My name is Lisa Gilliland Viney, and I am an artist from Atwater, California. I paint and show with a group called the Contemporary Humanitarian Artists Association, also known as CHAA. I am the education director for the Merced County Arts Council, which has its physical location at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center. Every day I am surrounded by art.

My origin box is a legacy box. My mom, Mae Shizuno Gilliland, worked on this box with me. She was born and raised in Lahaina, Hawaii, and she is third generation Japanese American. This is her origin story as well as mine.

My mom’s grandparents left Japan as teenage newlyweds looking for adventure. The found it on the beautiful island of Maui. My great grandfather worked for the sugar plantation. He built a house on a small plot of land in the middle of the sugarcane fields. The sugar mill in the center of Lahaina employed many of the town’s residents a that time.

On August 11th, 2023, Lisa’s mom lost everything in the Lahaina fire, except for her life, her purse and the clothes that she was wearing. Also lost, was the house that Lisa’s mom grew up in.

Lisa created a painting of the front porch of that house more than a decade ago for a CHAA show called “Topophilia”, a word that means love of place. On the porch of her grandma Toshi’s house, the mainland folk, as locals call them, meaning Lisa, her brother and sister, would meet with their Lahaina cousins to plan their daily adventures. The orchid sprays represent the many orchids that Grandma raised. Lisa painted Toshi’s place as an experiment to see if she could paint a memory. Now it truly is a memory.

In our origins box, paper cranes and cherry blossoms represent our cultural ties to Japan. The photos show some of the artwork of my after-school arts kids, who ranged in ages from 5 to 11 this year. On the easel, you can see a photo of my painting, Toshi’s Place.

Just as my grandmother tended to and raised her orchids, my mom also had a passion teaching children. Mom moved to the mainland to attend college and become an elementary school teacher. As a child, I remember seeing her classroom packed with students’ artwork, spilling out into the hallways and covering them with beautiful lines, shapes and colors.

After the Lahaina fire, mom came to live in Merced. At 89 years of age, she resides in an independent senior living facility where she has made many friends, and her rooms are filled with orchids.

I was that child in elementary school who could draw, but I also loved biology, and I earned a BA in biology and a PhD in therapeutic immunology, and then I worked as a research scientist.

My family moved to California when my husband was appointed to the faculty of UC Merced. At this point, we were a family of four, my husband, myself and our two daughters.

For the past two decades, I have worked as an Art Tree artist, teaching drawing and painting to kids throughout Merced County. I now run that program. Art Tree currently has nearly 40 artists who specialize in visual arts, theater arts, dance, music or cultural appreciation.

I have also painted murals and created ballet costumes for the Merced Academy of Dance. Three years ago, a tumor was discovered in my brain. Thankfully, on the day following my craniotomy, I was sitting up in bed and sketching views from the ICU windows at Stanford.

I met John G. Martin as I was preparing to teach one of my after-school arts classes. From all of my years of teaching kids art, I believe that the ability to draw is what defines whether or not children perceive themselves as artistic. But most people never learn to draw and then assume that they are not artists. But everyone can draw, they just need a teacher.

We all have origin stories, stories of our lives. At birth, we are open books, ready to write our stories. In today’s world threatened by hatred and division, it is vital that we come together, share, appreciate our differences and learn from each other.