INVESTING IN creative advocacy in alaska

HUMAN:ties is a partnership between the Alaska Humanities Forum and the 100Stone Project that will grant another Alaskan artist an opportunity to activate their communities as 100Stone did around place-based issues of great gravity.

Inspired by Sarah Davies’ 100Stone Project, the Alaska Humanities Forum’s newest initiative, HUMAN:ties, will combat isolation and promote a deeper understanding of self and community by funding place-based art projects that explore the influence of human connection on our emotional, psychological, and social well-being.

Through your sponsorship and purchase of our 43 surviving "stone" statues, the purchase of merchandise, or your direct donation to HUMAN:ties at the link below, you will play an essential role in our movement to activate another creative vision.

Help us pass the torch of 100Stone Project, and ignite the imagination of another artist. Together, we will define the beauty and strength in vulnerability.

CONTRIBUTE TODAY

HUMAN:ties is unfolding in 2 parts

*Your Part*

On Friday, November 4, 2016, at 5:00pm, Alaskans will once again be able to embrace our restored 100Stone family on the gorgeous grounds of Alaska Pacific University, Anchorage. This day also marks the moment you will be able to make the "stones" your own in any of the following ways:

Sponsor a stone to become part of a collection in a permanent public setting.
Purchase a stone to bring home to your personal gardens or private institutions.
Contribute to a pool of dollars that will support sponsored statues for a permanent public collection by donating, or buying a handmade hoodie, amulet or print.

In the same way the Anchorage Park Foundation and the Light Brigade invested in the 100Stone Project, we want to invest in our Statewide community's creative population. With our sights on the highest success, and so much value to offer, our goal is to build HUMAN:TIES, through which your contributions will become investments into new pathways of storytelling, advocacy and social creativity. Your dollars will give potency to new projects, and opportunities to our communities for civic art that amplifies their own unique voices. Your participation will bring new life.

*Our Part*

In 2017, Alaskan artists of all disciplines will be invited to propose a creative advocacy project of their own imagining. When chosen, new projects will receive a grant up to $15,000 and the fiscal sponsorship of the Alaska Humanities Forum as they bring their vision to life.

A personal note from sarah davies, 100Stone project lead

“Perhaps one day I will find the language to express what it feels like to have made 100Stone Project with hundreds of others, and to be part of a global army of fearlessly vulnerable allies. Until then, the psychic debt I feel to my community for giving me a life of such quality is tremendous. For that reason, I feel compelled to pay forward what I have been given.

It all started with an invitation. Then, in January 2014, a board gave me the chance of a lifetime, a grant of $15,000, and an indomitable team of supporters as I moved through uncharted creative and social territory. Now, with deeply embedded roots in my community, and an army of allies behind me, I am strong enough to offer that same gift to another. Before next year is over I want to see that someone else has the same chance I was given.

Why is this important? Why not just invest in myself? …because if you have found yourself on this page you must understand the gravity of this project. The 100Stone Project and this granting initiative are a continued, fearless pursuit of levity, empowerment, and peace in a world thick with shame and stigma. Some of us have entered this battle creatively, some quietly, some have perished, and some have become fearsome warriors on the front lines of the war against that which keeps us isolated. I’ve initiated this project because we must keep moving forward, together.

I had no idea the life 100Stone would take. I had no idea of its Real power. I imagined it as an awareness project, creative activism, a battle against forces that keep us shamed and unwell. I knew it was important, but what it has become is much more than all that. 100Stone has become a colossal act of empathy, compassion, physically performed in real time by hundreds of us in synchronicity with mother nature, witnessed by hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.

Through 100Stone, an enormous affirmative attention has been brought to a huge diversity of our most difficult truths, where before there was silence, scorn, and shame. Every day we are able to touch our family of “stone” beings and witness all the lessons life has to offer them is another day to reflect on the stories of our hidden brothers and sisters, on love, on ourselves, and on who and how we want to be as we move through this world.

Join me today as I try to find a way to seed that same reflection and imagination in our community again. With the blessings of their makers and models, I offer you the stones with which we can build this fund. Help me pay forward what 100Stone has given to me—to Us—so we might empower another to have the audacity to speak in ways only art can do.

Without you this cannot work.
”

— In solidarity, Sarah

THIS PAGE IS UPDATED AS THE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THIS PROJECT MATURES.

PLEASE VISIT REGULARLY.