Transforming Hell Strips into Health Strips

Saturday, August 19, 4-6 p.m.
Stiles African American Heritage Center
2607 Glenarm Place, Denver CO 80205

Honoring the Colorado Council of Black Nurses
Featuring paintings by Jacqueline Withers
Inaugurating the new installation on Bessie Coleman

Join us in celebrating 50 years of the Colorado Council of Black Nurses!

Board member and former nurse, Jacqueline Withers will share her artwork and the new installation she helped create featuring Bessie Coleman, the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot's license. Jacqueline founded the Fly Girls and Boys Bessie Coleman Denver Chapter of Take Flight Leadership Aviation as an organization that helps teach leadership and aviation skills to teens. Taking a holistic approach to health, she feels that confident, well-rounded individuals who have a strong sense of their own identity will thrive as healthy members of our communities.

Jacqueline Withers is the first of a series of community-based visual artists who will install temporary works in the Stiles African American Heritage Gardens as part of the P.S. You Are Here program supported by Denver’s Arts & Venues. Her site-specific garden works will be installed in the fall of 2023 and stay in place for a year.

Artist talk at 4:30 p.m.

Transforming hell strips into “Health Strips”
After pulling out three layers of weedcloth last winter, the Stiles African American Heritage Center has opened ground to revive living soils, the foundation of life. Through this project, they installed vertical stones, allowing water to penetrate the deep roots of the small but growing collection of first season medicinal plants, now adapting to dry steppe conditions. Saturday, Aug. 19, the Stiles African American Heritage Center will sow native grass seeds to offer winter shelter for pollinators like bumble bees and butterfly larvae. They will also give away some of the abundant Russian Sage we planted with Grace Stiles thirty years ago in hopes other ‘hell strips’ may be revived into Health Strips.