IMPORTANT UPDATE
Please note: In the midst of our initial fundraising attempt, we enjoyed an important "update conversation" with the community of Newtown, Connecticut. A commission to determine quantity and site placement of selected monument donations was just being formed—and the community asked us to postpone our significant efforts until they had made their final evaluations.
Although our project previously received excellent feedback from community stakeholders—and we expect more from this commission—we agreed to restart our campaign after hearing from the new group.
Please check back for important developments, and thanks for your support!
Our Inspiration
Unfortunately, we all have become familiar with tragedy—and we're REALLY familiar with feeling powerless to help people who are far away. With this awesome project, we're going to cast a 13-foot bronze monument and donate it to Newtown, Connecticut. The figure is holding origami cranes, which are symbols of peace and hope.
Participating in this project allows all of us to make a lasting, permanent contribution to the lives of an entire community—and the world.
The piece was sculpted by Lorri Acott, a former teacher who reacted like all of you did when the Newtown tragedy occurred last December. As a sculptor, she is able to express her own deep connection to those who suffer by making artwork. Sculpture is her loudest voice, and it's permanent. By contributing to this project, you can speak with her, and with the community of Hill City, South Dakota.
Lorri is joined in this effort by many. Black Hill Bronze will help with casting and installation. The students at Bethel High School in Bethel, Connecticut began by folding cranes and have decided to join us in raising money for the big sculpture. The Hill City Arts Council is lending their support, and various people from all over the US are stepping forward to assist in this effo
What we need & What You Get
We're asking for $70,000 to make this piece and transport it to Newtown. If we receive extra funding, we will enhance the base of the sculpture and landscaping—and if we receive a LOT of extra funding, we'll contribute to the college funds of Sandy Hook Elementary students.
You get a ton of great perks for participating, from our heartfelt thanks, to sculptures, to in-person visits to our studio and the casting foundry. This is a community project—and the community is getting larger every day. By participating, you join other people who are MAKING A DIFFERENCE. Why not just save the world with art?
If we don't raise the entire amount during this time, we will begin the casting process and move forward with the sculpture with what we have. It is important enough to us that we will make it happen either way. Your help will allow us do it in a timely manner, as well as give you the opportunity to be a part of a the transformational power or art.
The Impact
The impact of this project will be a permanent memorial that commemorates the strength and resiliency of Newtown—as well as the compassion and hope of the world around Newtown. Our world is small, and we all have to share whatever love and support we can give.
As a sculptor who works in large format, Lorri has experienced the emotion of families and communities who place monuments in public spaces. She's watched people cry and laugh; she's read letters years later from those who have just then seen an important sculpture for the first time.
Monuments literally transform a physical space. They provide a gathering place, a positive aspect to history. All of us involved with this project can't wait to see this particular sculpture, which is called Peace, in this particular community. We can already feel it there.
Other Ways You Can Help
If this project speaks to you, then please share it! Link, Facebook, Tweet, chat, do whatever you can to spread the word. We already successfully accomplished our first collaborative phase of this project—helping school kids to fold paper origami cranes filled with "love notes" and sending them to Newtown. Word of our tiny town's efforts spread like wildfire across the country, and other kids and their schools also folded cranes. Let's do the same with this project! Spread the word. Spread the love.
Don't forget to use the Indiegogo share tools!
Thanks for your excitement about this. Join us in whatever way you can!
Phase One—December 2012
In cultures around the world, people have used the crane as a symbol of peace and hope—a way to soothe souls of their suffering. Following this tradition, children in Hill City, South Dakota—population 900—sent an irrefutable message of love to the
families in Newtown, Connecticut. They folded origami cranes—embedded with drawings or written prayers, wishes, and personal messages—intended as physical representations of what is impossible to say.
“Each crane is a representation of a prayer,” Lorri Acott said. “One person, one crane, one prayer.”
Bethel, Connecticut, is just minutes away from Newtown, and students in its high school also had started folding cranes, with the hope of creating one string of 1,000 cranes for each of Newtown’s 26 grieving families. Hill City’s cranes first flew to
Bethel to assist with that project—but the dream did not end there. Other communities around the country also provided their own crane “populations.”
