participate

Broad Street Ministry cares about many things. Food and nourishment are some of the most important of them. Another passion we share is art. To celebrate the building of the new kitchen and all it represents, Alison Dilworth (the artist whose creativity put the iconic origami swallows in flight through BSM’s cathedral space) is creating and installing a multimedia mural that will encompass the names of all who help bring this dream to life.

[your name here] 
We want you to be a part of this creative work. The multimedia mural will incorporate the names of every person who donates or contributes to the kitchen project. This is more than just a kitchen. This project will have an impact of the life of our community. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to create a work of art that speaks to everything this project represents: abundance, generosity, hope, community, …and you.
Click here to donate.

Alison Dilworth - artist

A few years ago, I was given the opportunity to design the “Fall to Flight” installation in the Sanctuary of Broad Street Ministry.  I gathered handwritten prayers from the community, folded them into origami swallows, and suspended them with invisible thread through a passage of windmills formed by Dayton Castleman’s “Tilting at Giants“.  A homeless man wandered into the church while I was up on the scaffolding, hanging birds, and gasped, “My prayer is up THERE? Which one is it?”  The meaning of the work unfolded over time, through the slow reading of anonymous prayers, to funerals held beneath the birds, to moments where people who feel invisible on the streets can look up and know they are here.

Now I have the opportunity to create a work of art that is becoming more than just a painting to me.  We are building a kitchen, which has long symbolized the heart of a home.  The heart of this home will generate warmth and food for countless people who are hungry for a good meal, and a place to be.  This mural is a gesture of gratitude to those who are able to help attain the very practical goal of building a kitchen that will feed the hungry; donor names will be inscribed into the work.  This project is born of generosity, and would not happen otherwise.  The mural will be painted along the back of the stage in the room where meals are held, and community events are held; the concept of focus is the passage from suffering to freedom.  This painting is for a diverse community of people.  Some of these people have nowhere else to go.  Some of these people spend their holidays alone, are without family, have come to a place where they’re just trying to hold things together long enough to get through one day and onto the next.  Some of these people are children.  Some of these people are students.  Some of these people are successful by the standards of society.  Some of these people feel broken and some of these people feel whole.  Some look ahead and some are mired to the past.  The point is, we all have stories trailing behind us, and in this place, I want a work of art that acknowledges those stories and the power of transcendence that is right here with each of us, as it has been all along.

- Alison Dilworth