The Lilla Jewel Award – named in honor of artist, feminist, and suffragist Lilla Jewel – was created nearly 30 years ago to support and amplify Oregon-based artists of marginalized genders who use their art as a tool for activism and advance social justice messages.
The Lilla Jewel Award Committee and Seeding Justice is excited to announce our 2024 Lilla Jewel Awardees:
Crystal Meneses is an interdisciplinary artist who activates community arts making and collective healing to inspire social change. She is a composer, choral conductor, death doula, and hospice chaplain that practices therapeutic based healing arts. Crystal’s work ranges from youth arts civic engagement organizing, nonprofit leadership, muralist/painter, to a singing hospice chaplain. The common themes of Crystal’s work is addressing isolation through healing arts practices. Her work is intergenerational and rooted in her cultural values of fluid collectiveness. The Augmented Reality Singing Mural, Underground Shanghai Concerts, Intergenerational Music Programming at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility and the Last Words Cemetery Concert Series are some of her notable community healing projects.
Learn more at activateartsnow.com
Yanely Rivas Maldonado (she/they) is a working-class printmaker, cultural worker, and visual storyteller with ancestral roots amongst the mountains of Michoacán, Mexico —lands traditionally steward by the Purépecha. They come from a lineage of campesinos, merchants, and an abuela who was a partera (birth worker) in her village.
Her art practice has been sowed in community and has flourished in the versatile soil of social justice movements and solidarity efforts she’s been a part of over the last decade. Their art is an offering and prayer for a world where we are all beautifully free and interconnected, living in good relationship with the lands, waters, and beings that so graciously nourish our hearts. They create artwork to weave us across the continuum of past-present-future and to leave seeds of ancestral memory, resistance, joy, and hope along the path back to center —back to home.
Yanely is inspired by so many creative mediums ranging from basket weaving, printmaking, digital illustration, watercolor, and protest art that lives in the hands of community. She is finding happiness in the ability to collectively tend to Mother Earth and promote the preservation of Indigenous lifeways, culture, and our overall well-being through traditional arts programming at the Anahuac Farm of the CAPACES Leadership Institute.
Learn more at yanelyrivas.com. Photo by Luis Francisco Osuna Ham