“Art has a transformational quality,” Lorri said. “Art gives people a place to put their grief, sorrow, and pain—and a way to begin to transform it. Art gives both children and adults a way to share a silent prayer that cannot be adequately expressed in words—and if anyone needs our prayers right now, it’s the folks in Newtown.”
“This project is a tangible way that people can actually do something to help others—and themselves,” said Kristin Donnan Standard, president of the Hill City Arts Council, the organization that linked Lorri Acott to the school administration, the state arts council, and a video production company that volunteered its services. “This is art at its highest service.”
She said that folding cranes for a particular purpose reminded her of a traditional Native American practice of making prayer ties—in which tobacco is folded into small squares of cotton.
“You really focus your heart while you fold, whether it’s a crane or a tie,” she said. “And when you hang up a string of cranes, it’s like hanging Tibetan prayer flags. You’re putting your message out to God.”
The Legend of the Crane
This large and graceful bird is the subject of many legends, thanks to fables claiming that a single crane can live for a thousand years. The fossil record suggests that today’s cranes are probably relatives of the oldest birds on earth, which gives some credence to our human interpretations of their power of endurance.
More than a dozen species of crane inhabit five continents, with the most majestic standing five feet tall with a wingspan of more than seven feet.
The crane has been connected to ideas of joy and the celebration of life since Greek and Roman times, thanks to their association with Apollo, the sun god. Throughout Asia, the crane has symbolized happiness, eternal youth, longevity, and good fortune. In some legends, these powerful birds are said to carry a person to higher levels of spiritual consciousness—or a soul up to paradise.
If any bird has broad enough shoulders to carry messages of hope across the land, surely it is the crane—in the flesh or in paper. It is said that a thousand folded cranes, one for each year of the bird’s life, makes a wish come true.
“Art can help us heal,” Lorri says. “There are many examples of how art has been used to help people recover from traumatic events in the past. The crane project—both paper and bronze—is the vehicle we can use to help people who are so desperately in need of healing right now as a town, community, and country.”
The Team
LORRI ACOTT
A teacher for 25 years in elementary, junior high, and high school, Lorri taught in both general and art classrooms. She also taught children with emotional
and learning disabilities.
“When I taught in the elementary school, I remember all the wonderful things the first grade teachers did to help kids understand the concept of 100,” she said. “They collected things all year long—they laid out bottle caps, jelly beans, and pennies, one by one, so that a hundred could really be understood.”
As she folded practice cranes, in brightly colored origami squares, she asked, “What do a thousand prayers look like? What about ten thousand, or one hundred thousand, or a million? The only way we will know is by seeing them.”
Learn more about Lorri, and her partner, sculptor Adam Schultz, at www.DreamBigSculpture.com. Lorri's personal site is www.LorriAcott.com.
BLACK HILLS BRONZE
Just miles from the country’s largest and most renowned sculptures—Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorials—Black Hills Bronze offers full-service bronze casting to artists, businesses, organizations, industry, and the public. As avid supporters of using creativity to help unify and strengthen, we believe in making connections. We believe that creativity can heal us, individually, tribally, and as human beings. And we believe that it will take all of us, working together, to save the world.
Learn more at www.blackhillsbronze.com.
HILL CITY ARTS COUNCIL
The Hill City Arts Council has been called "the glue that holds Hill City together," and we accomplish loads of work each year thanks to the effort of a generous volunteer board. We host several significant events each year, and love supporting initiatives like Lorri Acott's idea for Newtown.
Learn more about our annual programming, as well as our partners and supporters, including: the South Dakota Arts Council; South Dakotans for the Arts; Arts Midwest, our regional contingent of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA); and the NEA itself at www.hillcityarts.org.
Join Us!
Prayers strung as paper—or bronze—cranes. The tiny village of Hill City in the Black Hills wants Newtown residents to know that more people love them than don’t, more people are good than bad, and although horrible things happen, there is still good in the world.
