.
Her experience working with Wayzgoose Kitsap spans from volunteer at the merch table, multi-year linoleum artist, and board member. But these labels don't tell the full picture of how essential Spring has been to the survival of our precious little arts organization, and my own sanity as a founder, mother and executive director. She is a sounding board, a problem solver, and a last-minute logistics miracle worker. She genuinely believes in our mission to make art and art-making more accessible to everyone in our community, but not just for art-making sake - in order to foster both individual and community healing, as a means of resisting the patriarchy, and in order to create the kind of world we all want our kids to inherit.
She is also the one I turn to for a humorous and wider perspective when things get dark or heavy - because not taking life too seriously is one of the most effective kinds of therapy.
We're all pretty damn blessed by Spring's gifts.
In the midst of chaotic festival planning this week, I had the chance to ask her about her take on this year's upcoming Wayzgoose Kitsap Art Festival:
In her own words:
MB: What about the 2023 festival are you most excited about?
SMG: Seeing the look on the faces of the artists as their first print is pulled up from the linoleum. Despite having looked at the block for weeks through the design and carving process as an artist you never really know how the design will turn out until that paper comes up for the first time.
MB: What's your favorite thing about being involved with Wayzgoose Kitsap?
SMG: Being part of a growing community within our community, and seeing our vision of reducing barriers to the arts happening.
MB: Share a detail about WK that you don't think most people know:
SMG: We used to have a Crisco budget. 🤣
MB: You're a board member, major volunteer hustler, and a lino artist... When you dream about Wayzgoose, is it all blistered carving fingers and Zoom meetings?
SMG: Hah! Not blistered fingers, but perhaps bandaged ones. I dream of the excitement and fun, and of conversations and connections, and maybe even the smell of warm linoleum in the sun.
MB: What does your family think about Wayzgoose Kitsap?
SMG: They love it, though my husband has commented that we're going to run out of wall space.
MB: If you could secure a magical $1M grant for WK, what would you want the organization to do with the funds?
SMG: Secure a permanent home that would allow Wayzgoose to offer classes to the community and give a place to foster the ongoing growth of the arts in Kitsap County.
And her favorite quote: Well behaved women seldom make history. - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
This post is part of an ongoing series of Board Member Spotlights. Stay tuned for more from the other amazing folks on the board.
Thank you Spring for being an amazing human,
~ Marit
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