Opening Our Eyes and Minds Through Art

Left to Right: Tim Hall, Shanelle Villegas, Veronica Robles, Feda Eid, and micah rose.

At Boston University, the Bloomberg Arts Internship Program hosted its Arts & Culture Panel featuring talented artists Feda Eid, Tim Hall, micah rose, and Veronica Robles. They showed us interns how they express themselves through their different forms of art. 

Feda Eid came from a Lebanese-American family that was more traditional; so, it was a little harder for her to creatively express her passion for heritage, tradition, and identity. She captures her art through photos that use bold colors, textiles, adornment, and pop culture that helps link the past to the present. Her art shows personal narratives to inspire everyone to feel the universal emotions that help connect with one another. 

Tim Hall is an award winning musician, performance poet, and producer from Detroit who shared a piece of himself by reading his own poem to us. He started writing poetry in college as a way to cope through hard times. Tim’s poems focused on the nuances of Blackness, masculinity, and the beauties of life. He made all of those poems into a self-published book called “Trust the Process”. He has also won many awards for his other forms of art, such as his music. 

micah rose is a Filipino who cherishes ancestral medicine, archival, and embodiment. They help gather artists make experiments to reach creative justice. They also prioritize lineages of queer divinity, taiko, and story circles as practices of community care. They showed us the importance of these things to them through dance. 

 Veronica Robles is a singer and musician from Mexico. She loved singing from a young age and started off her career by singing in public places as a teenager, which helped her realize how many people loved her and her voice. She is now a cultural icon for Boston’s Hispanic community and the founder of Boston’s first all-women mariachi band. She has performed in different places across the US, including singing for us at the panel. Veronica wants to raise awareness about how important diversity and culture is, leading her to employ the youth and teaching them about their roots and culture. 

By showing their backgrounds, passions, and goals to interns, these four panelists  helped open our eyes and minds to different cultures and social problems, and how all of those things can be expressed through art. 

Julia Phan is a 2023 alumni of the Bloomberg Arts Internship program.