—Arshia Simkin, The Underline
This December 20, on the eve of the shortest day of the year, an estimated 6,000 people are expected to gather in Downtown Hillsborough for the annual Solstice Lantern Walk and Market. They will bring with them lanterns in an astonishing array of sizes and shapes, including intricate Star Wars-themed ships, twinkling eyeballs, daisies, tentacles, and animals such as swans and jellyfish. The Solstice Walk began in 2015 when local Hillsborough artist and former Hillsborough Art Council (HAC) board member, Tinka Jordy, visited the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she met with a puppeteer who had also helmed a lantern walk in Cleveland. (Jordy is also one of the originators of Hillsborough’s beloved biannual Handmade Parade.) Inspired by her meeting in Cleveland, Jordy decided to bring the lantern walk to Hillsborough as a way to have an inclusive and nondenominational community event. Initially, Jordy thought that only a few dozen people would show up; however, as Jordy wrote in a comment for the HAC website, “When the online sign up sheet we created kept populating I thought it was some kind of glitch! Soon we had 1,960 participants signed up!”
As the Solstice Walk has grown in size and popularity over the past ten years, it has evolved: the winter market was introduced a few years ago as well as a requirement to register for the walk. The market component “allows us to support forty—if not more—local artists and bring tourism to the small businesses of Hillsborough, who similarly need that support during this colder, darker season,” said Ivana Beveridge, Communications Director for HAC. She also explained that the registration requirement is for safety reasons, grant reporting purposes and because the registration gives participants the opportunity to make an optional donation to the arts council. Heather Tatreau, Executive Director of HAC, emphasized that while registration for the walk is “completely free,” the optional donation goes toward supporting the work of the arts council, which includes putting on community events such as the Solstice Walk and Handmade Parade and in hosting Last Fridays arts walks, Makers Markets, and running a gallery and gift shop that features sixty local artists. As an additional perk of donating, this is the second year that event registrants can get an exclusive solstice-themed mug at the market, with original artwork by local artist Barbara Younger.
In the gear up to the Solstice Walk, the arts council offers free “make and take” workshops for participants to learn how to craft their own homemade lanterns; the last workshop of the season was held during the Last Friday event on November 28 and themed around “what home means to you.” The HAC Gallery & Gift Shop is also selling lantern kits and the HAC website has a page dedicated to “lantern resources” and guidelines for those who want to attempt to DIY a lantern. For those looking for something simpler, there are artist-made lanterns for sale at the gift shop.
Tatreau described the Solstice walk as “magical” and said, “The walk itself is so peaceful and the lanterns themselves keep growing.” She described the wonder of seeing lanterns such as last year’s “gigantic” lit-up “cat-head puppets,” led by Jordy and made by staff and board members of the Orange County Arts Commission with Eno Arts Mill artists. For Beveridge, the Solstice Walk is a reminder of one of the art council’s core tenants: to support emerging artists, including “people who don’t maybe self-identify as artists,” she said. She recalled being impressed with a recurring lantern at the festival—which she described as “a remarkable giant octopus made out of fabric”—and asking the maker of the lantern, a woman named Maureen Noh, if she’d be interested in leading a lantern-making workshop. Beveridge said, “Maureen just happened to be a doctor and did not identify as an artist at all…but she showed up and she did an incredible job leading other people through the process of making a bigger lantern and sparking that creative vision. And I just love to see that—I love people that really attach to and engage with this event as an outlier from the rest of their lives and it ends up being kind of a little sparkling reminder that everyone is an artist actually.”
> Learn more about the Solstice Lantern Walk and Market at https://www.hillsboroughartscouncil.org/solstice
> Follow the Hillsborough Arts on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/hillsborougharts/; on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/HillsboroughArtsCouncil/
> Sign up for the HAC newsletter at https://www.hillsboroughartscouncil.org/newsletter
