Instagram: @bri_the_librarian
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
http://jean-sanders-illustration.com/
Instagram: @jeanbeans
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
Instagram: @grkinser
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
Instagram: @twicetoldstudio
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
http://nualaoconnor.com/
Twitter: @NualaNiC
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
Featured as part of Emilytober2020 with permission from the artist
Missed an online program? No fear! Rewatch a selection of archived programs below.
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Since 2009, artists from all over the world have chosen to spend October participating in challenges based on lists of prompts put together by other artists and institutions. Some make a piece of work every day, some every other day, and others are happy to simply take inspiration from all the lists floating around. We’re so excited to be participating in this year’s #Artober by releasing our own list of prompts consisting of phrases from Dickinson poems! We encourage you to pick and choose from the prompts, to work from either the lines we’ve provided or from the whole poems from which they’ve been plucked, and to create in any medium you desire. We look forward to seeing what you create—make sure to tag us on social media so we catch your work! You can tag your pieces with #artober2020, #emilytober, and @emilydickinson.museum. We’ll share our favorites from our instagram account, and feature some of them here on our website!
We talked as Girls do –
Fond, and late –
We speculated fair, on every subject, but the Grave –
Of our’s, none affair –
We handled Destinies, as cool –
As we – Disposers – be –
And God, a Quiet Party
to our authority –
But fondest, dwelt opon Ourself
As we eventual – be –
When Girls, to Women, softly raised
We – occupy – Degree –
We parted with a contract
To cherish, and to write
But Heaven made both, impossible
Before another night.
This statement was originally released on June 3rd 2020:
Today, in our distress over recent devastating events, we stand with our community and with the Black Lives Matter movement against racial injustice and inequality. We recognize that real change is necessary both in our country and in our museum.
We believe that museums are not neutral: they should be part of public conversations on contemporary issues such as racism, injustice, and oppression. Museums have long been institutions that hold and reflect cultural values and collective memory. Now, they have an even greater responsibility to be active participants in challenging age-old and contemporary systems of oppression.
Like other museums, the Emily Dickinson Museum has a duty to examine the history it teaches and to expand the stories it tells. Emily Dickinson lived through a catastrophic Civil War rooted in racial injustice and oppression. Her family was part of a society that benefited from the labor of immigrants, African Americans, and Native Americans in service to a privileged White majority. The poet’s literary work was made possible by the labor of these domestic servants. The Emily Dickinson Museum strives to tell this full story. Our new interpretive plan will place greater emphasis on the perspectives of Irish, Native American, and free Black workers in the Dickinson households, making plain issues of race and class in Dickinson family daily life.
At the Emily Dickinson Museum we recognize that this interpretive work is but one step in the greater effort to increase diversity, equity, inclusion, and access for audiences, staff, and leadership in institutions like ours. Dickinson’s revolutionary poetic voice became an agent of change, both in the literary canon and in the lives of individuals who find depths of meaning in her account of our human condition. As an institution, we are committed to the continuous work of change that museums can and should be doing to build an equitable society.