On July 17 Kristin Sisco opened her doors to a deliciously delightful contemporary French bakery on Mercer Island. The SZ Team worked closely with Kristin and her Landlord, Ken Dayton, in transforming the previous Pho restaurant into this inviting indoor/outdoor Parisian corner of our Town Center. Congratulations Kristin for realizing your vision, your dream! We’re proud to have played a supporting role & wish La Fête sweet success.
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‘The world’s perception of African and black communities is not always their reality. So many misconceptions and prejudices are born from these limited points of view. This is why we believe in authentic representation.”
PICHA is a stock image company that specializes in African images and showcasing African photographers. We worked with them on our [linked] AfroFuturism and Skin gallery exhibits, and were amazed at the wealth of talent they brought to the table. Now we proudly join with them again in their new endeavor: VisualActivist.me.
VisualActivist.Me is an inclusive campaign that invites Afro-descendants and Africans to be part of a movement for visual diversity and equal representation in online media. Their goals? To create an online visual archive championing the diversity of people of African descent all over the world, and to forward the #RepresentationMatters movement and give all our people the chance to become a visual activist.
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If you’re anything like me, the past few months you’ve been spending a lot more time at home. Also, if you’re anything like me, the home that you have found yourself spending that time in now happens to be your office, school, exercise gym, art studio, sourdough bread bakery…As we are all now acutely aware, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed every facet of our lives, including the relationship that we have with our home environments.
Being at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week, our homes are now being asked to be something that they were never designed to be: functional multi-purpose spaces that accommodate numerous activities simultaneously and seamlessly. And in its current form, my home is failing at the task. We just didn’t foresee needing two dedicated work spaces for adults, as well as room to play and learn for two kids… and that’s not even mentioning the fourth pet we adopted early in the pandemic. With work-from-home and school-from-home guidelines in place for a seemingly indefinite time, it is time to make our homes the multi-tasking spaces they have the potential to be.
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On Tuesday, August 4th, a massive blast rocked Beirut's port when tons of improperly stored ammonium-nitrate were ignited by a fire in the storage facility. Within 24 hours of the explosion the death toll already numbered more than 130 people, approximately 5,000 injured and hundreds of thousands left homeless. This man-made disaster also came at a time of ongoing political and deep financial crisis in the tiny nation that is also home to the world's largest per-capita population of refugees, my Palestinian family included.
The Lebanese are resilient but also exhausted. Beirut is broken, more than ever before. They need help from our international community. Please lend your support in any way you are able.
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