There’s No Place Like Home

The Adams County Arts Council’s 2024 People Project asks what “at home” means to participants.

 

Lisa Cadigan remembers working in the Midwest years ago after earning her master’s degree, wishing she had a similar yet more arts-related career closer to her native New Jersey.

Today, she has fulfilled those dreams. Lisa is the executive director of the Adams County Arts Council (ACAC), living in Gettysburg and doing her part to promote the arts. “It’s been a really serendipitous journey,” she says, citing her roles in marketing, graphic design and as a theater instructor in various capacities before landing at ACAC, initially as a board member in 2013, then continuing as a volunteer before joining the staff, then becoming the organization’s leader in 2022.

It was through that journey that she conceptualized The People Project, loosely based on a syndicated show called “Listen to Your Mother” in which individuals perform staged readings of their essays on the topic of motherhood.

Lisa embraced this simple idea and broadened the scope to include universal themes with the goal of getting a diverse group of people to participate. “When somebody tells you ‘This happened to me’ in the first person, you can’t argue with that—but you can learn something and maybe see something in a new way,” she explains.

Gettysburg College accepted Lisa’s initial pitch in 2017. The first People Project consisted of 10 students sharing stories of empathy and compassion, and, because of its successful debut, the college invited the project back for another performance year in 2018.

The project took a different approach in 2020, when the YWCA asked Lisa to highlight the stories of discrimination shared by community members. “We had an experimental year, when some of our stories were reenacted and others were in the first person,” she remembers. “I don’t think I would do reenactments again, but it was a learning experience, and they were important stories to tell—so I’m glad we did it. We got our performance done the weekend before the whole world shut down.”

That shutdown, of course, was due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this allowed for another unique opportunity: a virtual People Project asking middle and high school students how they were using creativity to cope with the challenges of the pandemic. This, in turn, led to another iteration of the project: incorporating visual and musical components. “It became more apparent that everyone has a story that’s important to tell, and some people are not going to get up and tell it in the first person, but they might tell it visually.”

This positive response coincided with PA Humanities offering grant funding for storytelling projects in 2022. Ultimately, ACAC received a sizeable grant that allowed for the expansion of The People Project, which included a video recap, an art exhibit and music.

The 2024 theme of “At Home in Adams County” came about from a discussion with Stacey Rice, who at the time was involved in SCCAP’s program of the same name. “Stacey did a lot of grant writing to help with housing and transportation issues,” Lisa explains. “But behind every number in these applications is a real person with a real story, and she felt it was really important that those stories be heard.”

The 2024 People Project will include 10 storytellers, two dance groups, three musicians and a five-panel public art installation to be featured on the outside of ACAC’s Art Education Center on South Washington Street. A visual arts component will also accompany the event with artwork displayed in the ACAC’s gallery space during the month of November.

“There’s no experience required to be part of this project,” Lisa says. “It’s all people who are living and working in Adams County and what home means to them.”

ACAC commissioned Gettysburg artist Sarah Jacobs to create the art panels. She worked with students from Lincoln Intermediate Unit 12’s Migrant Education Program for one panel and a group of senior women for another to capture their idea of “at home.”

With her guidance, the participants painted elements of their concepts, and Sarah pieced together those elements while adding her own interpretation based on their conversations. She used stories collected from the community as inspiration for the final three panels.

Like previous years, the 2024 theme of “at home” can be interpreted literally or metaphorically. And that begs the question: what makes Lisa feel at home in Adams County?

Lisa momentarily pauses while she collects her thoughts. “People in my life are what’s most important to making me feel at home. Family is really important to me. I have really good friends. I’ve been here 18 years,” she shares. “This is actually the longest I’ve ever lived in one place my whole life. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, so I love living here. I raised my kids here, and I’ve made some amazing friendships along the way. And it’s just continuing to evolve.”