For those of you that missed it, we had an incredible event in Salem on Saturday the 15th. For the second year, Rayme Pullen and a team of incredible volunteers from the Salem Community and abroad pulled off a very special event which we are privileged to sponsor. You’ll find a gallery of event photos below following this beautiful introductory speech by the Mayor of Salem, Brandie Garner.

“Good evening, everyone and welcome to the Salem Community Arts Showcase.

Tonight, these walls are filled with something rare: the work of our neighbors—the painter down the street, the quilter from your kid’s school, the photographer you’ve passed a hundred times without knowing what they carry with them. Each piece here started as an idea and became something we now get to share together, in one room, at the same time.

In a time when things can feel uncertain or overwhelming, art has a way of feeding our soul in ways little else can. It gives shape to what we feel but can’t always say, and it reminds us we’re not alone in feeling it. It doesn’t just nourish us, it changes the community around it. The writer Toni Morrison put it best when she said: ‘This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.’

That’s what’s happening around you tonight… Salem, speaking to itself, through its artists.

None of this happens on its own, though. I want to take a moment to thank the Salem Community Arts Showcase Committee and the Cultural Foundation of Harrison County. The people who spent months planning, organizing, and pulling this evening together behind the scenes. Their work rarely gets seen, but everything you’re enjoying tonight exists because of it. Thank you to the artists that are here tonight for their strength in sharing a piece of themselves.

So take your time. Talk to the people who made this work. Ask them questions. Thank you for being part of a community that still shows up for its artists.

Welcome, and enjoy the showcase.”