For the fourth consecutive year, the Community Conversations series at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, OR, created a vital platform for participants to engage deeply through the arts, fostering connection, dialogue, and creative expression. Within this series, Hear My Voice stood out as a focused project centered on building community by creating a supportive and inclusive environment where individuals shared their lived experiences, identities, and values openly.

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My work facilitating Hear My Voice was grounded in a commitment to cultural competency, access, and authentic representation—principles essential to any initiative aiming to serve diverse communities meaningfully. By prioritizing collaboration and participatory practices within Hear My Voice, I strove to elevate voices that were often marginalized or overlooked. Authentic engagement, in my view, demanded more than passive viewing; it required active participation and co-creation. This approach aligned with contemporary curatorial theories emphasizing relational aesthetics and community-centered programming as pathways to social empowerment and transformation.

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As the facilitator of this project, I worked to amplify the literal voices of participants beyond traditional representation. Through storytelling and artistic practice, I encouraged individuals to articulate their social and civic identities, reclaiming agency over their narratives beyond institutional definitions of achievement or success. This process of vocal empowerment nurtured empathy, disrupted implicit biases, and fostered critical self-reflection, creating space for non-confrontational dialogue to thrive.

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Inspired by Hank Willis Thomas’s Truth Booth—an interactive platform designed to uplift public voices in their own terms—Hear My Voice embodied the imperative of hearing from communities rather than speaking for them. It embraced voice as a radical tool for empowerment and resistance, providing a space where participants could honestly and complexly narrate their realities.

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To challenge traditional hierarchical dynamics of portraiture and representation, Hear My Voice shifted creative control toward participants. By transforming recorded stories into visual forms like spectrogram prints, the project disrupted conventional power relations between curator, artist, and subject. While this shift was mediated by necessary technical processes, it marked an important step toward participatory authorship, inviting participants to shape how their identities and experiences were expressed and perceived.

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Ultimately, I viewed Hear My Voice as a model within the broader Community Conversations series for future initiatives that center community-driven creation and expression. It championed a curatorial vision grounded in inclusion, dialogue, and empowerment—recognizing the arts as a dynamic space for fostering social connection, nurturing diverse voices, and cultivating meaningful change.