Lisa sings and plays with The Therapy Sisters, Nonviolent Austin, and The Raging Grannies. Creativity, music, and social justice are her current trinity. thetherapysistersmusic.com
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Lisa joins us as a featured guest during the 2025 Artists Salon Series on Monday, April 14, 2025, from 7 pm – 9 pm, on Zoom. You can learn more about the salons and find the registration link to attend here.
Yohan Montozzi-Wood (any pronouns) is a theater-maker, singer-songwriter, and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Theater Studies at Duke University. Their embodied research explores Black queer performance and post-dramatic theater, weaving together ritual, ecology, and jazz aesthetics. Johann is currently developing Grandfathered In, a concept album and devised theater project that investigates biraciality, ancestral grief, migration, and queer resilience through a pastiche of original music, acrobatics, and drag performance. https://yohansol.com
Follow on Instagram @yohanstudios
Yohan joins us as a featured guest during the 2025 Artists Salon Series on Monday, April 7, 2025, from 7 pm – 9 pm, on Zoom. You can learn more about the salons and find the registration link to attend here.
Simone Monique Barnes, Wildflower’s Director of Membership and Spiritual Life, hosts an annual gathering of artists and creative thinkers for virtual living room-style conversations, in the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance. This six-week salon series of artist-led, artist-centered conversations uses a mix of art, music, poetry, dance, essays, film, current events, and/or spiritual texts as springboards for dialogue and community.
Salons are open to anyone, especially those who self-identify as an artist (in any visual, performing arts, literary, or other creative expression), art lover, or as a creative thinker. You do not need to be a professional artist to attend a salon.
Held on Monday evenings, March 24 through April 28, 2025, on Zoom.
During these salons we focus on the artist, rather than solely on their artwork, engaging in conversations that artists want to discuss, such as imagination, creating during hard times, survival, rejection, criticism, racism, oppression, the creative process, fear, artistic expression, developing new work, spirituality, faith, religion, and more.
This year’s theme is Keeping Pace, inspired by the poetic words of Kahlil Gibran (b. 1883 – d. 1931): “You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth,” which is a line from the poem “On Work” in The Prophet in which Gibran reminds us that “Work is love made visible.”
Join us for one or more of the six Monday Virtual Artists Salon dates, held from 7pm – 9pm Central Time, on Zoom.(Note: The first 30 minutes are for checking in, getting settled, and socializing. The salon topic of conversation begins at 7:30 pm CT.)
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/NSu0XJYdSsuZdBAVhP6JYw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Mondays, 7 PM Central Time
The artist salon is a day off, not a day on for artists. There is no expectation of performance or art exhibition. There is no expectation to talk about “the work.” The salons are an invitation for artists to participate in conversations with other artists, art lovers, and creatives about topics they are interested in.
In many Christian traditions, Lent is a solemn forty-day period of self-examination, reflection, spiritual discipline, fasting and prayer leading to Easter. The word “Lent” comes from the Old English “lencten,” referring to Spring and the “lengthening” of days that occurs at this time of year.
In the book The Cross and The Lynching Tree, Black Liberation theologian James H. Cone writes about how it was artists who pushed the Church into social change during the Harlem Renaissance. “Most black artists were not church-going Christians. Like many artists throughout history, they were the concerned human beings who served as society’s ritual priests and prophets, seeking out the meaning of the black experience in a world defined by white supremacy. As witnesses to black suffering, they were in the words of African American literary critic Trudier Harris, “active tradition-bearers of the uglier phases of black history.””
This Artists Salon Series honors artists, as a whole, as society’s ritual priests, prophets, and tradition-bearers who demonstrate our understanding of people’s experiences. In this series, the Artist’s Lent is an inter-religious, spiritual season of creative reflection, self-examination, reading, meditation, and connection.
As Cone notes, “More than anyone, artists demonstrate our understanding of the need to represent the beauty and the terror of our people’s experiences.”
“Artists force us to see things we do not want to look at because they make us uncomfortable with ourselves and the world we have created.”
This year’s series extends past the season of traditional season Lent, as we explore together the experience and themes of transformation.
Faithful dissent is our theological inheritance. Today’s Unitarian Universalism emerges from a heritage of dissenting churches that is hundreds of years old, a tradition of faithful people who grounded their religious living in how best to be of service to one another. We have a long history of holding our values collectively and living them in community.
Today, many of the institutions and ideals that our Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist forbearers worked for across our long history are under attack – including public schools, children’s access to learning supports, protections for individual rights, and the value of diversity and pluralism in society at large.
In such times, communal care matters perhaps more than ever. Communal care is the living promise of faith communities; it encompasses all that we offer to each other and all that might come into being because of our choices. Communal care is also how we work for justice; how we teach one another and learn together.
Communal care calls us to become good ancestors, to provide a foundation of love and justice that will sustain those who are yet to come. And so, we must continue our theological tradition of dissent – as it emerges in our legal strategy to protect the most vulnerable and in our continued commitment to community building even amid the anxiety-inducing chaos intentionally created to rob us of our hope and demoralize us with fear.
Let us rise on the efforts of our ancestors and heed the call of generations yet to come. There is much faithful work to do today in our Unitarian Universalist congregations and communities. Find resources for this time at the link below:
This week, we celebrate the ten-year work anniversary of our Office Administrator, Lin McKissick!
As the office administrator, Lin is often the first voice, face, or email people connect with at Wildflower. Her work maintains that connection, as she serves our congregation in so many ways, often behind the scenes, but never unnoticed. She is supportive of all our teams, our staff, our Board, our lay leaders, and our community partners. And she knows our congregation and our neighbors by name. Her many years of service and commitment to our congregation and the community help to create an environment for everyone to grow spiritually together, spreading love, justice, and joy.
Sign our thank you card for Lin.
