"THERE'S FOOD AND THERE'S COMMUNITY AND THERE'S CREATIVITY"

ROBYN IVY’S SPEECH FROM THE OPEN HOUSE

I took this space over in May. I came here to do it with Patsy, who was here a little while ago. I'd never been to Rooms & Works, but probably about five years ago I said to myself, if I ever had a studio somewhere else, because I'd had Wakefield, I would probably want it to be in Cranston, which makes no sense to anyone from Rhode Island ever, right? Cause nobody wants anything from Cranston. Except the distance was right, and so my mind, I would say well someday a studio in Cranston would make sense... And then a divine intervention happened and I ended up seeing this studio and I walked in, and it was kind of dark and I said, I'll take it!

I didn't know how much it was, and I didn't know how it was going to work, and I didn't know anything else about it. But I feel like, my dad is a Methodist minister and as much as I rebelled against that practice with my combat boots and my fishnet stockings and conversations of where Jesus was, which was never in church, after all, I really evolved into a person of faith far more than I ever imagined that I would have. And I feel like for all the times that we pray, or you ask a divine higher intervention, to be a witness, to just show us something, right? Like I pray all the time like, ‘please just show me what's next, what's the right thing?’. And I don't always know what that's going to be, but I feel like when I get an answer to that call, I feel it in my bones. And it's usually really, really difficult to feel things in your bones, right? Because that's how I know I can't say no. And it's usually really inconvenient because it comes at really crappy times. You know? Like it's usually a big investment when the bank account is low or it's a big yes to somebody who's really far away and it's a big road to travel or whatever. But every time I walk away I think, well, what's the point of asking to be shown if when were shown, and we know it because we feel it in our bones, if we say no? Then why ever ask, right? And so faith to me has become a way of being and a verb in my life, and a way of saying, well, I'm going to pray to be shown, and then when I'm shown, then you be brave enough and have the faith enough to do the thing, even if I have no idea. And even if nobody understands what I'm thinking because I don't even know. Right. And so many people are like, ‘but what are you going to do?’ I don't know. It's not my plan yet.

And I haven't known, but I just knew that if I feel it in my bones, then that's the only next step I can take. And so I hope that all of you tonight who’ve come here, feel like whatever that next thing is for you, that you may have felt in your bones or you're just craving to feel in your bones.

If you do feel it, then do it, because you only get this one chance and you don't know what's coming next and you don't know why you were told to do the thing. But I look around at all of you and there's so much love and community and connection in this room, which is what this space is meant to be a container for, for my ideas, for my creativity, but also for yours, right? Bring your people here, come and do things here. Come and create here or be here, play here or just learn to say yes to something bigger than what you said yes to before, here.

And Bre’s going to keep making food, so we're going to keep having dinners here. Right?

My vision for this space is like I plan to continue to be a commercial photographer and shoot in here. So photo shoots. But part of what I felt in my bones in here was that this is a place to gather, right? Like I got the flu last year really bad and I have said to people, "I have four or five thousand Facebook friends, but I don't always know who to call when I need Gatorade." Or God forbid, Immodium, right? So that matters in today's world and when your kids are getting older and they're leaving the house, then family dinner looks different and divorce is real and gathering looks different. And so my goal in here, is to make a space where like if you have a partner, you're welcome. If you don't, you're welcome. If you're of any color under the sun, you're welcome. I don't care what your bank account looks like, you're welcome.

Like there's food and there's community and there's creativity and there's ways of being human that are really a divine right that I think we kind of lost touch with. So I hope you all continue to come back for things that I offer here to just reclaim your humanity in a way that I think social media has given us and taken from us in some ways, right? So this is the place to do things in real life. Make real fluffy clouds you have no time to make, but you do it because that's where iPhones come from, right? It's true. We think that productivity is the way to what we're all looking for. But you know what? It's not. No iPhone ever came from somebody who was just following the rules or doing the productive thing. It came from somebody throwing shit at a blank wall over and over. Until something stuck and it made shape and it took form and it became something that everybody used to get more productive!