Love Letters in Light Documentary Produced in partnership with LA County Library and WE RISE
Plant your sorrow in the soil. Next year it will grow into a set of oars.
-Victoria Chang
From top: féi hernandez, Victoria Chang, Jerry Quickley, Yesika Salgado, Imani Tolliver, Leila Hamidi, and Skye Patrick, LA County Library Director
Detail of “Grass grew undisturbed. Deer grazed unfettered. I, too, lived wild.” Poem by Benin Lemus, displayed at Rosemead Library, May 27, 2021 for Love Letters in Light, curated by Leila Hamidi.
Love Letters in Light was a public poetry project that I curated and produced in May of 2021 in partnership with LA County Library and WE RISE, an annual event of the LA County Department of Mental Health that uses the power of creative expression to strengthen our individual and collective wellbeing. During Mental Health Awareness Month in May, scrolling LED signs were installed on the exterior of ten library buildings throughout the County. The content for the signs, short messages of love of fifteen words or less, presented in both English and Spanish, was produced by a core group of five writers—Victoria Chang, féi hernandez, Jerry Quickly, Yesika Salgado, Imani Tolliver—and a public open call that received over 1,100 submissions.
A short 15-minute film, directed by Natalija Vekic & Christian Bruno (Electric Park Films), documents the month-long public art project. The film, which interviews all of the core contributors as well as LA County Library director Skye Patrick, Library Journal’s 2019 Librarian of the Year, is unflinchingly honest about the heartbreaks and hopes of a County that was the epicenter of the first wave of COVID-19 outbreaks, and deeply impacted by the ensuing social uprisings.
To learn more about the Love Letters in Light public art project and read select short poems, click HERE.