Since childhood, Crystal Meneses has been keenly in tune with her intuitive nature, a side of her personality she’s nurtured through music, spiritual study, and in her work as a teacher, chaplain, and a death doula. Now, the Lincoln City interdisciplinary artist is weaving all of it together in an art exhibit, A Thousand Hands, opening with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. April 4 in the Newport Visual Arts Center and running through May 25.  She will lead a workshop, sponsored by Oregon Humanities, on art and spiritual healing on May 24 in the arts center.

I talked with Meneses about the exhibit, which celebrates Asian American Pacific Islander Month and is “inspired by her devotion to harmony in community and her deep spiritual relationship with Kuan Yin, the deity of compassion and mercy.” Her comments have been lightly edited for clarity.

In the past few years, you and I have talked about your Last Words Project, about cemetery concerts, and your efforts to get the lyrics changed to the state song, Oregon, My Oregon — among other ventures. Tell us how you came to this latest undertaking.

Meneses: I’m always on a spiritual path of discernment. It’s my death doula work, my hospice chaplain work, my visual arts work, and my music. I’ve always wanted to weave those together, but I noticed in my chaplaincy work, I’m seeing a lot of pain and suffering in the world, and people seem scared to give themselves permission to cope or create through their own spiritual discernment. I’ve met so many people that come to me, and they’ll say, “I want to make art, but I don’t think I’m good enough to make art,” or “I don’t have a natural ability to make art.” So, it’s just all those different things coming together. I want to inspire people to create art for spiritual discernment.

How do you do that?

It’s all art divination. It’s showing the paintings I create from my art divination practice. I have pieces that are interactive and multi-sensory and in mediums including fire, guava leaf, egg, water, candle, and spirit. I’m inviting people in to do their own art divination through the pieces that I create.

Can you talk about your growth as an artist.

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I was classically trained. I started really young, and so I was in audition groups. I got to travel for competition and from a very young age art and music was about accomplishment, perfection, and being good at it. And so, I went along that path. When I started to hear what I call whispers, it was about using art in a different way.

We were singing at Doernbecher [Children’s] Hospital for Christmas, and I heard voices say, “You have to sing out today.” And when you’re a choral singer, you don’t sing out, you blend. It’s about being together.

My choral teacher didn’t even know I’d stayed behind — they were loading the bus. A mom pulled me into a room, and she said, “Will you sing for my daughter?” I didn’t know her daughter was in a coma. But something in me just felt this enormous amount of love for this child and I started singing Silent Night … and she woke up. I was 17. So, I came from being classically trained and this miracle happened in my life, and it was really saying, music can be used, art can be used for something else.

How has that informed the artist you’ve become?

I’m always leaning into these gifts of creativity. I see miracles all the time and I just want to bring more attention to that, because it makes me deeply sad and irritated that our art sector has made art such a binary narrative — that it’s either good art or bad art. What happened to meaningful art or art that connects people?  When I’m making art with people, it’s not about what it looks like. It’s not about getting this exterior approval. It’s about what did it feel like to make it; what’s the story?

This exhibit is greatly influenced by Kuan Yin. What can you tell us about the deity?

The Thousand-Hand Kuan Yin (also spelled Guanyin) is a famous representation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in East Asian Buddhism. This depiction is known for its many arms, symbolizing the bodhisattva’s ability to reach out and help countless beings in need. The Thousand Hands represent the infinite compassion and ability to assist numerous beings at once. The eyes on the palms symbolize wisdom and the ability to see the suffering of all beings. Multiple heads symbolize omniscient awareness; mudras and ritual implements symbolize the various ways Guanyin offers guidance and relief.

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Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your art and its connection to your Filipino spiritual practices?

I bring my spiritual Filipino practices into my art divination work. My art comes from my memories, visions, prayers, meditations, imagination, and intuition. When I was in the Philippines, my sister got sick, and my family called the witch doctor — something that was common in the Philippines. That experience became one of my first spiritual memories and inspired my work….

For this exhibit, I created 100 wax sculptures inspired by the Filipino practice of “pagtunaw ng kandila” (melting of the candle). I invite people to pick them up, take photos, and practice their own art divination. I prompt them: “What do you see in the wax?” Each wax sculpture is connected to a Kuan Yin poem, and I will have art supplies available for people to create what comes to them.

There is also a role for local students in the exhibit. Tell us about that.

I travel and guide workshops where communities create mosaic pieces that come together into one large collective artwork. For my recent mosaic commission at Holgate Library [in Portland], over 1,000 people participated in creating the mosaic with me.

For this exhibit, I’m visiting different coastal organizations and schools where children are making water patterns that will be installed at the Visual Arts Center in Newport, contributing to my mosaic of Kuan Yin. This mosaic, called A Thousand Hands, represents Kuan Yin’s thousand hands of compassion. Through this project, the children are not just making art — they are practicing compassion through creativity. Their waves of kindness, like the ocean, will come together to form something greater than themselves.

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