In case readers don’t know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
I spent my Friday evening at the Sexual Assault Awareness Month Opening ceremony and art gala at the Knight Law School. When I walked in, glasses of strawberry lemonade were clinking as the sun poured natural light in the building to light up this essential space for survivors and their artwork. While this event was put on to mainly educate the University of Oregon community about this month, it was also held to honor the sexual assault survivors of this community. This year the Sexual Violence Prevention and Education program decided to create an art gala; the art pieces were submitted to the Dean of Students Office and were picked out for display by Kerry Frazee and Empower UO co-founders, Danielle Ragan and Alix Brewster. Kerry Frazee was the true person who put the whole event together, “I wanted a creative way to reach out to the different communities on campus about assault prevention”. Frazee works in the office of the Dean of Students as the director of the Sexual Violence Prevention and Education program.
Danielle Ragan and Alix Brewster helped collect many of the art pieces through their cofounded group Empower UO. Empower UO is a safe space for survivors of sexual assault and their supporters to share their stories. Every week, members of Empower UO come together to talk about their experiences of assault and healing. Ragan’s main job for the event was to collect art, but she also submitted a total of six different pieces herself. “If you had asked me a year ago to create art pieces and put them on display as well as read aloud a poem about my experience, I could have never done that. As a survivor myself, I have come a long way in my healing process, a lot which I account to Empower UO for”. Brewster adds that the by sharing her art pieces, she has “never felt more vulnerable in an oddly empowering way”. Brewster is a third year journalism student at the UO majoring in public relations, so she was in charge of spreading the word about the gala and advertising the importance of this month as a whole.
Not only did the gala have art pieces for the guests to view, there was also an interactive engagement activity. A large white and gold tree painted by Danielle Ragan was surrounded by leaves and flowers on the ground, Ragan encouraged guests to pin a flower on the tree as a symbol of the survivor they know, or for themselves if they are a survivor. By the end of the night, the originally barren tree had bloomed and was full of life while capturing the importance of this month, and honoring the survivors.
While this event’s sole purpose was to educate the community about this month, Frazee, Ragan, and Brewster all did an excellent job bringing light to such a “hush-hush” subject in a way that keeps the stories of survivors alive.
