Lori Greene is a mosaic artist living in Minnesota. She spoke to Sojourners' Jenna Barnett about creating the first permanent memorial to sexual violence survivors in the United States.
“WHEN SARAH Super asked if I would help create a memorial to survivors of rape and sexual assault, I said ‘yes’ immediately. I’m also a survivor, so it was a no-brainer. Burying pain will not help us recover.
The memorial [in Minneapolis] is painful, but it’s not just pain. I call the first [of the five] panels ‘Sorrow.’ A person in red is curled up in the snow. It’s dark; there are trees everywhere. In panel two are two figures: the same figure, who is clearly crying, and a purple figure holding them. There’s a little sunrise on the horizon. We have a memorial to Holocaust victims. We have the new lynching memorial. And these things are making a difference.
In panel three, the original figure has a red dress on, symbolic of murdered and missing native women. Two women are helping her stand. It’s dawn and the trees are budding. In the fourth panel, the woman is walking and strong. It’s midsummer. She has a fist—she’s confident, [but] also ready to protect herself.
We call the fifth panel ‘The Ancestors.’ It’s all of the people hurt in the past who weren’t able to speak their truth. The figure is holding the hand of a woman in a wheelchair. I used to work in a nursing home with a woman who had cerebral palsy. She had been raped. She was nonverbal, so she told me what had happened by spelling it out on a board. I have never forgotten.
The Survivors Memorial feels like a sacred site. For the entire eight months it took to build, I burned sage every morning and said a prayer for the people that would see it—a prayer of healing. A prayer of love. A prayer of safety.”
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