‘Ever True’ initiative to collect and preserve art highlights the power of creativity in healing

The effort is one element of the Brown Ever True initiative, which is bringing together resources, programming and services to support healing and recovery. And it's just one among many ways that University community members are respectfully documenting a difficult moment in Brown's history - other actions range from planning for a permanent campus memorial honoring the lives of the two Brown students whose lives were lost to saving samples of flowers placed at temporary memorials with the goal of preserving some in perpetuity.

"Often, art allows us to express something that is otherwise incomprehensible," said Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion Matthew Guterl, who is coordinating the Brown Ever True operational team. "Collecting these materials from the Brown community is a way to capture this seemingly impossible moment, so that we, as a University community, are able to look back and see how we tried to make sense of a terrible tragedy."

The artwork submissions are currently being shared through weekly Instagram posts, and the Brown Library plans to archive them as part of a larger collection of materials related to Dec. 13.

For Graduate School Associate Dean Alycia Mosley Austin, an adjunct assistant professor of neuroscience and a member of Brown's Class of 2001, creating a collage helped her process the tragic events of last winter.

For the collage base, she used a piece of stationery from a package she bought 25 years ago to write her Brown graduation gift thank-you notes. She included images of sheet music from Brown's alma mater song, photographs of brown bears in nature from Scientific American, and depictions of the windows of Barus & Holley, where she took physics classes as an undergraduate. The piece is titled "Our Hearts Swell (That Song)," and it was highlighted in March on Brown's Instagram account.

"Some of my memories aren't fully formed - they're just snippets of random memories in time - so I cut the images into strips as a way to think about the fragmentation of memory and that feeling," said Austin, who hasn't studied art formally but has recently embraced collage-making as a hobby.

The bears depicted in her piece are vocalizing, but it's unclear if they are doing so in a joyful, playful or sorrowful way, she said: "That made me think about singing the alma mater in different contexts, like in the context of a joyful, 'We won the football game' kind of way, but also, members of the Brown community have sung it at more sorrowful occasions."

The original collage now hangs in Austin's office, where visitors can take it in.

One of McCormack's paintings, depicting the "Infinite Possibility" art installation near the School of Engineering, was posted to Brown's Instagram account earlier in March.

"The first few paintings I made of Barus & Holley were really difficult - I live really close to that building and walk past it every single day," McCormack said. "But the more I painted the building, the more comfortable I became with it."

Guterl said that like the Brown University Herbarium's memorial flower preservation project, the effort to collect and share art is designed to promote healing and recovery across the community.

"These are all determined efforts to perhaps begin to understand what we lost on Dec. 13 and what we found in each other in the aftermath of that terrible event," he said.