Art Beat: nurturing creative nature

Hi, my name is Jacob Mann. I cover the Art Beat for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.

Stories start in many different ways. This one started at a new music festival in the fall of 2017, and ended in a living room in downtown Palmer, where the festival founder’s children were attending to their homework in 2021.

I met Devon Shaw on a hot summer day in the middle of AK Rhymefest, a music festival that he created from the ground up. Shaw is a local rapper that grew up in the Valley and graduated from Palmer High School. He’s around the same age as me, and we both know what it’s like growing up around here.

I grew to like Shaw right as we started talking. As he explained his vision to unite local artists across genres and build up the local music scene, I realized that his train of thought is exactly what we need out here. His efforts and the similar efforts around the Valley is what pushes us forward as a community.

Fast forward to 2021 and I’m talking to a local artist who dedicated her time and energy to painting 20 unique portraits of MyHouse clients for a fundraising auction benefiting the organization. I asked here what she enjoyed most about the creative process, and she said,

“What I really enjoy is like if I made a painting and someone said, ‘wow, I walk by that everyday and I never saw it like that before.’ You know? Just being able to show people the beauty I might see. Sometimes it’s overlooked or we’re too busy.”

About a week later, I interviewed Shaw for my weekly Creative Q&A article at his apartment in downtown Palmer. We’ve become good friends over the years, so I’ve been in and out of his home on countless occasions. I’ve watched his newborn daughter grow into a talkative little girl able to navigate through an iPhone.

Shaw’s resolve to establish something bigger than himself has only strengthened through his exposure to fatherhood. As his kids worked on their homework and hung out with their uncle in the living room, Shaw took an important call for one of his various projects down the hall, I smiled looking down at his daughter’s big brown eyes.

I’ve always believed in the power of art as a holistic necessity for any place with living, whether people realize it or not. It can subtly play in the background of everyone’s life, but as I ponder these connected happenings, I acknowledge its existence and stand in awe of its cosmic wonder.

To foster our own, no matter what their creative pursuit looks like is the key to our salvation, if such a thing exists. If there is an answer, surely it’s among the poetic voices, the artistic toils of our neighbors, more over their children and the landscape brushed before them.

Every time I talk to Shaw about the early days, when he was first getting involved with music and finding his voice, he brings up his former music teacher Stanley Harris. Before he started a hip hop group called United the North, before starting an annual music festival attended by hundreds of people, there Harris. Harris recognized Shaw’s natural talent and went out of his way to nurture it.

“Shout out to Stanley Harris, Palmer High School. He gave us our first studio, and he was actually the first person to really believe in us back then… He taught me the basics of recording… I give much respect to Mr. Harris. There wouldn’t be a UTN without Mr. Harris,” Shaw said.

What we needed for a more diverse and connected music scene was already here the whole time. The land was there. The people were ready to come. The talent was already queued up. It was just a matter of someone taking a moment to look at an empty lot filled with gravel and dirt, and see something much more than that, the whisper of an idea that echoes louder and louder until it becomes a roaring din of people applauding for the final act of the night before wandering back to their tents. He saw a vast and glowing network of voices across the state that could be connected, if only there were a conduit, a stage, a unifying light.

“You should take pride in music that’s where you’re from... It’s a symbol of a strong community... I believe music is just another voice... We are the northern light. Music is the voice,” Shaw said.

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman reporter Jacob Mann at jacob.mann@frontiersman.com