In 2019, I spent a day with Yolande Van Herdeen, an expat South African whose path serendipitously led her to Greenwood, Mississippi. When I met her in 2019, Yolande was serving as the artist-in-residence at ArtPlace Mississippi, a community art center in downtown Greenwood offering classes and programs for all ages. What stayed with me from that visit wasn’t just the art itself, but the way Yolande explained the unique role ArtPlace plays in Greenwood.

Greenwood has 15 schools- public, private, religious. For a town of 13,600 people, that’s a lot. Each school has its own community with its own activities, sports and events. Add that to the dozens of churches in town, the many neighborhoods and private clubs, and it becomes clear why it can be such a real challenge to cross paths with people outside your own school, church, club, or neighborhood.

And so ArtPlace functions as a kind of bridge where youth from all schools, regardless of their art experience, can come and hang out and maybe get to know each other in the creative environment as well as teens in the teen art club (and the Grown Folks Art Club if you’re adult). In a town where cultures often run in parallel without ever crossing, places like this are rare. And they matter, deeply.

THE SEWING ROOM. This room is where the magic happens. Yolande started a sewing program at Art Place because she “loves to make fun joyful stuff in a non-traditional way.”  She taught kids and adults alike how to sew, and along the way shared her love of quilting.

At the end of the first quilting workshop, she asked everyone to write a reflection about their quilt and what it symbolized to them.  They could write one sentence, or a paragraph or a whole page. The responses were powerful, insightful and remarkable-- one of the students wrote that her quilt made her feel like home. A 12 year old student wrote, "It reminds me of my great grandma." A Pennsylvanian transplant who made an improvisational quilt said “I thought I was going to use math and make a traditional quilt, instead Yolande asked me to make poetry”.

One year, she launched Project Runway—free sewing workshops that culminated in students designing and modeling their own clothing at a community-wide celebration. The program grew quickly: nine students the first year, eighteen the next, and by the third year, seventy-four kids were strutting down the runway. The graduations became big, can’t-miss events. One unforgettable moment came when a 14-year-old named Marlin debuted a West African–inspired jacket. At the end of the runway, he flipped the jacket open, dropped into the splits, and leapt back up to cheers. The crowd went wild—and not long after, Marlin launched a small business of his own.

But the real magic happens in the hours spent sewing together. In the afterschool classes, kids trade phone numbers, catch up, and miss each other when they’re apart. One year was especially hard, marked by a rash of school shootings. Yolande remembered it this way:

‘We make things, we work side by side, we laugh, and I let them just be kids. Once they settle into sewing, they love to sit and gossip and chat—it’s so sweet. But they also bring their problems, and we work through those too. That year, a 12-year-old boy was shot, and the kids in my class were his best friends. They came to sewing heartbroken, traumatized. So we talked about it, they talked with each other, and they said what they needed to say. And then, when they were ready—they sewed.’