Tadia Lynch’s first-person account of her experiences in New Orleans, Louisiana, after catastrophic Hurricane Katrina struck was shared in Our Time Press, September 2005.
Miss Lynch had travelled there with her mom — and violin — ready to enter Loyola University as a freshman. Her 8,000-word description of those harrowing few days, and how she and Mrs. Lynch arrived back home with the most important things they took with them, evoke great emotion, still. With us and readers.
The young writer-musician-scholar’s disclosure of how, during the rough “storm” swirling within the overcrowded Superdome, she thought of music. It kept her sane and tough; she handed over her last orange and a bottle of water to people she felt needed them more than she did. She held up an elder, weak, lame and treading the dome floor carefully.
Today, 20 years later, Ms. Lynch is deputy director of the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning (J-CAL). She is an arts and culture programs specialist, writer, and curator “working in the ethos of arts democratization in both traditional and unconventional art spaces.”
Through her work, according to the website, Ms. Lynch “explores the relationship between artist, space, and audience, fostering deeper communal connectivity.”
Following is Ms. Lynch’s response to Our Time Press queries:
On the Role of the Arts in Life:
Through the Arts, we have an insurmountable capacity to process, communicate, and regulate our emotions. As a transcendent language between each other and sometimes even more so within ourselves, we can convey what is inexpressible through all common tongues.
On Creativity:
To create is to be in constant negotiation with the self and to give agency to our most vulnerable states of grief, healing, and joy. Every note, brush stroke, step in a dance, phrase and/or word is stitch in the wound of our trials.
On inheritance and investment:
My parents’ purchase of my violin in 2000 was a “conscious investment.”
The Violin shaped my childhood. It was how I learned discipline, patience, confidence, and even love. I am beyond grateful to the confidence my family had in my passion to play. The physical instrument is the embodiment of the unwavering support I have from them and even from those who have transitioned.
On Music: Music lives within us always, as long as we make space for it. Children need only the space and encouragement to explore it.
Did you ever produce the concert you had planned once you and your mom arrived home?
I believe the concert you are referring to was produced by Patricia Robinson, who runs the Patricia F. Robinson Music School, formerly known as the Stuyvesant Music School. It was founded in 1930 by her mother L. Elsie Graham. Along with helping me in a great moment of upheaval over the last three decades, Patricia has consistently offered support to young artists through concerts and scholarship opportunities.
Ms. Lynch is a 2025 DVCAI Curatorial Fellow, an alumnus of the Institute for Nonprofit Practice (INP) Leadership Program and holds an MBA in Arts and Cultural Management from the Paris School of Business.
-Bernice Elizabeth Green