In honor of the seventh year of recognizing World Refugee Day, the HOME Refugee Steering Committee at the Lynden Sculpture Garden is hosting a series of free, family-friendly outdoor events that celebrate Milwaukee’s refugee communities through art, food, fashion and performance.
This year’s theme for the event is “Walking Together, Weaving the World.”
The celebration will launch Friday, the day the United Nations has designated as World Refugee Day, at Milwaukee City Hall from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. The event, co-hosted with the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families – Bureau of Refugee Programs, will include a children’s art exhibit, performances of music and dance, poetry from refugee communities, hands-on art making activities and food trucks.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The Lynden Sculpture Garden’s World Refugee Day celebrations continue with a series of events on the garden’s grounds, 2145 W. Brown Deer Road, River Hills.
“When I opened Lynden to the public in 2010, I was really interested in creating a kind of laboratory for the community and seeing how people wanted to use the place,” Executive Director Polly Morris said. “It was fundamental that it was a place of welcome.”
The events, which are free and open to the public, are as follows:
- World Refugee Day Community Celebration, June 22 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• Home Family Workshop Day and Bombazo, July 19 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Home Citizenship Celebration, Aug. 9, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The Lynden Sculpture Garden’s focus on World Refugee Day stemmed from initial work with Black artists from across the country who had come in for summer residencies, Morris said.
“People working with resettlement agencies and other groups in the city would often bring refugees up to work with these artists because a lot of traditional crafts like batik are common across a lot of cultures,” she said.
Then, in 2019, Kim Khaira, an artist-in-residence from Malaysia, proposed organizing a World Refugee Day celebration.
World Refugee Day honors people who have been forced to flee their home countries and takes place every June 20. The first World Refugee Day, in 2001, commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention. It was originally known as Africa Refugee Day, before the United Nations General Assembly officially designated it as an international day in December 2000.
“It’s part of our general belief in the importance of creating spaces of welcome that people feel comfortable in and can reimagine in ways that are important to them,” Morris said. “A lot of refugee organizations in the city are nationality, ethnicity or religion based. At Lynden, they can make their cultures legible to each other. That’s always been a great attraction because people want to share their cultures. Having people representing all these different communities, it becomes very celebratory and joyful for people.”
The program isn’t focused just on refugees but on displaced populations in general, she said.
“We’re focusing on how we can work together across boundaries at a time when people feel under threat and there’s an effort being made to isolate people,” Morris said.
Last year, Lynden added a naturalization ceremony to its refugee celebration in partnership with Community Center for Immigrants.
“We naturalized 55 people last summer,” Morris said. “It’s a big deal and we’ll do that again in August.”
